Q&A with Ashan Kumar, PR Consultant, Strategic Alliance PR,Exclusive Affiliate of Burson-Marsteller
What is PR 2.0? Before we take a look at PR 2.0, it is important to understand the advances of the world wide web.

"Web 2.0" refers to a perceived second generation of web development and design, that facilitates communication, secures information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web.

Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and applications; such as social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.

These changes and introduction of "new" channels of communication led marketers to take into consideration the ever growing and popular "social media" taking their brand message and further engaging with their target audiences.

This paved the way to PR 2.0, how public relations integrate with technology and the internet.
How does PR 2.0 influence a marketer?

The web creates an opportunity for the prospective customer, consumer and public to communicate giving feedback about their experiences and what he/she feels about the product or service. This is a form of two-way communication providing valuable information, the pulse about their customer and consumer. PR 2.0 is the understanding and practice that communications is a two-way process; it includes the tools, principles, strategies, and philosophies for reaching, engaging, guiding, influencing, and helping people directly in addition to the traditional cycle of PR influence.

What are the tools used in PR 2.0?
PR 2.0 uses social media elements such as blogging, viral marketing, social networking sites and search engine optimization to communicate with your target publics. It blends traditional and new media relations to reach journalists as well as consumers.

Where does Sri Lanka stand in this evolution?
Sri Lanka is still not a fully-fledged computer user. But there is an increase in IT literacy. The country has seen a growth of 15-20%, and plans are on the way to increase it to 50% with the launch of the Year of ICT and English early this year.

As we speak there are plenty of news on wire sites being updated constantly, not only keeping citizens updated on the latest news as it happens, but also taking the message regionally and globally, as the internet is knowledge for the world. There are niche wires and forums catering to different industries, for example ITPro for ICT relevant news, LinkedIn connecting the business community.

How useful do you think PR 2.0 would be to help marketers in Sri Lanka?
In Sri Lanka we see an escalating growth of bloggers, with sites like elakiri.com having more than 192,000 members. What started from chatting, chat rooms has now developed to Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Youtube, RSS feeds on your mobile to podcasts. Many forums and networks are created amongst groups with similar interests where they share and comment about their experiences.

The internet is turning out to be a general need amongst many individuals. There are many examples where brands in Sri Lanka have used the internet to reach out to their targets, promoting their products and services and have resulted in good ROI. Additionally, marketers will clearly be able to identify ways to measure PR including new PR metrics and advanced methods for measuring PR, such as counting hits per page, improving communications with bloggers, generating publicity in websites, building awareness with opinion leaders, getting inbound links to landing pages, and increasing internet traffic to the website.