PR 2.0: where the internet and public relations converge

Innovative Web 2.0 applications and increased bandwidth have empowered the masses. Users are now able to congregate and share ideas and content online. As Deirdre Breakenridge explains in PR 2.0 A Communicator’s Manifesto, PR 2.0 puts the public back in public relations with the help of two-way communication.

But first a basic equation in Web 2.0: users + sharing content + credibility = mass awareness.




Agent of change and best selling author, Seth Godin believes there is a digital divide, which has placed people in one of two categories, the haves and the have nots. Or as Godin outlines in The New Digital, the digerati and the left behind. While the digerati are reading boing boing, the left behinds are still watching the Tonight Show.

Brian Solis of FutureWorks and co-author of Putting the Public back in Public Relations discusses the idea of web content being fully democratized in the video below. Solis believes that users, or the digerati, are the information and concept curators of the web, sharing the content with others who may be interested.

Watch Brain Solis’ full interview:




These curators or users develop online credibility through Tara Hunt’s concept of social capital. Hunt explains that social capital is the currency of the digital world in her book The Whuffie Factor. The book outlines how businesses can use social media to develop and maintain a strong customer base.

Web 2.0 has allowed those who have embraced it, the digerati to become online information curators, sharing content with their followers. Curators with a larger following have stronger social capital.

Here are a couple of examples of how broadband connectivity, or Web 2.0 has put the public back in public relations.

At a recent Third Tuesday event during the Q and A, Mitch Joel answered a question about online damage control. Joel uses a great example of how two-way communication can help a company improve its PR. When Bob Lutz was attacked online about GM’s environmental impact, it was members of his supportive online community that stepped in to defend him.

Watch Mitch Joel’s full answer:



The second example is the infamous twitpic of the napping transit worker. The photo went viral in a matter of hours and was covered widely in the media. This picture and the media backlash have forced the TTC to start a two-way conversation with its consumers.

These are not isolated incidences. United Breaks Guitar is another great example of how powerful the Web 2.0 platform can be.



Web 2.0 has given users a platform to congregate, share content and be heard. As Breakenridge explains PR 2.0 is the true convergence of PR and the Internet. The Web 2.0 platform has also shifted PR’s perspective or focus to the consumers who now have a strong voice. Technology now allows companies to speak directly to consumers, and allows the consumers to participate in two-way communication.

Captchas, recaptcha-ing books digitally

How many words have you contributed?

Captchas, those inescapable road blocks standing between you and a pair of front row tickets to your favourite band. You know the screen. The one that pops up with one or two distorted words, asking the user to prove that they do indeed have opposable thumbs and aren’t some robot intruder.


I’ve lost many a good seats because of captchas. What a nuisance! When one is as egocentric as most people are when buying tickets, they tend to only think of the nuisance of captchas in the moment and not the bigger picture. But when you think about how many people use the website to buy tickets or how many sites actually use captcha technology, the results are frightening.

It takes 10 seconds to solve a captcha and on average over 200 million captchas are solved a day. This translates to something like 400,000 or 500,000 hours a day wasted on captchas. Imagine what else humanity could accomplish if they put 400,000 hours into something productive?



Luis von Ahn, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and the creator of the captcha, asked himself the same question. Von Ahn, concerned with the amount of time wasted on captchas, a necessary evil in today’s tech-savvy world, decided the time should be used more productively. He created recaptcha, a technology that uses captchas to digitalize books.

Recaptchas essentially take photographs of books unable to be digitalized because of faded print or illegible fonts. The words photographed are used as the distorted words on the captcha screen. The users, you and I, type the words into the computer, digitalizing the books.

This is how recaptcha, is recaptcha-ing books digitally, making the books more accessible to the masses.