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Online Public Relations

Written by: Andy Marken

Article Overview: Book Review -- A Handbook for Practitioners – By James L. Horton; 296 pages, ISBN 1-56720-406-6, Quorum Books, Westport, CT, May 2001

Online Public Relations

We’re hard pressed to compare Horton’s Online Public Relations with Shel Holtz’s Public Relations on the Net. They both do an excellent job of covering and explaining an area that most practitioners don’t understand but certainly want to control. We won’t go into Holtz’s book again since we have covered it pervasively other than to say…read and digest them both!

The field of online PR is still in its infancy – being only about 20 -25 years old (depending upon which start date you want to use) – but it has already become one of the most powerful tools available to public relations practitioners to use and abuse. Horton has done an excellent job of not talking down to the reader in Online Public Relations but does give you enough background of the fledgling NSFNet (National Science Foundation Network) so you can understand how simultaneously fragile and strong the Internet really is.

While the publisher promises that the reader will be able to fly through the book and immediately begin using the new found knowledge to carry out an efficient and effective online PR program for a company, Horton is a little more cautious about your ability to turn his ideas, thoughts and recommendations into instant profit. Unfortunately, too many practitioners will probably ignore his warnings and plunge ahead without reading the book a second time.

In addition to writing for both the novice and experienced practitioner, Horton gives you a world of very pertinent examples of real applications to make it easier to understand the points he makes in the book. This pre-screened research alone makes the book more valuable and more useful in your day-to-day online PR activities.

Online Public Relations is definitely not an academic work but the accumulation of a lot of practical experience – others in the field as well as personal – that he shares very freely. We’ve read several other books on the subject and reams of articles on online public relations over the past few years as the subject emerged from its techie background to mainstream to communications to hot topic of the year(s). Everyone seemed to be bent on putting his or her stake in the ground as the definitive expert on the subject.

But Horton has significantly raised the bar for the others. He has put together an unbelievable reference guide for you and has ferreted out hundreds of web sites you’ll want to bookmark and visit again and again as you work in the online world. If you’ve ever used the Web to research a specific subject and struggled from branch to branch on the Internet you’ll realize how time consuming and frustrating it is to locate the exact information location. You’ll also immediately see how valuable his screening work is to you.

Online Public Relations is a lot more than just an interesting and potentially profitable book to read, it really become a valuable roadmap for you to use as you venture out onto the proverbial Internet superhighway. But a word of caution. One reading won’t make you an online PR expert. Read it two or three times. Then keep it handy as a reference.

Horton’s book will prove to be invaluable in keeping your company, your client, your product and you from becoming Internet roadkill.

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