In high-technology era, the utilization of social media as communication tools is crucial to establish relationships and widen organization’s network. Various digital platorm and media provide the ease of accessing news for people through their mobile phones. Even though social media is frequently used among people nowadays, conventional media is also still used to spread the news. The conventional media is considered important to spread news for people with various backgrounds.
“Currently, It is people’s habit that easily to share the information that they received. This is beneficial for organizations to spread their good practices to various platforms,” as Agnes Karina, a consultant from Maverick, stated during a KEMITRAAN Internal training session about media relations on Thursday, 14 April 2022.
In utilizing social media more massively, organizations or communities have many constructive ways, such as collaborates with other organizations, communities, KOL (Key Opinion Leader), or influencers, using the mainstream media, or online portals.
With more benefits that could be gathered in digital era, the more challenges also comes. Many media have gone out of business because they can not adapt to people’s new habits. Accordingly, the fewer the people who access the media of an organization, the lower the amount of impression made towards that media.
During this training, Agnes provided a way on how to increase the public’s participation in attending virtual or hybrid events and how to manage data in order to create sustainable relationships. In addition, Agnes also described the important role of journalism as one of the main sources of news.
When the discussion was held, Belinda as one of the participants from the Democratic, Justice, and Governance Reform unit, confirmed by saying, “Working with young journalists such as Narasi could help organizations spread their good practices to specific and relevant issues. For example, regarding the issue of youth.”
However, there are also obstacles that need to be anticipated, such as the one that was stated by Shabrina, a communication staff from KEMITRAAN. She said, “It is often that the intent of messages that wanted to be delivered by organizations are different compared to the one that the media created, but the media won’t allow the organizations to revise them.”
Not to mention the false delivery of news content. “In covering news, the organization need to be careful while processing their data. Because, there is one of the journalist’s techniques namely TikPet (Fast Typing). This techniques could affect potential benefit or harm for the organization. If the news is not managed by competent and credible people, the message of the news will be out of context,” Agnes added.
Hopefully, this Media Relations training could provide more information regarding KEMITRAAN activities, projects, and achievements to broader and more accurate media partners.