Deirdre Breakenridge

In my book, Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional, PR Practice #2 is the Internal Collaboration Generator.  This practice focuses on the communications professional who appreciates how social media collaboration starts on the inside of the organization.  Because social media moves across the organization, it’s imperative for you work more closely with your own department, as well as with other departments including Advertising, Marketing, Web, IT, HR, Legal, Sales, etc.  The Internal Collaboration Generator knows it’s time to break down the silos for greater internal sharing and effective communication, which begins on the inside of the company and then goes outward to the public.

Originally, the chart below was to appear in my chapter on the Internal Collaboration Generator.  But, due to space constraints, we had to edit the diagram out.  You can see from the wheel visual that there are several new roles and responsibilities for you to learn and embrace, as you evolve into the Internal Collaboration Generator role. [Note: You must think like a Hybrid Professional to successfully master this role.]

The Internal Collaboration Generator is a professional who quickly learns that a critical part of the communications strategy and planning process includes a way for the communications team and other departments involved in social media to share, coordinate, collaborate and innovate in a more productive and creative manner.

Here are a few of your new responsibilities:

Research How Your Department Shares: In order to move forward with a new way of sharing in your department or with other departments it’s imperative to review what type of sharing is currently working or not working.  You can research the pros and cons of current sharing practices and ask peers how they would like to collaborate and innovate together.  One of the best ways to find out is to observe their behavior, discuss their challenges and ask how they want their communications to be improved.

Answer the Sharing Questions: As an Internal Collaboration Generator you and your team have to answer the “Sharing Questions.”  These are simple questions that address your team’s sharing needs including: Does your team need to share and edit documents in real-time? Do you need project management capabilities to be available in your platform? Should there be areas for discussion including groups, forums, blogs, etc.? Does your platform need video capabilities? Do you need more advanced sharing and innovation including platforms with internal social computing?  Of course, your responses should be geared toward your social media growth, as you increase the participation in your program

Determine Sharing Needs:  Once you evaluate sharing habits and answer the sharing questions, you will be able to determine which level of sharing is right for your team.  Sharing ranges from simple document editing and project management to collaborative enterprise platforms. If you work in a larger organization, chances are an advanced platform may already be in place. If this is the case, then it’s up to Internal Collaboration Generators to learn more about the platform’s functionality and benefits of use, and embrace how to use existing resources and tools for better collaboration and innovation internally.

Research and Evaluate Platforms:  At this point you’re ready to evaluate the capabilities required in your collaborative platform, as well as the pros and cons of the different sharing environments.  From the paid platforms to the free tools, you can use a matrix approach.  The matrix approach enables you evaluate your specific objectives for collaboration (listed in the far left column of your matrix) and then compare the functionality you need to a few platform choices you believe might be the best solution (listed across the matrix). It’s also critical for your team to not only review but also demo and trial a platform to make sure it meets the communication needs of the team.

Create a Communications Plan to Educate:  Making technology available in the communications department or in other departments in your company is only the first part of your challenge. Getting your peers to participate collaboratively in the new platform and to use it appropriately is the other part of the Internal Collaboration Generator’s role.  You will need a plan to introduce the new technology and to teach and motivate others how to use the platform properly for streamlined communication. Of course, your own understanding and ability to use the technology will also help educate your team members on the value and increased productivity internal collaboration will bring to the organization.

Finally, my book, “Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional” is done!  I just reviewed the cover and the manuscript is in its final form.  It was a fairly smooth process with only one slight hiccup.  After writing almost 300 pages, my publisher told me that I had to cut back to about 175.  That’s a lot of pages to cut!  As I removed chunks of copy, I also had to remove many of the graphics developed for the book, including eight charts, with each one relating to the roles the different practices.

For the next several PR 2.0 Strategies posts, I’ll be sharing these charts and discussing briefly the related roles and responsibilities.  The first chart cut was from Practice #1: The PR Policymaker.  You can see from the wheel diagram there are several new roles and responsibilities for you to learn and embrace, as you evolve into the PR Policymaker.

© PR 2.0 Strategies

The PR Policymaker is a professional who quickly learns that a crucial part of the communications strategy and planning process includes the development of social media policies, training, and governance. Not only developing social media policies, but also maintaining them falls within this new PR practice.

