Use of the Internet in the Public Relations Curriculum

"Can you be a competent PR practitioner and not be on the Internet? Theoretically, maybe. But then, theoretically, you could also be a competent PR practitioner and still use a typewriter, correcting fluid, and a hand-- cranked telephone," (Independent PR Practitioners Network, 1999, p. 3). The Independent PR Practitioners Network may be overstating the point, but there is no question that the Internet offers public relations practitioners a new communication medium, the implications of which have yet to be fully understood. The Internet, meaning broadly its World Wide Web and e-mail functions, offers advantages over the traditional print and broadcast media. But capitalizing on the Internet's advantages means learning about the various Internet tools and technologies and understanding their capabilities. Known also as "Net relations" (Spataro, 1998) and "online PR," Internet public relations, as used here, refers to the use of Internet tools and technologies by public relations professionals in the public relations process, including researching publics and issues, communicating with a client's internal and external stakeholders, and evaluating the results of PR efforts. This article reviews the results of an exploratory e-mail survey that sought to determine for what purposes public relations agencies are using the Internet for their clients and which of the Internet's tools and technologies they employ. It also sought to determine what skills these practitioners consider important for Internet public relations. The issue examined is how public relations educators can best prepare graduates for the demands of the profession, especially if Spataro is right that, "companies are beginning to hire people who have Internet skills" and that, "recent college graduates who have been using the Web for years are sometimes the best qualified to fill some of these new roles" (Spataro, 1998, p. 2). Literature review Public relations and the Internet. That the Internet and its World Wide Web component are changing public relations is well-documented in the professional literature (e.g., Barks, 1999; Leslie, n.d.; Adams, 1999; Gawlick, 2001). Bloom (1999) argues that, "the Internet and PR were made for each other. They are both about making a connection, about establishing one-on-- one relationships" (p. 12). It is equally clear that the fundamentals of public relations have not changed. Public relations still involves managing relationships through communication (Independent PR Practitioners Network, 1999). But Holtz (1999) argues that the Internet, although a medium like newspapers, radio, and television, changes the traditional mass media concept of "one-to-many" communication to "many-to-many." It also offers advantages over the traditional media, such as interactivity, immediacy, accessibility, targeting, and reach (Leslie, n.d.), and opens the door to Grunig and Hunt's two-way symmetrical communication (1984). In fact, in a 1999 survey of 1,730 public relations clients conducted by Impulse Research Corporation, 79 percent indicated that the Internet had already improved two-- way communication between "my company and its publics." The same study revealed that, "most used the Internet to monitor online news coverage (80%), to monitor the competition (71%), and to communicate with the media (69%), customers (63%), prospective employees (56%), and shareholders/financial community (53%)" (Harris & Novick, 1999). But many public relations professionals are ill-equipped to handle the changes. Holtz (1999) describes the profession's use of the Internet as "embryonic," and Stein notes that most professionals are "still learning how to adapt news releases for Web sites" (Adams, 1999). According to Geibel (1999), the problem is that many established public relations tools were developed in a different time. "Conventional PR tools -- the press release, white paper, press kits -- were designed at the turn of the century for journalists," he writes (p. …