Marketing Public Relations goes to digital? Do you know that Public Relations has changed massively? It isn’t just about media relations and churning out press releases like it used to be a decade ago. As time goes by, technology has developed rapidly. It causes everything are delivered by technology. One of the examples is Digital Public Relations. Digital Public Relations is the use of digital and social technologies to manage the awareness and understanding, reputation and brand of a company or organization through the purposeful influence of exposure via digital media. It is all about combining traditional PR with content marketing, social media, and research.

Practitioners in Marketing Public Relations found that Digital Public Relations is very useful and helpful for them in order to do their work well. News can be spread further, faster, and more directly to a specific target audience than ever before in history. It allows us to maximize news like never before. Instead of being satisfied with a single placement, your news can be shared exponentially. Not only that, but we can now use social media, blogs, reviews, and content to not just share news, but also to create a dialog with our targeted customer/audience.

Related to the development era, Binus as one of the World Star University also make an evolution in terms of educational practice. Binus University does not only require their students to have a good understanding theoretically but also have good experiences in practice. That’s why Binus University implements laboratory class in certain subjects for every faculty. Marketing Public Relations students in Binus University have learned about Digital Public Relations in 6th semester. 3 practice experiences in Digital Public Relations laboratory are:

  1. Press Release: A press release is one core of Marketing Public Relations job description. A press release can be presented in 2 forms, such as Word and PPT. In Digital Marketing Public Relations, students are guided to make an interesting press release of their own product launch.
  2. Piktochart: This session is about how to transform fun facts of company’s product to a piktochart form. Pictochart contains fun facts in graphic, explanation, number, percentages, world map, and much more in creative design transform. In this class, students have learned to make piktochart of their product launching and brand in piktochart website: (www.piktochart.com).
  3. Social Media Engagement Analysis: Social media analytics is the practice of gathering data from blogs and other forms of social media and analyzing the data to make a business decision. The most common use of social media analytics is to mine customer sentiment to support marketing and customer service activities. Which also related to CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

In Digital Marketing Public Relations class, students are guided to do social media analytics. Students must choose one company to become the object of their experiment. Then, they have to do a research of that company’s social media, especially Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. How is their reputation in social media? Are their message consistent across all platforms? How is their engagement with their customer based on their feedback?