I was very happy to see the 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. According to the study, “PR executives and their advertising counterparts rarely see eye-to-eye, but a recent study found one area of agreement – both groups think PR is using social media more effectively.”

Elizabeth Sosnow, Managing Director of BlissPR and a member of Worldcom’s Americas Region Board of Directors conducted the study, and presented the findings to the TAAN North America meeting in Scottsdale, AZ.  The survey respondents were the principals of 25 firms in each agency network.  Some of the more interesting findings included:

PR Leads Social Media

• 84% of PR respondents were pleased with their profession’s approach to social media campaigns.
  • Approximately 20% stated it was an “innovative marketing communications leader.”
  • About 64% said it was “keeping pace.”

• By contrast, only 52% of the advertising respondents rated their profession either “innovative” at 12% and “keeping pace” at 40%.
• Another 40% of the respondents said the advertising industry was “falling behind.”

Working Relationships

• When asked to rate their sister professions, the results were similar.  The advertising respondents gave PR a positive rating of 67%.
  • Over 13% called it “innovative.”
  • About 54% rated it “keeping pace,” higher grades than they gave themselves.

• PR respondents gave advertising higher marks than did the advertising chiefs, with a positive rating of 68%.
  • Approximately 20% “innovative.”
  • About 48% “keeping pace.”

Social Media Revenue Growth

Both marketing disciplines expect fees from social media work to grow in 2011.

• About 44% respondents stated that fees would increase 5% – 15% in 2011.
• Approximately 32% of the respondents stated that fees would increase by 15% – 25% in 2011.

The PR and advertising professionals have been working very hard to learn and embrace social media, understanding how it is integrated with other organizational communications.  Virginia Sheridan, President of M. Sliver Public Relations sums up the survey nicely, and I agree with her comments. She stated, “This survey has two major takeaways for me … First, both advertising agencies and PR firms foresee sustained growth in social media.  Second, it seems clear that such growth could be substantially enhanced by our professions working more closely together to capitalize on each others’ strengths.”

Congratulations to the PR and advertising professionals who are social media champions in their organizations … keep up the good work!

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.

I had the pleausre of working with PRSA to assist in the development of their social media policy, which was rolled out today. It was a great exercise because of the intricacies of an organization that serves more than 21,000 members. It’s a comprehensive policy, one that sets the standard for social media participation, gives guidance on engagement, and offers social media best practice resources to employees, volunteers and leaders. PRSA’s policy will grow and evolve as the organization extends its social footprint.

A best practices approach to creating the PRSA social media policy included the following steps in the development process:

• Finding a champion (in this case the PR manager) to spearhead the effort, corral the team and manage the process from start to finish.
• Building a coalition or core team that developed policy objectives across the organization so it would not only guide employees, leaders and volunteers, but also PRSA chapters, sections and districts. The coalition consisted of PR, marketing, executive leadership and the PRSA legal team.
• Conducting an in-depth audit to evaluate the current state of PRSA social media and to help standardize and promote better brand guidelines connected to social media participation.
• Encouraging participation and not stifling communication, going well beyond just the do’s and don’ts of social media. The policy also carefuly reviewed situations specific to the Society, and focused on where the organization needed to convey stronger messages, including legal concerns like privacy, intellectual property and disclaimers.
• Covering employee participation on behalf of PRSA, as well as including a statement on personal use. Understanding that employees will participate during their work hours and their own free time, it’s important that employees know the type of representation, responsibility and respect they must have for PRSA at all times.
• Considering several key areas in the policy, including access, account management, acceptable conduct and the rules of engagement, content, security and legal issues.
• Introducing leaders and members to the draft policy, asking them to evaluate usefullness by participating in a survey prior to launch. Feedback from the survey was incorporated into the social media policy to create an even stronger set of guidelines.
• Including other organizational policies — the PRSA Code of Ethics, the PRSA Branding Guidelines, the PRSA Style Guide and the PRSA Media Policy — fully integrating these policies into the social media policy, as they now relate to social outreach.

This is only a starting point for PRSA and its new social media policy. The Society’s policy will continue to evolve as the organization grows its social media presence and identifies increased opportunities for engagement.

It’s critical that the process of policy development continue throughout every phase of social media planning. PRSA will continue its best practices approach by implementing an organization-wide social media plan that allows departments to tailor it to their goals and strategies;  re-evaluating its policy during the strategic planning phase each year; and sharing the direction of its own social communications with leaders, volunteers and members.

What is your best practice approach to social media policy development and how has the overall process helped to create a strong set of guidelines for your organization?

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.  For me, 2011 will be a year to dig in, making sure that our organizations have embraced the changes and are better prepared to deal with new ways of sharing communication, with the ability to monitor conversations as they occur.

