My first job in PR was part of the community relations team at a well known private/public transport organisation. Community relations was an integral part of the CSR agenda and was very much needed as a way to engage with a rather active local community.
At the time, our work revolved around holding events and producing newsletters delivered to every home – it was good fun, and I got involved in a whole manner of strange but interesting activities, but very time consuming and difficult at times to judge its impact. This was primarily because to relate to the community we had to be within the community.
Reading about Labour’s new media strategy this week, it was interesting to see that some organisations are evolving their contact with communities to ensure they have a greater reach. PR week reportsthat Labour strategists are realising they need to be involved with new networks, particularly online, and “being in the community now also means being in the online community.”
This allows organisations to reach a new stakeholder, perhaps one who wouldn’t have attended an event or flicked through a freesheet dumped on their doorstep, so it is worth considering in the communications strategy. But looking around i haven’t come across that many other organisations who have yet taken that leap into translating it into their community relations programmes – in fact, pre-Obama campaign, social media was only just featuring in public sector media policies, as a way to monitor what is being said about or to promote an organisation.
The damage social media can do means that we do need to make it a part of our strategy, however I hope we don’t go in the complete opposite direction and start to neglect the more traditional, non-media related, ways of communicating with our stakeholders.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Tags: communications strategy, community relations, Labour, media policy, new media, social media, strategy
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onewomanandherblog
Think it depends on how you define community – I suppose there are lots of communities we need to relate to and by using only social/online media you just don’t reach certain groups – probably the ones which are most vulnerable. Think the monitoring of, and responding to these networks is also time consuming certainly for public sector organisations. Can’t beat having a face to face over a cup of tea in the community centre!