Digital Media And Strategic Communication

1508 Words4 Pages

For the purpose of this essay, new or social media can be defined as the participatory online media that create and spread information in a democratic and collaborative manner. Social media uses technological tools and applications that enable people to connect and share opinions, news, and knowledge. A few prominent examples of social media applications are Wikipedia (reference), MySpace and Facebook (social networking), YouTube (video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), Digg (news sharing), Flickr (photo sharing) and Sharenow (media sharing). These sites typically use applications such as blogs, micro-blogging, message boards, podcasts, and wikis to allow users to interact in a quick, collaborative and efficient manner.

With the emergence of the new social media the nature of communication has been changed. This change has led to alteration of the relationship between an organization and its publics or stakeholders. Smith, Kearns and Fine (Power to the Edges: Trends and Opportunities in Online Civic Engagement, 2005) argue that the future belongs to the organizations that can effectively align online and offline communication strategies in their activities. Internet revolution enabled organizations to communicate cheaply, quickly and effectively with thousands of people. Campaign developments, communications, field management and fundraising are the fields that are greatly affected by the online connectivity that reshaped all aspects of community life.

The scholars say that thanks to the Internet and its tools, networks of individuals,

completely independent of organizations, can initiate and carry out civic engagement

campaigns. The traditional communication model implied dissemination of informatio...

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...Internet research has more advantages than disadvantages. Furthermore, organizations can also satisfy their research needs by analyzing the content of bulletin boards, newsgroups, list servers, chat rooms in order to receive feedback from their stakeholders.

To conclude with, organizations should combine both traditional and social media in building and maintaining relationships with the stakeholders . The companies should also adopt new communication tools (such as blogging, podcasting, Webcasting, social networking, virtual realities, etc.) and learn to listen and converse with their customers in a genuine way. These tools will help the company to directly convey critical information and receive instant customer feedback. Eventually, the companies will learn to operate in a customer-centric fashion, even in the situations that have significant reputation risk.

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