Abstract
In 1982, the Chicago senior public relations (PR) consultant Philip Lesly wrote: "You won't be able to practice public relations effectively in the last half of the 1980's with just a local phone, a mimeograph machine and postage stamps, as the pioneers of this field did? (Reilly, 1987). His forecast was certainly right about the middle eighties, but is also much relevant to present times. Back in 2007, big companies tried to buy the so-called community websites such as Youtube, MySpace or more recently Facebook (ITWorld.com, 2007). Those websites have seen their popularity increased over the last decade although the phenomenon is not new: before online "web? communities (blogs, forums, wikis), several other computer-mediated communication protocols allowed users to integrate virtual groups such as Usenet (1979) and Internet Relay Chat (IRC ? 1988) or even e-mail, through mailing-lists (Holtz, 2002, p37).
