Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification - Martin Fischer

The Internet Movie Database turned 15 today. A lot of people I know don’t know what IMDB is, but if you ever need to find out any sort of information about an actor or a film, that’s the first place you should look.

One thing that I’ve picked up on in my short PR career so far is that there seems to be an evolution of sorts happening. It isn’t a case of having the right contacts, it’s becoming a case of having the best resources.

For example, I met another PR practitioner out the other night and we got chatting. She was interested in an initiative we had run using a celebrity and wondered how we found her agent. She was quite taken aback when I told her that I found the agent originally through Google.

The way things are in PR is that one day you might need to find a celeb’s agent, the next you might need to find the phone number of a county council. You’ll never know when you’ll actually need them, but you need to be able to find them.

I’ve talked before about how everyone working in PR should be trained how to use Google effectively, but there are a whole range of resources like IMDB that they should be familiar with also. It’s not about who you know, but who you can find!

Technorati Tags: Piaras Kelly, PR, IMDB