Here are a few of your new responsibilities:

Spearhead a Social Media Core Team: You and other social media champions in your organization will form a team responsible for vision and strategy.  This is also the team that creates the social media policy and guides the process.

Conduct a Social Media Audit: A social media audit allows you to identify any of the challenges or problem areas within your brand’s current social communications program. By evaluating your social properties, you’re also able to pinpoint genuine opportunities and what has been working with respect to participation and engagement in the social media landscape.  A few areas the audit focuses on include brand guidelines, types of content shared, frequency of content, levels of engagement, measurement, etc.

Establish Policy Objectives:  As a member of the communications department, you will have several of your own objectives for creating a social media policy, but so will other groups within the organization that want to accomplish specific goals. These groups may include HR, Legal, Marketing, IT, etc.  If you’re a PR policymaker, then you will help to build a policy to accomplish a variety of objectives fulfilling department objectives across the organization.

Guide the Policy Process:  Your natural liaison skills make it easy to help guide the policy process.  As a PR policymaker you may be coordinating team meetings across departments, assigning tasks to appropriate department champions and using your project management skills to get the policy written, reviewed and shared with your organization in a timely manner.

Create a Plan to Communicate the Policy: Writing the policy is only step one.  Step two includes delivering and supporting the policy the right way.  The PR policymaker has to develop a communications plan to introduce and inspire employees to embrace the policies.  A couple of examples include communication through interactive formats rather than long Word documents and considering a reward program for social media participation, as a part of employee recognition.

Measure Policy Compliance:  Another important part of the PR Policymaker process is measuring the behavior and usage of the policy. You can ask for feedback through employee questionnaires, informal interviews, polls, and by monitoring and evaluating employee internal participation and collaboration.  You will need your employee evangelists to be willing participants, and to also be that unified voice or army of champions who support and add value to the brand’s social presence.

Maintain the Policy: As a strategic communicator, the practice of the PR Policymaker does not stop with the first round of development.  In many organizations marketing and PR are responsible for maintaining and updating the policy every six months to a year and then working with different departments on implementation.  A good social media policy reflects where and how the organization communicates and the constant social media growth in different communities.

Are you currently involved in any of these roles and how are you managing your new responsibilities?

Public relations is a blend of art or creative writing communications and science, which is a structured strategy, with defined goals and measurement revealing valuable business outcomes.  Today, the argument of art or science is in the spotlight, as PR professionals are faced with increased accountability for their communications programs.  As a result, we are becoming much more involved in new communication processes. We are also taking time to research and select technology tools, all to help us capture key metrics that show social media impact.  With new platforms and tools surfacing everyday and increased involvement in their use, it’s even more important to keep a balance between the art of the creative writing process and a really effective program to show campaign success.

On a special night, Thursday, March 22, 2012 at 8:30 p.m. ET (giving our community members, who can’t normally participate on Wednesday night, the opportunity to join in the conversation), the PRStudChat community will engage in a discussion to find out how students, professionals and educators are finding the careful balance between the art and science of public relations.  We’ll discuss how professionals are finding this equilibrium, what they’re doing to feed their creative writing skills, and how they can avoid being overly focused on metrics, which risks the art entirely.

With more pressure to produce successful campaigns, we believe a session focusing on the art and science of PR will allow the PRStudChat members to find a balance together.  We hope you will join us for the March 22^nd #PRStudChat session. We’re looking forward to hearing different opinions on the subject (both sides of the argument) and learning the best ways to create great programs, which results in communication impact and action. If you have any questions you would like to share regarding the art and science of public relations, please feel free to post them on our LinkedIn Discussion Group.  Hope to “see” you on the 22^nd!

A Little More About PRStudChat:

It began with a simple question asked by Angela Hernandez, then President of PRSSA at Central Michigan University (CMU). “Is PR Right for me?” A follow up blog post by PR 2.0 expert Deirdre Breakenridge inspired a series of direct messages on Twitter between Breakenridge and fellow PR industry pro, Valerie Simon. This was an important question and one that should be explored beyond one student or one blog post. Why not build a community to help students across the country, and even the globe, learn from the experience and perspective of industry professionals… A community where everyone can learn and grow together. Read more

A Guest Post By Harrison Kratz

Being a communications professional in the digital age, it is essential to keep up with the latest trends and news in our industry. With so many different sources and stories that would make your head spin (similar to trying to pick a place to eat in New York City), it is difficult to figure out a strategy to avoid content overload while staying ahead of the game.

