Does social media let everyone act as their own PR agency?

No. It doesn’t.

Public relations is much more than just pitching journalists. It is not something you can just jump into and be great at. While people can be good at one or more aspects of PR, there is no way you can decide to do PR and be immediately good, or even great, at all the facets of the business.

PR is event management; it is media training; it is strategic planning; it is crisis management; it is internal communication, etc. In our company (MPiRe), for example, we widen it further to include relationship building, community building, sports management and more.

Social media does let people carry out some aspects of public relations themselves, such as building relationships with journalists and online influencers, and outreach to those people.

However, public relations is not as easy as drafting a release and pitching it, well, that is the conception in Oman. It requires skills and experience. I could become a mechanic, a butcher, or a doctor if I wanted to, however it would take me years of training to do it well. Similarly, you can’t just pick up the reins of public relations and undertake the full suite of functions that the PR department/agency does.

Anyone can embark on basic public relations efforts through social media, but few people will do them well. Public relations is the external face of your organization; would you want someone with minimal knowledge and skills of the discipline representing you publicly? I would not.

Public relations needs to evolve as we've already seen here. That is what i think and that was also the result of the poll we had some time ago.

As an industry, public relations in Oman need to embrace social media tools in order to keep up with the rest of the world. Various studies and researches show that public relations is a natural fit for social media, and there is so much that can be done that clients expect to be represented in every way possible.

This means expanding to blogging, Facebook, Twitter and any other form of electronic media. Everyone uses them nowadays, so clients want and need to be represented on them all in order to get their name out there.

We need to blog; to create podcasts; to experiment on Twitter; to produce videos; to build social media sites; to foster online communities. We need to do this so we don’t lose relevancy during these changes, we should provide integrated solutions to our clients.

Social media doesn’t mean everyone can do public relations; however, it does mean that we need to up our game to get the best results for our clients.