Deirdre Breakenridge

I was very happy to see the survey results of a joint study with Worldcom PR Group, the largest partnership of independent PR firms in the world and the Transworld Advertising Agency Network (TAAN), a blue chip organization of advertising agencies. The joint study discussed how PR is getting higher grades in social media, with good projections toward revenue growth in 2011, as reported by the principals of the agencies that were surveyed.

The key to building an effective social media policy is to customize the guidelines to meet the needs of your organization. A well developed policy will guide your employees in the many ways that they engage in social communications. The best practice approach requires that your organization invest the time, resources, and effort to plan and build a policy that empowers the organization, allows people to understand the value of social media and helps them to see how they can better participate as internal brand champions.

The past few years have been revolutionary for PR and communications. We’ve seen changes in our approach and in new technologies that allow us to share, collaborate and connect directly with our constituents.

Finally, we’re ready to announce the winner of the #PRStudChat Challenge.  The two finalists were: Finalist #1: Karen Russell, PR Professor at the University of Georgia. Editor of the Journal of Public Relations Research. Karen’s collaborative lit review: http://bit.ly/9aT851 group SM book review: http://bit.ly/bW0l9Q offered a great example of the use of collaborative learning techniques [...]

I’ve been doing a lot of work in the area of social media policy development. The same questions keep surfacing in my conversations with executives at different industry associations. Although, we see many of the two-page social media policies that are public facing, many executives are inquiring about their employees and what they need to know regarding social media participation, beyond the obvious “Rules of Engagement.”

We’re gearing up for our September 15th #PRStudChat session this week with a great line up of young PR pro panelists who will discuss their “Transition from PR Student to PR Professional.”

I’ve noticed some interesting conversations lately about strategy, execution and accountability. If you are on the strategy side, and advising a brand, are you held accountable for the execution (if it’s not your part)? Is it easier just to advise, then to execute social media? My own personal opinion is that we rise to a higher or maybe I should say a “new” level when we are able to do both.

If you’ve done your listening exercises (monitoring the social landscape through keyword searches) you may have discovered your competition is on Twitter. As a part of your own social media strategy and planning audit, it’s important to evaluate what your competition is doing, how they are connecting with influencers and how quickly they’re advancing on this network.