Here are five mobile and web apps that I recommend (some you may already know) to help you discover and consume content that will keep you calm while looking like an expert.

Zite

Zite may be my favorite iPad app. Also available on the iPhone, Zite is a personal magazine that pulls in your preferences to deliver you up-to-date content from the web that is relevant to you. In addition, you can rate the content as you go to let Zite know what content you would like to be seeing. Not to mention, the layout and ease of sharing on your social networks is near perfect.

If you want to save an article for later, you can also store it or clip to Evernote so you can enjoy the content on your time. This is the best app for daily content discovery.

Stumble Upon

Both an app and website, I find Stumble Upon interesting because while it drives so much traffic to sites, you really hear communications professionals talk about it. Stumble Upon can be quite addicting and fun as you can spend hours finding new content around the web based on the categories you select. All of the content may not be new in terms of chronology but you’re always bound to learn something new while stumblin’.

Pulse/Flipboard

Pulse and Flipboard are content discovery apps like Zite that are available both on phones and tablets. Both apps are terrific and are unqiue because they can also create sections of content out of what is being shared on your social network. While that content may sometimes be redundant, the more sources of content the better. Flipboard is easily the most popular of the two and has a cleaner layout, but both are great and it’s ultimately a matter of preference.

Summify

It will be interesting to see the future of Summify since Twitter recently acquired them, but I couldn’t leave them off this list. Summify pulls in the most shared content from your networks and can be viewed online, on your phone, or via email. No matter what the platform, Summify is great way to be in the middle of the discussions that are going on around your network that day.

Instapaper

Instapaper isn’t great for content discovery and does cost $4.99, but it is a great content consumption app. Instapaper allows you to store the articles that interest you on the Internet and on many of your news apps so you can read them later. For those that are always on the go or don’t have too much time to read during the work day, this bookmarking tool can be your best friend. Especially since, Instapaper allows you to read the articles without an Internet or cell connection

What are your favorite content tools? Do you have any tips on avoiding content overload while staying up to date on what’s happening?

Bio: Harrison Kratz is the Community Manager at MBA@UNC, the accredited online mba program offered through the University of North Carolina. Harrison also sticks to his entrepreneurial roots as the founder of the global social good campaign, Tweet Drive.

March 8,2012 is International Women’s Day (IWD) and Oxfam America is celebrating women who are making a difference in the fight against hunger and poverty. These incredible women around the world are tackling challenges, one initiative at a time. There are women who feed and provide for their children, but are facing hardships that make it nearly impossible. They’re among the one in seven people who go to bed hungry every night. And, this isn’t because there isn’t enough food to go around. It’s because there are deep imbalances in access to resources like fertile lands and water.

In recognition of IWD, I wanted to get a young woman’s perspective on praising women for their accomplishments.  I asked my16 year-old daughter about her thoughts on the characteristics of a strong woman; one who can change the world, from community leader to world leader. First, I shared with her a few statistics on women, which included:

• Sixty-six percent of the world’s work falls on women’s shoulders, yet they earn only 10% of the world’s income.
•  If women were given the same access to resources that men have, they could increase yields on their farms by 20-30%.
• Hunger and poverty are about power and inequality, and women and girls face the biggest inequalities of all.

I followed up the statistics with a few questions.  Here are my daughter’s answers about IWD, the characteristics of women who change the world, and what type of women have the power and influence to help fight poverty.

1. What are the characteristics of a woman who makes a difference; whether she’s a leader in her community or a global role model?

These women are responsible and reliable, and I also think they are people who care. It’s a woman who wants to do something to make a change, whether it’s recycling water bottles or ending world hunger. She is open-minded and doesn’t let any adversity get in her way.  I believe any woman, in her own way, can be a strong woman. It’s not hard at all, because you don’t have to tackle world hunger alone or be a billionaire with a talk show. Every good mom in the world is a role model.  The way to bring this strength out is to overcome challenges; if adversity is in your face and people don’t expect much, it makes it even more of a motivation to show you can do anything!

2. When you think of women who have made a difference around the world, who is the first to come to your mind and what do you like about her?

