public relations | Social Signal

When you're talking about yourself, your brand or your organization, you may have first-person credibility... but you also have a pretty obvious conflict of interest. Add that to the growing distrust of advertising and public relations - in fact, of institutional communications generally - and you have a challenge.

These days, your audience is putting much more trust in their personal networks: their friends, family, neighbours and colleagues. When they hear a personal message from someone they know, it punches through in a way that organizational communications can't.

So far in this 10-part series, we've seen how blogs can give your organization a human voice, and provide valuable feedback from your customers. Now we're going to look at how they can open up a new communications channel to the world: one where you can tell stories that might not make front page news, but can still move your audience.

Many organizations have only two ways to talk to the public about the issues that matter to them: advertising, and mass media - often through a news release.