1. Week 2: Online communication
    1. Communication
      1. Occurs between at least two parties.
      2. Is informational or effective: Business uses informational communication to learn what to say and effective communication to say it and produce results. Online serves both purposes.
        1. Effective communication depends greatly on persuasion because some information always remains unknown. Online with multimedia technology can be a highly persuasive format.
      3. Is a craft:
        1. Has rules and grammars, whether verbal or nonverbal.
        2. Has denotations and connotations.
        3. Online has rules, grammars, denotations and connotations.
    2. Business communication has several languages to transmit content:
      1. Accounting is the most used business language that crosses all departments.
      2. Online easily transmits all languages.
      3. The ways that business uses communications splinter into multiple and often, uncoordinated fragments. Corporate communications has many roles and many types of content. Online can serve all roles and carry all content, but it is still difficult to coordinate them into a whole.
      4. The challenge of corporate communications is its ubiquity. It is, as one manager called it, "the flux" in organization -- the flow that keeps business together and profitable. Business is largely content/information.
      5. Online multimedia are the closest an organization can come to one channel carrying almost all forms of communication.
    3. Internet Audiences
      1. Media
      2. Community
      3. Consumers
      4. Shareholders and investors
      5. Employees
      6. Government and civic leaders
      7. Critics and activists
    4. How PR professionals use online.
      1. Persuading target audiences to support an enterprise to ensure its survival and success.
      2. Research and information tracking.
      3. Research and evaluate public opinion.
      4. Crisis communications.
      5. Releasing information.
      6. Accessing news stories.
      7. Communicating with reporters/News bureaus.
    5. Online benefits and shortcomings
      1. A cost-effective way of communicating globally.
        1. Everything about an organization can go online.
        2. One-to-one communication.
        3. One-to-many communication.
      2. Information retrieval.
      3. Instantaneous communication.
      4. Direct communication.
      5. Passive and active communication.
      6. Personal communication.
      7. Inexpensive communication.
    6. Public Relations benefits
      1. Direct and mass media simultaneously. Depends on the site.
      2. Journalist communication.
      3. Precise audience targeting.
      4. Better communication tracking.
      5. 24-hour, 7-day-a-week presence.
      6. Multimedia publishing.
      7. Searchable information.
      8. Eliminates geographic barriers.
      9. Allows Intranets, Extranets.
      10. Helps management and prevention of crises.
    7. Public Relations shortcomings.
      1. Does not substitute for a complete PR strategy and implementation. It is one tool among many.
      2. Does not replace other media, especially face-to-face.
      3. Does not reach everyone.
      4. Technical complexity.
      5. Initial expense.
      6. Requires continuous updating.
      7. Does not guarantee coverage or audience interest.
      8. Security.
      9. Does not have a common user registry -- global phone book.
      10. Internet voices have the same strength -- good and bad.
      11. A resource with limited bandwidth.
    8. Exercise: Students analyze IR web site on chalkboard.
    9. Assignment for next week's class on online research. Search engines, Catalogues and link sites.
      1. Why talk about research? The Internet is the world's largest library. It is an essential PR tool.
      2. A powerful way to understand an environment.
    10. Reading:
      1. Chapter 4 in Integrating Corporate Communications
      2. Chapters 4 and 5 in Public Relations on the Net
      3. Chapter 12 of Publicity on the Internet
      4. Go to web references section of www.online-pr.com and find a site that explains search engines. Read it before the class exercise.
    11. Exercise: Explain how eight search engines work.
      1. Magellan
      2. Lycos
      3. Altavista Digital
      4. Dogpile
      5. Mamma
      6. Metacrawler
      7. Hotbot
      8. Excite!

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