The woman who immediately comes to mind is Eleanor Roosevelt.  I think Eleanor Roosevelt was a really influential woman. FDR couldn’t walk because of his Polio and she would go around, and take care of his affairs. She acted as his “eyes and ears” and this wasn’t typical for women to do, and it wasn’t a way for a woman to act in the 30s and 40s.  She also did a great deal to support the civil rights of African Americans. Eleanor Roosevelt’s influence was not expected at this point in history, and her strength as a woman is something I greatly admire.

3. What do you think is the best way to get younger women to participate in a movement to help women who face hunger and poverty around the world?

When you’re younger you’re still a little sheltered. So, the best way to get people interested, and to also get them involved, is to keep them informed.  Do it on a level where they think they can actually make a difference.  You have to make the cause closer to “home.”  If there are women in poverty, they have to be connected closer to where they live.  It has to be reduced to a smaller scale, otherwise they won’t feel as if they can make a difference, or it will scare them off.  Young people definitely care, it’s just sometimes these situations feel very remote, and we don’t know how to approach the situation in order to help.  Keep it local to help an issue on a larger scale.  Of course, use the Internet, which is a great resource for causes, you learn so much more.

The Oxfam America’s International Women’s campaign is trying to get people to join in the cause.  If you want to participate, here are some ways to get involved:

• Send one of their IWD eCards to a woman you admire and think has made a difference (or several!)
• Give a personalized IWD award to a woman  – this is really neat, IMHO, because you can just type in the name, your name & date, save as a PDF/JPG & publish to your blog.
• Write a post asking people to do one or both of the above, especially focusing on giving women a voice, since that’s a large part of what Oxfam America does, particularly in developing countries – ideally the post would publish sometime between March 1 & March 8 (not later than that, since 3/8 is IWD). Here is an info document/sample post if it makes it any easier (click the link under “Bloggers” on that page).

I hope you will join Oxfam America’s International Women’s Day, and recognize a woman who is making a difference.

As I was conducting research for my new book, Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional, I came across many interesting measurement tools and platforms. Prosyna was on my list and I learned quite a bit about the platform from Marty Levine, Executive Vice President, at the company.  Marty is a marketing and communications specialist and veteran of multiple digital media and technology startups in Silicon Valley, Seattle and Vancouver. He worked in New York publishing for more than 20 years as a reporter, editor and publisher before moving to digital media and technology where as an executive team member he built alliances and commercial relationships with leading companies in consumer electronics, motion pictures and cable television.

Here are a few of the questions I asked Marty, which related to Prosyna and social media measurement:

Q: What are the main reasons to capture social media intelligence for the CEO, CFO and marketing executives in an organization?  What do they expect to see with respect to metrics and measurement of their social media programs?

Each of those executives shares the common goal of helping the organization to succeed, but they each also need to maintain a particular focus. The CEO and CFO in particular are looking for transparency – is the organization’s overall investment in socials media of budget, time and people paying sufficient dividends? While you can say the same thing about the CMO that person has to get a bit more granular: what’s the ROI on a particular marketing campaign? How is the target audience responding to overall and specific messaging? And for many of them, how is social media performing against more traditional marketing channels?

With that in mind it’s a shame to waste social media on a series of one-to-one conversations – even if there’s a larger audience listening in on those conversations. What does that really tell you about what you’re trying to achieve? It misses the larger opportunity. If you’re going to use social media effectively you should be using it to convert your target audience into customers of whatever it is you’re selling. That means getting them to the websites and content that will influence them to sign up for a service, buy a product, participate in a promotion or event, read a third-party review that will materially influence purchase decisions – something that will have a bottom line impact.

If that becomes your social media strategy – as it should – you then need to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. Did you drive people to one of those transactions that connect to your overall and specific objectives? And it’s not just an aggregate number. If you’re going to measure you need comparative metrics that you can use to modify and improve on your social media execution. For example: If you’re an airline when should you tweet about a weekend seat sale? If you publish four Tweets with different wording and hashtags which one generates the best response?  I was at a recent panel discussion with marketing executives from Walmart, AT&T General Electric among others and they all stressed their reliance on data-driven marketing to understand customer behavior patterns. To be effective, social media has to fit that model.

Q: What is the best way to gauge whether or not the content you have created for a campaign is performing well through different channels?

