Deirdre Breakenridge

In order to truly be a PR 2.0 champion for your organization, it starts with your personal involvement in web communities. I believe you have to take off your marketing hat and become a trusted peer. Ask yourself the following questions …

With PR2.0 comes the responsibility to listen, engage, learn more and understand the new media landscape. If and only if you do this, then you can teach others how to listen, engage, learn more and understand how to use New PR effectively for their brands.

As a marketing and PR agency professional, I definitely discuss with my clients the importance of transparency and showing their human side. I know that I write a lot about brands and how they must develop a voice and talk directly to customers and social media is a great way to do that. So, I asked myself, “What has my agency done lately? How have we been transparent, shared meaningful information and how have I, personally, furthered this quest to have conversations to build better relationships.

My first post on New PR 2.0 Measurement was well received. Measurement is one of the hottest topics right now. I’m noticing that most of my professional associations and well known publications are having monthly seminars/webinars on this topic. There are so many tools and techniques that it can almost be overwhelming for the PR professional. How do you measure the conversations that take the form of tweets, comments and blog posts? What about negative comments in social networks? Are free measurement tools such as Google Analytics and TweetBeep enough?

One of my Twitter buddies, @weldfeldpr, inspired me to write this blog post. However, before I can dig into the specifics tools to measure the tweets and conversations (which will be part II of this post) I want to set up some guidelines and introduce the new metrics for PR 2.0. Overall, how do we measure the effectiveness of PR today to include our social media activity?

I can’t remember a time in my PR career when a brand (B2B or B2C) wasn’t in some kind of trouble. From product recalls and e coli poisoning to airline flights cancellations and accounting scandals. Enron, WorldCom and Arthur Anderson resulted in Sarbanes Oxley and more financial transparency and stricter reporting procedures. I’m not sure if social media would have helped those companies. But, today is different. On any given day, a brand that is on top of the world (i.e., athletes and MLB) can fall from grace. Did anyone say Alex Rodriguez? There is a way to restore the trust.

I’m basing my blog post on the reaction to my last post on “PR of the Past vs. PR 2.0 Today.” I wrote that post to pinpoint the amazing technological differences between today and year’s past and how a PR person’s role has altered (for the better). But, the real discussion (the comments on my blog) focused on how PR people need to evolve as a result of social media communications and how there’s still resistance. As a matter of fact one comment stated, “A lot of PR people don’t even know that PR has evolve[d]…or they don’t want that!”

Even though PR is over 100 years old, I can only comment from experience on the last 20 years. As I walk down memory lane, from my first job at Padilla Spear Burdick & Beardsley (now Padilla Spear) until today, I think PR has grown in a number of ways.