PR in Politics

Nowadays we can see that PR tools are being used more and more for political purposes. It’s becoming a trend that that PR practitioners make use of New Media tools to build up political campaigns and politicians positive as well as negative reputation.

In the last class, some class mates did a presentation on Obama’s campaign and it was a fabulous presentation where they analysed every single PR tool he used. Obama managed to get through all different kinds of public using a really good PR strategy, and what worries me about politics, is that sometimes a politician wins the elections just because of their creative and strategical PR campaigns and not because of their beliefs.

Obama’s and Mc Cain’s campaigns where totally different, and obviously Obama did much better selecting his PR people, but politics is not only about campaigning, politics should be much more than that. We, as a whole society, should fight and go for our beliefs, and what is happening is that people have a blind faith in media and on what the media says.

The media has the power to convince a country to support a really harmful politician. An example of this could be “Hitler”. In this case, he used propaganda to such extent that he managed people to support him. The outcomes of his campaign lead the whole country to a terrible situation.

I’m not trying to compare Obama’s campaign to what Hitler did, but what I’m trying to say is that we, as PR practitioners, have the power of persuasion and, depending on how we use this power, we can do either really great or harmful things for our society.

I want to share with you all a video from YouTube that shows exactly how PR campaigning can be distorted, and how PR people have to fight to get their message across and to persuade people. Sometimes they create good strategies like Obama’s PR people did, and sometimes their campaigns are not that successful like Mc Cain’s campaign.

Becoming Famous Using New Media

Last Wednesday’s class was about new media. I’ve been thinking about new media for such a long time because I had to do a presentation on that topic, so I had to do an in-depth research on it.
From what I’ve learned new media tools are essential for any business to use as a way of social networking and communicating with a vast amount of public who they cannot reach by means of traditional media.
PR practitioners are able to reach their target easily using Social Networking Sites and information is easily spread out.

I want to share with you all a video about a British girl who started posting videos of herself singing on “YouTube”, a very famous social media network, and she managed to get the attention of musical producers in New York, and they actually hired her. Currently, she is recording her first single, and what is really amazing is the way she managed to attract the attention of many people all over the world, and this is the way she got famous.

As you can observe, new media has the power of making an unknown person famous. This is an example of how someone used new media in a positive way, but there are many cases of people who are using new media tools to destroy many organisations or people’s reputation.

There is a controversial belief about this girl called Mia Rose, about her being helped by a PR person to build her image in order to become a popular singer and to build her career as a musician. It’s very possible that a PR practitioner is actually helping her, but either way, this is a very curious example that shows how powerful new media tools can be.

My personal belief about new media is that its so powerful that it can help and at the same time be really dangerous, because anyone around the world can have their own blog and say whatever they think about any organisation or person and can really harm their reputation.

The Powe of PR during War

The first class of this semester was about PR during war. I found it a very interesting topic because I learned how public relations practitioners use media tools to persuade a country of starting a war and how they can convince the public that national interest is under threat.
Every war obviously has two sides of the story, and any of the sides have the right to start the war, but isn’t it interesting how we, as PR practitioners, can change people’s minds?
The most important aspect is what the public perceives about the conflict, and how by using PR people can think that it’s good to start a war against any other country.
Currently, we have the example of the Israeli war against Palestine. As we can see in the news, the Israeli army has been dehumanised by the showing videos of the soldiers bombarding schools and hospitals, but what is the Palestinian army doing? Aren’t they doing the same? Aren’t they using schools and hospitals as a tactic against the Israelis? So at this point, who is behaving worse?
This is a good example of how much power public relations has during a war. The vision that the European countries have of the Israeli war is that they are not acting morally but attacking civilians, but isn’t that what the Palestinians want the rest of the world to see?
I recently interviewed an Israeli citizen and asked him about what he thinks about the conflict and, obviously, his view about the conflict is totally different from what we can see every day in the news.
To conclude, I have learned that the worlds perception during a war depends on what kind of PR each country is doing, so I can say that the media has too much power to condemn or condone the other.