It has to be apples to apples. If you Tweet a link and post it on your Facebook page you have to be able to capture the click-through response, with equivalent metrics, for each channel. And it’s not just overall numbers. You need to see if people respond through different channels at different times. If there are geographic factors that affect response. And you need to understand the impact of third-party influencers – both individuals and websites – that are helping to propagate your message. If something goes viral – and you probably want to repeat that type of success – then you need to understand whether it was what you published on Twitter, Facebook or some other channel that got you that mass response.

Q: What are some of the important metrics to track if you want to identify whether or not audiences are truly engaging with your brand?

Remember the truism: It’s not what people say, it’s what they do. Facebook Comments and Twitter Replies are a great way to get anecdotal evidence on audience reaction. But that type of activity represents an infinitesimal percentage of audience engagement. The same is really true about building up followers and fans. That tells you that you were able to get them to opt in on getting additional information – but it doesn’t say they will pay attention.

If people are truly engaged, they are following the links you publish to the online destinations you set: product and service pages, third-party reviews, news that supports your marketing message. If you are consistently getting a significant number of your target audience to engage with your brand that way – and I’d define “significant” as an ROI-based number compared to your other marketing activities – then you are doing your job.

Q: What advice would you give PR and communications professionals about gathering critical business intelligence?

It starts with having measurable objectives. This has always been a huge challenge for PR. The old metric used to be largely press clippings, though there have been efforts to link specific time-based PR activities to bottom line changes immediately following those events. So I can see the attraction of basing social media performance on easily obtainable data – the increase in followers/fans, number of comments, retweets, replies and such. But none of those numbers will tell you whether you are effectively executing on a specific objective. You have to go deeper and you need to use social media tools that can deliver relevant data. And I define “relevant” as “I can act on that information in a way that will get me closer to my objective.”

There are some good tools out there that provide different snapshots over target audience response. Of course, I very much believe in the comparative response analytics Prosyna delivers. But there are also sentiment analysis tools that, if used carefully, can also provide critical intelligence on how a large and diverse audience responds to a communications campaign. If I were running a PR agency or department, I’d be looking at all the tools that can deliver meaningful data that will make me more effective. We’re seeing a number of different business constituencies developing expertise with social media: Ad agencies, social media marketing specialists. If the public relations community is going to run social media campaigns on behalf of their clients and colleagues they are going to demonstrate bottom line, data-driven expertise that is natural to some of those other professions.

A new marketing measurement survey by Ifbyphone found that an overwhelming majority of marketers (82%) are not effectively measuring the ROI for their public relations campaigns. On top of that, PR was stated to be the most difficult to measure out of all marketing campaigns. In light of the survey findings, I interviewed Mike Santoro, President of Walker Sands Communications, about the factors business owners and marketers must consider before investing in a public relations program. Mike also shared his advice on how companies can better measure their public relations programs.

Here’s my Q&A with Mike Santoro about the survey:

Q. What are several of the key questions executives ask when they need to determine the return on public relations investment?

A. It’s very difficult to correlate investment to return directly, but people should ask the following types of questions when considering investing in a public relations program:

• What impact would it have on the business if the number of inbound leads I receive went up by 5%?
• What impact would it have on the business if we increased the number of appointments we schedule through our prospecting calls by 10%?
• What impact would it have on the business if our sales cycles were shortened down to 90% of the current time?
• What impact would it have on the business if an investor took an interest in our business and wanted to provide us with funding?
• What impact would it have on our business if we were able to get through a crisis situation without losing market share?
• What impact would it have on the business if certain companies approached us about being our strategic partner?
• What impact would it have on the business if we were able to recruit a higher level of employee talent, without having to overpay for improved talent?
• What impact would it have on our shareholders, if we were approached by a company that wanted to acquire us?
• What impact would it have on our competitive positioning if we suddenly became much more visible to the audiences we want to reach? On the flip side, if our competitors were to achieve higher visibility that outpaced our own visibility, how much might we lose?

These questions get to the heart of the issue: What is the value of heightened visibility and growing acclaim? What can potentially be lost if you don’t invest in visibility and your competitors do?

The second question to ask is: Can a good PR firm really get the impact I’ve outlined above? By walking through this exercise, companies can get a feel for whether PR should be a strategic lever that they tap into for business growth.

