The advent of the Internet and its other components has enhanced the marketing opportunities also set the new targets for the marketers. This may be changing the definition, meaning, understanding and practice of PR because cyberspace is not physical, geometric or geographic. Time and space no longer limit the amount of information and audience size.



PR audience is becoming more diverse in an increasingly integrated global economy, with the attendant cultural barriers. Among others, Internet is enhancing interactivity, PR feedback and evaluation, and virtual story telling. It is extending PR outreach programs, though in a more depersonalized and transitory environment. The new medium is providing enhanced information delivery systems, not available just few years ago.

A new societal communication culture has emerged because the new information technology is providing all with the easy access to vehicles of mass communication, which historically belonged to just few institutions. This contemporary social reality discourages PR practitioners to adopt the one-way communication model. Modern information technology is creating a new corporate communication landscape. It is affecting communication channels, corporate audience identification, mode and methods of communication, message content and form, communication feedback and corporate personae. It is impacting shared meaning of message, information packaging, strategic information management and corporate identity.

There is also the need to carefully investigate how corporations can now manage public issues, advocacy role and reaction to emerging and sustained crises. There is an emerging power sharing. Publics now have ready access to the mass media to tell their story from their own perspective and complain vehemently if necessary. The meaning and definition of literacy in the New Information Age may have to be carefully reviewed.

Audience literacy has always been very important in segmenting and understanding a public. Traditionally, description of marketing opportunities in the consumer market is that products were sold face to face and physically in the point of market. But now the marketing opportunities are different in the digital world. There are now much more marketing opportunities in the digital world for the organizations. The organizations have the opportunity to reach through internet to the every person at a very low cost.