A consequence of the digital revolution and the rise of social media is a blending of communication contexts. Contexts collapse is the flattening of multiple audiences into a single communication context. In the same social media space, for example, a company's marketing team can engage customers, but so can it's executive and employees on their own. Real consumers can post reviews of your product organically, but so can fake reviewers and your competitors. Journalists can step out of their professional roles to share their personal opinions on a controversial issue. CEOs can post their personal views on stock market trends and hot investment trends. Such mixing of social, spatial, and temporal dimensions of professional and personal communication activities can bring opportunities and threats to a company's reputation. Online reputation and relationship management become an essential activity in digital marketing. Online PR leverages the network effect of the Internet to shape opinions, drive visitors to your website, build and maintain customer relationships, and mitigate the negative impacts of crisis. At its core, public relations is about reputation, which results from what you do, what you say, and what others say about you, and social media is where all of those activities occur. There are five major differences between online PR and traditional PR. First, the audience is directly connected to organizations in the digital age. In the past, PR professionals communicate with the audience through press releases distributed over the news wires with the hope to be picked up by mainstream media outlets. Second, the members of your audience are connected through user-generated content and social media postings. Information can be rapidly shared from one person to another and one group to another. Such connectivity means that brands are constantly being discussed online beyond their control. Third, the audience has constant access to other information. In the one-way mass communication era, a carefully crafted public statement from a company will be difficult for an average audience member to verify and challenge. Today, any details in such a statement will be questioned, verified, discussed, and compared immediately following its release. Fourth, digital audiences are active. They control what they want to see and read, instead of being passively fed with information. Brands have lost the megaphone of mass media. Their voices are harder to hear and can be easily drowned in the digital age. Finally, the Internet doesn't forget. In the past, a PR crisis will pass and be forgotten once the issue is out of the public eyes. Today, an ill-conceived social media post or an inappropriate response from an executive will live in a digital world forever. It can come back to haunt the company unexpectedly long after its time. Proactive management is vital in online PR. Online PR involves content management, what you say to the public, backlink management, who you are associated with, reputation management, how your stakeholders are talking about you, and relationship management, how much influence you have on your stakeholders and vice versa. Defensively, it is also necessary to track the health of a brand online through social listening and develop a proactive approach to manage potential negative incidence. A major task in traditional PR is media relations. Similarly, in online PR, forming healthy relationships with online publishers can help expand the reach of a brand. Online PR should be a critical element in influencer campaigns. Building a good relationship with your influencers is essential. Still, you should also carefully monitor your influencer's reputation and their communication activities because damage to their reputation can also harm yours. In a nutshell, online PR is maximizing favorable mentions of your company, brands, products, or websites on third-party websites and social media platforms. It is about managing the reputation through monitoring and controlling online communication of all forms at all touchpoints. Online PR should be integrated into your search, social, end CRM strategies.