The “Going Forward” section of Entrepreneur magazine recently highlighted 10 must-click websites.  I have to admit there were some very good sites mentioned on the list.  From BizStats and Entrepreneurship.com to LadiesWhoLaunch and Nielsen, these sites were all jam-packed with great information, statistics and ideas.

I thought it would be a good idea to put together my top five must-click websites (this does not include my favorite blogs, which I’ll save for another post) for Public Relations professionals.  These are the sites that I rely on almost daily. Now, this is not as easy as you may think; on the contrary it’s a challenge because I know that there are many valuable sites, rich with information and resources for PR professionals.

A note to PR service providers: If you don’t make the list the first time around, feel free to contact me.  I’m sure I’ll be doing follow up posts in the future so that I can continue to share the “Best of the Best” with communications professionals.

Here’s my list (in no particular order):

1.       www.myragan.com

2.       www.pitchengine.com

3.       www.technorati.com

4.       http://search.twitter.com

5.       www.google.com

MyRagan.com is an excellent social networking community for PR professionals to share information, resources, tools and general knowledge about the Public Relations agency.  Mark Ragan, CEO has done a fantastic job building a community that is not only engaging with helpful blogs and useful articles, but he’s also built myragan.tv, which is a video sharing community.  MyRagan is a must click site because it educates me and draws me closer to my industry every day.

PitchEngine is not only a great community for PR professionals and journalists, but it allows you to develop and share Social Media Releases (SMRs) for free.  Another great feature on PitchEngine includes its PitchFeed, which is a user-generated searchable news stream.  You are also able to share your SMRs through Google News and apps like Facebook and Twitter. My agency uses PitchEngine for our SMRs.  The result for us has been a huge increase in traffic to the PFS Marketwyse website (as much as 600%).

Technorati is a blog search engine and PR professionals should be using Technorati to evaluate the authority and ranking of blogs and bloggers for their brands. The search engine collects and highlights global conversations. By searching in Technorati, you can find the blogs and bloggers who are related to your target world and those that also may have conversations related to your brand.   When you’re using Technorati correctly, then as a marketer you are using a tool that helps you to listen first and then join the conversation.

I don’t think I go a day without using search.twitter.com.  Aside from Google, it’s my second favorite way to search and find relevant conversations for industry trends, client related information, and threads of conversations based on key words.  Twitter search allows you to search, filter and interact with volumes of news and information being transmitted in real-time. One of the first things that I learned as a PR professional was to be up on the news in a variety of industries.  When I was first beginning my career, there was no Twitter Search so I read The New York Times every morning.  Now, I get my favorite media delivered to my inbox and I use Twitter Search to give me real time news as it occurs around the world.

I was introduced to Mike Lewis (@bostonmike) of Awareness Inc., through Justin Levy (@justinlevy) of New Marketing Labs.  What a great connection!  I participated in a Webinar with Mike on May 27^th and it was not only on an interesting topic (Building Community Through PR:  From Virtual to Physical) but the Q&A with Mike was dynamic and even at one point stumped us both for an answer.

I have to admit that the presentation started off a little rocky on my end because it was the first time I was doing a webinar outside of my office.  So, despite jumping onto the call about 2 minutes before the program began, it was one of my best programs yet.  Here’s why I liked it so much.

The topic was extremely relevant. Everyone in business is trying to figure out that magic question:  How do you build community through PR.  I focused on some high level information, i.e. the challenges and opportunities, which include:

Service factor.  What is your offering to the community?

• What value will you provide and to whom?
• How will you be prepared and ready to respond?

External factor. Factors for consideration:

• Easy access to other communities because resources are no  longer limited to close proximity

Commitment factor.  Silence is not always “golden:”

• Manage and direct continuous conversations and  relationships

Participation factor. The homestretch of Social Media:

• Ideas are not useful until people get together to produce something meaningful

PR/Marketing factor. Align with business goals:

• Align community building goals with  business goals (include all areas of the company)
• Develop actionable enterprise within the community (increase participation, research, recruiting, endorsements, leads & sales)

I tried to drill down into the false assumptions, including how building community is simply hosting negative commentary and providing a destination for poor content, grammar and shallow messages.  I also discussed how the role of the PR person expands to include technology and programming, content review, comment strategy, customer service, web analytics and identifying trends for engagement.  All of our added responsibilities make us that more valuable to our organizations.

I presented a strong focus on the sociology of community building first and then the importance of technology:

• Social Media marketing starts with the observations of human behavior and interaction within online communities
• Technology then provides the tools to facilitate conversations online
  • Monitoring and tracking conversations

• Humanize your story by aligning it with the culture and the people driving the communities you’re trying to reach
  • What matters to them?
  • How do they talk to each other?

It’s the listening that matters the most! As my co-author, Brian Solis (@briansolis) stated in one of our interviews, “It’s the listening that separates the social media experts from the social media theorists.”

Of course, I couldn’t resist discussing the anti-community building approach with:

• Broadcast messages (top down strategy)
• Selling
• One way messages
• Spin, hype and jargon in our traditional press releases

As always, I thought the Q&A was the best part and I didn’t have the answer to the question:  Is there a website that rates all of the social networks?  I’m on a quest to find out the answer to this question, so if anyone knows, please comment : )

Other good questions included:

• Has the traditional press release gone away? I said no that it still exists because there are industries that continue to find it to be a valuable tool for fair and timely disclosure released over the wire (but, it should be void of all of the spin, hype and jargon).
• What is the biggest mistake companies make? It’s moving out too quickly with their social media programs and setting up FB and twitter profiles, and not really knowing why or how to measure their efforts.
• How should you start with community building? I believe that blogging/commenting is the easiest way. In some cases, brands are experimenting internally with their employees on intranet sites.
• The $10 million question: How do you measure ROI and how do you measure ROI from PR. Two tough but good questions. ROI depends on what objectives are set and could be measured in the form of authority, ranking, participation and engagement, registration and leads/sales. As for PR ROI, it depends on the relationships that are built as a result of the SM outreach and how these relationships develop into opportunities including, but not limited to endorsements from key influencers.

I’m sure that we will see a lot more great presentations and case studies in the area of community building.  I mentioned Starbucks as a good community and brand experience and a few of my favorite communities including PitchEngine and MyRagan.  However, I forgot to mention how non-profits are building community, for example, the Red Cross is setting up Flickr groups because they searched and found over 40,000 pictures from Red Cross enthusiasts.

I would love to hear from you about your PR and community building experiences.  What do you think are the best ways to build community through PR?  Please share your insight with me.