PR has taken on a new meaning since the internet era. Shirine Coburn knows that very well, as her company conducts PR on and offline.

For almost nine years, Shirine Coburn has been the owner of Coburn Communication, a multimillion dollar company specialized in PR, celebrity endorsements and strategic alliances. Coburn Communication has collective company experience of over 30 years in the luxury lifestyle and beauty industries.  Senior management has partnered with accounts such as Calvin Klein, Fabergé, Yves Saint Laurent, Donna Karan, Elizabeth Arden and Halston Borghese on the consumer end, as well as two of the world’s biggest international business-to-business fragrance houses, Givaudan and Firmenich.

What makes Coburn a successful agency, according to Shirine is that they focus on the clients they can grow with and keep up with the changes in the marketplace. And the internet means that market is changing every day.

For Coburn communications the biggest difference between online and offline branding and pr is that offline the communication is always one way communication whereas online communication has to be interactive. The brand needs to be in dialogue with the customer. Customers, Coburn finds, have a strong voice online which means PR companies are in a different playingfield.  The professionals at Coburn always try to find innovative means of reaching their customers.  They monitor their clients via social networks like twitter and MySpace for example but also think of innovative ways of engaging with customers on and offline.  One of the events is a bloggers breakfast in which they inform the bloggers about the clients they represent. That is how we stay in this ever changing playing field, because in the end, she says, PR is all about keeping up with change.

This article was written by Marianne Spier, a manager at the Institute of Interactive Media in Amsterdam. She is a lecturer in cross media and responsible for developing international programs and partnerships with universities and companies abroad