Q. From the survey, do executives care more about public relations that lead to inbound leads and sales or crisis and reputation management?

A. Ifbyphone’s 2011 State of Marketing Measurement Report revealed a large gap between executive demands and the ability to demonstrate tangible return on marketing investment. While the survey identified public relations as the most difficult program to measure return on investment (82%), it didn’t delve into the specific aspects of PR executives are most concerned with.

In my experience, the clients we work with, mostly in high-tech, business-to-business sectors, are much more interested in generating inbound leads. However, if a client is in a crisis situation, executives are most concerned with managing their reputation and retaining clients and brand loyalists for the time being.

Along the same lines, executives in very well-established companies, with high brand recognition, often view public relations as a solid tool to uphold and build their reputation, rather than generating inbound leads. But, for anyone who has not yet become a market leader, the top priority of public relations is generally to drive inbound leads, which will set up their position as market leader down the road.

Q. What can a company lose if competitors invest in visibility and it does not?

A. Companies can lose quite a few important drivers of growth but most namely – market position. Public relations offers third party validation and an outside stream of positive referrals, among other important aspects. When prospects see your competitor’s executives quoted in a large business publication, or a prominent trade publication that reach your target audience, they will recognize your competitor as a leader and expert in that space, while you’re quietly working away missing out on improving your market position and capitalizing on “warmer” leads.

We have helped a number of our clients move into the leadership position by sharing their company’s story with the media and generating more leads through credible information from news stories.

Q. What are some of the best metrics to capture PR return on investment?

A. This goes back to the first questions that executives need to ask when determining whether it is time to invest in a public relations program. There are three levels of metrics you can use to better determine the return on public relations investments.

At the basic level, capture placements and impressions. Are you generating more brand recognition simply because more people are reading about your company or seeing your executives quoted in a well-known publication?

Delve deeper by tying those numbers to impact. Are website visits increasing, more calls coming in, and more ‘followers,’ engagement, and conversations on your social networks?

Analyze the quality of your job applicants. Have you had more job seekers visiting your page? Are they higher quality applicants? Most importantly, don’t benchmark these analytics based solely on your company, but look at your competitors as well. This will give you a well-rounded sense of whether your public relations program is effective and help to shape your future program goals.

To dig even deeper, invest in research on brand awareness by surveying your target audience, or even the general public, about your company to gain a sense of the population who recognizes your company, is aware of your service offerings, and how they ‘feel’ about it. This is requires a significant monetary and time investment, but once you become a more sophisticated global player, it is necessary to understand how you stack up to the competition. If you are still a startup or a mid-sized corporation just starting to mature, the latter options are generally enough.

Q. What other interesting findings did the survey reveal about return on public relations investments?

A. This survey evaluated a number of different marketing tactics, and found, overall, PR and social media are the most difficult to measure. We, as PR and social media professionals, need to be aware there are tactics to employ to better measure and demonstrate the value-added of our services, which definitely exists, then, communicate this to C-level management.

Q. Why don’t people measure public relations?

A. It’s very difficult to measure and unfortunately, a standard metric has yet to be adopted industry-wide. Public relations works on a lot of fronts – it helps shorten sales cycles, boosts credibility, and improves inbound leads – but it’s hard to measure what this looks like exactly.

In marketing and public relations, there are many different factors working on a number of fronts and it can be tough to determine whether a targeted keyword or followed link, for example, was responsible for a particular lead.

If you do not at least try to measure public relations programs, it can be cut from the budget and you’ll lose a very credible and essential marketing tool. Overall, as an industry, we need to improve our public relations metrics to make it resemble those of pay-per-click, for instance.

Q. What steps can a company take to start measuring public relations?

A. Do something and do not give up. Many companies stop at the basics with capturing placements or impressions, but companies need to delve deeper and establish standardized metrics that make sense for their industry. A few starting points include measuring followed links, or matching up your target audience with publications you appear in and value publications based on the audience they reach.

Most importantly, set goals and determine benchmarks to ensure your public relations efforts are aligned with your short- and long-term goals.

Mike Santoro is President of Walker Sands, a full-service marketing and public relations firm focused on delivering growth for business to business clients.

