A colleague and I were recently debating how we did our job before we had the Internet and various other electronic devices at our disposal. How did we ever manage to write articles or opinion pieces without the PRO’s best friend Google to help us better understand a sector or technical term? And don’t get me started on clogging up the fax machine for half the day to send a press release to a hundred or more journalists.
Mobile devices have made us more available to our clients and other contacts which on the whole has to be a good thing although not so good when you’re about to take that first sip of a cold beer on day one of your annual week in the sun.
However, are we in danger of our devices and access to the Internet causing information overload? It’s often quicker and easier to just look something up online or send a quick email. But perhaps it’s time we thought about the best medium for getting the results we need.
So we email a journalist and they don’t respond, what do we do next? Phone them, only to get their answerphone or short shrift from a receptionist who has obviously been told not to let any calls from pesky PR people through to the editorial team. There is no obvious answer to this conundrum but surely it begs the question, if you’re not willing to accept calls, then respond to your emails?
Also with access to so much information at our fingertips, it’s often quicker to write something based on our findings on the Internet rather than have a true understanding of what it really means. Surely, we’d be better off with the right information first time and is the Internet always the best place to go get this? Has the time come for us to get back to basics and start to think about how we use our technology more effectively and where the best place to access the information we need in the first place?
