Public relations is no longer about relationships.

Traditional PR is now about trying to get journalists to notice you and your sensational little stunts. It’s about getting the media to do the relationship building for you.

This is why public relations practitioners are failing online, especially in the social media space. By its nature, and by name, social media is about developing relationships with others, whether they’re content producers or consumers.

But public relations isn’t about long-term relationship building anymore. It’s about the short-term instant return of sending out a press release and seeing how many bites you get—if any actually get past the spam filters. It seems some PR people still have the attitude that bloggers are like journalists and you can send them whatever you feel like.

There is a perception of the web-worker as a very lonely person who spends all their time in the home office, lonely, with nobody to talk to, no social life, no family outside the office door.

Of all the web-workers I know, this picture applies to none of them. They have fine social lives and spend time with their family and friends once they’ve clocked off for the day. But one thing that rings true is that web-working can be a lonely experience, since you don’t have the office environment that allows you to interact with others throughout the day. Sure, you interact with people on a professional level — emails back and forth about a project with your client, for instance — but the multiple levels of interaction that occur in a typical workplace aren’t present.

That is, unless you make them present.

Social media is a waste of time, you say?

There have been plenty of articles flying around the web this week claiming that social marketing is a waste of time. That’s not what this article is about. I’m talking about the blogger who refreshes Twitter every two seconds while hunting for story leads or the fifteen year old girl who posts pictures of herself in underwear on MySpace (how trashy).

Okay, maybe not so much that last one, but I’m talking about the average user of a social networking, media or bookmarking service. I’m also writing this from the vantage point of someone who generates content on the web on a daily basis, not a fly-by-night surfer.