Paradigms of global public relations in an age of digitalisation

Although the attention being paid to the new digital media may be the latest fad in public relations, these new media have the potential to make the profession more global, strategic, two-way and interactive, symmetrical or dialogical, and socially responsible. However, many practitioners are using the new media in the same ways they used the old—as a means of dumping messages on the general population rather than as a strategic means of interacting with publics and bringing information from the environment into organisational decision-making. For public relations to fully use digital media, practitioners and scholars must reinstitutionalise public relations as a behavioural, strategic management paradigm rather than as a symbolic, interpretive paradigm. This article provides a model of strategic public relations and offers suggestions for the use of digital media in each phase of this model.