New Media and Marketing Communications

This year I am taking a PR course through the school of Journalism through which we work with real life clients to create a public relations campaign.

The client I am working with is a not-for-profit organisation that works with CIDA to provide funding to women's rights organisations in developing countries. As a not-for-profit with a declining donor base, the organisation is struggling mightily to survive. The staff are overworked and underpaid, so their budget for the campaign is $0. Naturally, their idea was to use our generation's proficiency with the Internet to capitalise on free forms of social media.

I think that this idea is common with a lot of small businesses or organisations who have very little wiggle room with their money. They think they can develop a brilliant communications campaign through facebook, twitter, and a sub-par website - all for free.

What my organisation does not want to admit is that while twitter and facebook may not require a fee, to use them sucessfully still involves lots of costs. For example, this overrun staff is never going to find time to blog, tweet, and update their website. Moreover, no one on their paid staff feels comfortable with new media, and it is hard to count on volunteers to keep updating and monitoring all of these sites.

My PR team is really struggling to convey all of these challenges to the organisation. Our client is clinging to the idea that they can reach all these people for free, which makes them very unwilling to allocate any kind of budget to the campaign. They see that facebook comes without a price tag and don't understand why they will need to allocate resources to be successful.

In this class we recently had a guest lecturer from Delta Media talk about how many groups are abandoning PR strategies and simply signing onto facebook. Do you guys think social media is the new face of public relations, or will these group become disenchanted with all their "free" options and look again at advertising and more traditional communications to reach their publics?