On February 9, 2012, I delivered my keynote to the participants of The Social Conference in Amsterdam.  Part of my presentation focused on PR professionals who are excelling in PR 2.0. They are becoming champions in their organizations and/or helping their clients to move to the next level of strategic social media communications.  I highlighted professionals I know who are currently participating in different roles.  These folks are helping to spearhead a movement and educating others on new responsibilities that have formed, as a result of the convergence of social media and public relations.

For example, I mentioned Diane Gomez, PR manager at PRSA who is a PR Policymaker and directly involved in developing the social media policy for her organization. Diane was instrumental in building a social media core team to help with the effort, and educating employees, leaders, volunteers and members.  I also mentioned Michael Brito, VP at Edelman Digital, who is an Internal Collaboration Generator. Michael uses collaborative technology for project management to keep his team on the same page and also real-time tools such as Yammer to rally around various topics of interest.  Michael knows good communication begins on the inside of the organization and collaboration is a key to innovation.

My new book, “Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional,” discusses the next wave of communications professionals and the roles and responsibilities they undertaking.  As I gear up to launch the book in April 2012, I’m turning to my community asking for assistance.  I’m interested in hearing how you or any of your colleagues are participating in new social media responsibilities, which may fall under any of the following practices:

PR Practice #1: The PR Policymaker

The PR Policymaker is a professional who quickly learns that a crucial part of the communications strategy and planning process includes the development of social media policies, training and governance. Not only developing social media policies, but also maintaining them falls within this new PR practice.

PR Practice #2: The Internal Collaboration Generator

The Internal Collaboration Generator is the communications professional who appreciates how social media collaboration starts on the inside of the organization.  Because social media moves across the company, it’s imperative you work with specific departments (PR, Advertising, Marketing, HR, IT, Legal, Sales, etc.). You are breaking down the silos to increase sharing, collaboration and innovation, for better internal and external communication.

PR Practice #3: The PR Technology Tester

Being a PR Technology Tester means you are using technology strategically for greater peer-to-peer communications. At the start of social media, PR was criticized for not being up to speed on the knowledge and use of social media channels, tools and technology resources.  As a PR Technology Tester you are not only knowledgeable, but also testing the latest technology for better interactions with the public.

PR Practice #4: The Communications (COMMS) Organizer

The COMMS Organizer is the PR professional who has to educate and redirect their organization to implement a new communications process.  No longer can companies solely rely on the push or broadcast method to distribute their messages.  Now, it’s your responsibility to make sure your company’s stakeholders are pulling information from the organization.  You’re creating new types of stories by developing, coordinating, and curating content through different channels.

PR Practice #5: The Pre-Crisis Doctor

The Pre-Crisis Doctor is the PR professional who realizes every company today can face a crisis.  As a Pre-Crisis Doctor you will proactively build crisis prevention plans with comment response charts and helpful tools to identify and illustrate levels of crisis escalation through all media, including new media. Your new practice requires you to catch the negative sentiment and ease a potentially explosive situation, before it escalates to crisis proportions.

PR Practice #6: The Relationship Analyzer

The Relationship Analyzer is the PR Professional who turns into the communications sociologist with the help of technology.  It’s so important to observe and analyze how audiences connect, not only with their favorite brands, but also with their peers in web communities. You’re new skills include visualizing and mapping the connections for better strategic engagement and higher-level interactions.

PR Practice #7: The Reputation Task Force Member

The Reputation Task Force Member is the PR professional who practices reputation management on steroids.  Because social media can change a company’s reputation drastically, in a short amount of time, PR professionals have to teach about core values and brand voice. They must turn on their tracking/monitoring to high speed, in order to respond with immediacy, constant accuracy and transparency.

PR Practice #8: The Master of the Metrics 

The Master of the Metrics is the PR professional who moves from just accepting metrics (no more Advertising Value Equivalents) to forging ahead with measurable objectives and metrics tied to higher-level organizational goals. These professionals learn to differentiate between social media business outcomes vs. the outtakes and outputs.  Measurement has always been a challenging area, and your level of accountability is even higher with respect to social media communications.

I want to tell your story and/or the story of your friends, as I present to different organizations and groups about the Eight New Practices.  You can comment on this post, DM me on Twitter or send me a Facebook or LinkedIn message.  If you or people you know people who are working hard to integrate strategic social media into their public relations practices, then I’d like to share these stories to illustrate how PR has expanded, with many resulting opportunities for communications professionals to embrace.