Interestingly enough, I was in a community meeting recently where we were speaking to social media presence. This nonprofit was looking for a way to drive their campaigns to a younger generation but wasn’t as informed about the methods in how to get the message across as some that have been entrenched in the technologies.

The meeting itself was about social media technologies, as was the committee, but something I had said over in the meeting really struck home as far as the two schools of Public Relations (PR). As with every industry, there is always the old school and new school. But the differences here were so vastly different that it was interesting to note that many people never saw PR from a customer service perspective which is more like how the new school’s ideology is driven.

Old School PR: As a company, we release a public statement stating what we would like you to know, what we would like you to hear and ignoring anything else because we wish to not talk about it. We will take questions as long as it pertains to those particular boundaries that we have defined and if you want to know more, we won’t be telling you unless we can spin it in a better light for ourselves.

New School PR: As a company, we will release notices and keep our clients and others informed to what we’re doing. We strive to be as transparent as possible and are always having conversations with others through public means. This might mean a lot more quick thinking and apologizing for mistakes that the company has performed, but in the end the goal is to create relationships between those that you are relating to and the corporation.

Here is where both don’t jive together. You can’t be of the old school and try to use social media. Social media in itself is a new style of public relations where many of the startups and so on are taking to because they can not only gain feedback, but also defuse situations before they become worse. The latter of the schools is a lot more proactive than reactive. But it’s not to say that if you subscribe to either, that one is better than the other. In the case of social media, there is one that has an advantage but overall it depends on what your corporation does and why it takes that stance.

In the end, as a PR officer, you just have to make sure that you understand both schools of thought and are able to change from one to the other to get the best of both worlds. This idea in itself is invaluable for anyone doing business and understanding that will help them succeed through their relationships with the public.