Wrote this article in regards to a PR project involving pethouseclub.com. These were some of my thoughts surrounding ePR.

In order to develop a social networking website it is necessary to follow modern website models. An increasingly blurry area of social networking is the balance between free and premium content. It is seen generally on the internet that any knowledge or produce should be distributed freely. This has been partly caused by the General Public License and Opensource movements which have propelled internet technologies forward for the good. The problem this article addresses is simply:

How to build an online community and make a profit?

It is no easy question to answer. Traditional systems for paid registration no longer work in the current technological climate. There are many websites out there holding vast amounts of information and users would much rather research than pay out. Therefore I see the task to be building an online community and then later reap payments from the website, which shall be discussed later. The benefit of free registration is community growth (if the website project fits a market) and if so possible accelerated growth.

To run a modern website worthy of web 2.0 it is to be assumed that users will be providing some of the website content or will be able to comment on content. Either way the website will need to work in an open system, members having the ability to contact each other and website authors engaged with the online community. This balance is very important and only the best websites achieve this.

First I will address the issue of building an online community.

At the end of last year the internet changed a little bit. Suddenly large social networking website started to link in with each other. The majority of blogs did not have a closed personal community but linked together with many other websites. These social networking sites may have specialised areas such as dealing with pictures, status updates, storing comments, managing rss feeds etc.(…)

A couple of weeks ago at the Philosophy society we discussed ‘The Prince’ by Niccolo Machiavelli which is really an instruction manual for a leader. The whole the book seems to be littered with hypothetical imperatives in which Machiavelli believed a leader should act. In this way he seemed to imitate Immanuel Kant but the focus on morality was less severe. Obviously these circumstances are subjective to the philosopher’s own ideas and time period in which the book was written. As the only PR student at the society I could see a lot of crossovers in which philosophy, dubbed as the “broad church”, also infiltrates aspects of PR.

In particular, conversation swerved onto the recent American presidentially elections and Barack Hussein Obama’s win. This then diverted to politics in my own country, Britain and the image of Gordon Brown. A couple in the group believed that Margret Thatcher was making a positive comeback even though when she was Prime Minister people seemed to hate her ideas. I could see how Tony Blair’s popularity fell in office but now he would most likely be preferred over Gordon Brown. It seems that a leader has his character judged rather than the ideas he stands for. When the next political elections transpire in this country the newspapers are likely to have headlines such as Brown vs Cameron and imitate the elections as some sort of battle. Political parties only really receive focus during local elections but even so the leaders of particular parties are still taken into account.

It is no wonder then that Public Relations serves such an important role. If it is possible to observe an audience and find their ideal leader and character traits then a political leader could be shaped to this ideal. In a strange way this is similar to Plato’s theory of the forms. A leader is given a form which coincides with a higher form in the audience’s minds. The idea of a colloquially spoken Margret Thatcher would(…)