At work yesterday a thought occurred to me on how much the Internet is used in PR and it got me thinking on how much we rely upon it for a lot of day-to-day tasks.
I send and receive countless amounts of emails everyday; I use it as a secondary research tool when writing news releases, looking for background information, monitoring trends and to get my daily news fix from my RSS feeds.
Even sending documents over to my colleague opposite me is used via the Internet.
So my question is: How did PR cope before the Internet?
PR being the speedy environment that it is and working to tight deadlines the norm, how did PR practitioners ever cope?
Simple tasks like distributing a press release to multiple journalists, looking up background information to finish a press release or sending a document or photograph to a client must have been what we would now class a painstakingly long process.
Of course there was the fax machine, but even that would have took a considerable amount of time and effort to distribute documents to multiple people. And you can’t fax a photo…well I don’t think you can?
And before that was simply the good old fashioned postal service. Oh the mind-numbing of it all!
Should us that’s new to the game feel a sense of privilege to be working in the profession with this tool. Or do the old school seasoned PROs feel we’ve missed out in ‘the good old days’?
Stephen is a communications consultant based out of the UK. You can connect with him on Twitter or check out his LinkedIn profile. | Email Stephen
Stumble it
Digg it
Deli.icio.us
Tweet this
Piaras Kelly
Every now and again one of the girls here at Drury’s always commets about how everything has changed. Like you said, the fax machine used to be the cornerstone of every agency. It’s amazing to think how far we’ve come in such a short space of time.
I think she said ten years ago, there was one mobile phone in the office (the size of a brick!); around seven years ago there was one email address; and now there’s me talking about things like blogging! What’s it going to be like in ten years time!?
Stephen
I think there is no problem with the technology advancing, I think it’s more down to the willingness of the people to change and adapt to new technologies.
Just like blogging. I wonder how many PR people are blogging this time next year?
Richard Bailey
Good question: as with Tom Murphy, it brings back (fond) memories for me. The key technology was then (as now) the telephone. Yet there were more face-to-face meetings (these have been forced out in our time-poor age). We would freqently fill rooms for press events: that doesn’t happen so often now. But the reduction in wasted paper and postage must amount to progress.
David Phillips
What was it like?
It was magic. Clients were awed in the ’80’s when you were able to get Internet information. You just ‘knew so much’. In those days it was Usenet (now Google Groups) but the community was quite small and someone always knew an expert who knew the answer.
Then came FT Profile. Oh! Such impressive briefs and backgrounders.
Now its all too mundane.
I can even create automated news blogs (try http://www.netreputation.co.uk/cricketblog an experimental news summary blog) so the magic has gone.
But web TV is on its way and that will be fun. Imagine as many online TV stations as there are blogs.