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Fleishman-Hillard’s Irish office celebrates the firm being named European PR Consultancy of the Year by the Holmes Report in February 2010
groups, and benchmarked against their competitors. This Social media has eliminated the traditional top-down model
allows them to become more effective in their interactions and and communication can now happen from the bottom up or
more valuable to their stakeholders. A solid reputation is what horizontally, maintains Mark Cahalane. “Every stakeholder has
gives people the confidence to do business with them and a voice and what social media has done is armed stakehold-
helps their company weather the tough times.” ers with the means to have their voice heard. Brands and
organisations have to be prepared to relinquish control and
Social climbers learn to interact in order to earn trust.”
Undoubtedly, the greatest impact on the sector in recent years According to Cahalane, the average person now relies on
has been the proliferation of social media. “The rapid growth of eight different sources of information and will seek to validate
new media technologies, tools and channels and the unprece- each of these before forming an opinion. “This has made it far
dented velocity of change in the ways that people access, con- more difficult to aggregate audiences,” he points out. “What
sume and share information is without doubt the greatest we knew as mass media no longer exists. Messages now need
change and the biggest challenge PR practitioners face today,” to be highly targeted and tailored for niche audiences.”
says Rhona Blake, Fleishman-Hillard. Jim Walsh agrees that different media channels require dif-
“Communicating via social media and web-based marketing ferent approaches and that all communication needs to be
are central to most PR campaigns and agencies have had to more targeted. “The use of mass distribution press releases is
adapt and learn very quickly in order to keep up with emerging diminishing in importance,” he says. “This has resulted in PR
trends in this area,” continues Rachel Sherry. “There is an consultancies putting more focus on dealing one-to-one in
expectation and indeed an onus on the PR team to include communicating with specific media and individual journalists.”
digital as part of a comprehensive communications strategy, so “For professional PR people, social media is simply another
the role and the remit of PR have expanded and new tools are channel of communication which they have had to embrace,”
constantly being added to the box.” he says. “Used strategically it can be very effective but it does
70 Marketing Age Volume 4 Issue 1 2010
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