One critical area, which demands attention, and where we should dig in more, focuses on monitoring and maintaining a record of social media conversations.  Now, many organizations may feel that this is only reserved to those companies that have to adhere to Public Record laws, such as healthcare companies.  However, reading an article called “Tools to Help Companies Manage Their Social Media,” in The New York Times, makes me think otherwise.  The article discusses how, “if three years from now somebody comes and says, ‘I need every Facebook post, every tweet …’”  Are you prepared to accommodate this request?

It wouldn’t surprise me if, in most cases, you said, “no, we don’t have that data archived,” or “well, let me see if my monitoring platform can pull together that information from the past.”  These are not the answers that your legal team wants to hear, should the company be facing a lawsuit regarding specific content posted on one of your social networking sites.  It’s better to be prepared and to understand the access that you have to archiving and/or the limitations before the legal team inquires.

The article is our wake up call and being in communications and a part of the reputation management team, we have to make it our business to have certain technologies in place.  If we are the team that guides strategic communication, curates the content and is responsible for monitoring the results of the social outreach and the sharing of information, then we have to have a better answer in place.

When you are in your strategy and planning phase and you know exactly where the employees of your company will be communicating on social sites, then you need to make sure you select the proper monitoring and tracking platforms; ones that will allow you to archive at certain intervals.  I just recently learned that one of our clients platforms will archive (by PDF) up to 175 posts and 1,000 comments on their Facebook wall, before we have to pay additional fees to upgrade our package.  Ask now to protect the brand later.

Based on this article, I think we will see some sophisticated archiving tools in the future that will help us to manage the communications better and to feel prepared to furnish the “can I have the last three months of posts and comments” request with ease and with speed!

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 in the classroom

and,

Finalist #2: Barbara Nixon, Assistant Professor, Southeastern University; Adjunct professor, Georgia Southern University. Barbara’s blog posts / assignments for #PRCA3030 (Social Media for PR) from Spring 2010 http://bit.ly/a4kZcW including a final project for which students had the option of creating their own Social Media Resume or writing a Social Media Policy for a client organization, gave students an opportunity to get experience that will directly impact their professional success.

Although both professors had excellent submissions, the winner of our challenge is:

(Drum Roll…….)

Winner: Barbara Nixon

Congratulations Barbara!  Here are your prizes:

• A Skype visit with your class by the co-founders of #PRStudChat.
• An interview with Barbara or the student of her choice on the new PRStudChat Podcast Series with co-hosts, Harrison Kratz (@KratzPR) and Ashley Funderburk (@amfunderburk1).
• An interview in the Examiner with @ValerieSimon about the winning project and social media in the classroom.
• A guest blog post on PR 2.0 Strategies and/or the PRStudChat Blog.
• The choice of one of the following books from Amazon (courtesy of Mango! Marketing):
  • The Mirror Test by Jeffrey Hazlett and Jim Eber
  • Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investement by David Meerman Scott and Jim Stern
  • Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business by Erik Qualman
  • The Networked Non-Profit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change by Beth Kanter, Allison Fine, Randi Zuckerberg
  • Facebook Marketing: Designing Your Next Marketing Campaign by Justin Levy

We want to thank all of the professors and students who participated in the October #PRStudChat challenge.  We hope you will all help us to congratulate Barbara on being our winner.  Great job Barbara!

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.”

Whether you have one social media policy for all to see, or you separate your guidelines into a policy that is employee related and the other becomes outward or public-facing, here are several questions/considerations that must be discussed with different officers and departments in your organization.

Employee Access:

Many companies have an open access policy to social media and different websites.  However, for those that don’t, are there any sites that are currently off limits and/or have limited use within your organization?  If so, these sites need to be discussed in a policy.  Also, what is the process/protocol for employee access to social media?  Can an employee just set up a social profile or account on behalf of your brand (whether the employee just wants to create a social media initiative or is asked by a supervisor or leader within the company to participate)?

Employee Conduct:

Although I’ve seen many policies with the best practices for the Rules of Engagement including:  know who you want to reach, write what you know,  contribute to your community, avoid starting fires, etc.  However, other areas of conduct relate to how employees are supposed to identify themselves.  What type of disclaimers does the organization require employees to make with respect to their own opinions and views when they blog and post comments?  What is your policy on the personal use of social media? How do you advise employees on using brand style guidelines when setting up profiles and creating content on behalf of the organization (to keep the brand in tact)?  How do you advise employees with respect to customer privacy and/or patient information if you are in the health care industry?

Account Management:

Setting up accounts, when only a few people in an organization are participating, is easy to manage.  But what happens when there are hundreds of employees who want to set up accounts? Do you have a process in place for creating profiles and social networking accounts?  Is there one department or officer (i.e., a Public Information Officer) who manages the accounts?  Is this person working in conjunction with HR, so that there is a central database of domain names and user names and passwords? What is the process when employees leave a company and they are in charge of a social networking site or account(s)?  Who is in responsible for changing a site’s user name and password upon an employee’s departure?

Legal Issues:

Although social media is all about open conversations and transparency, it’s critical to impress upon employees what they are allowed to discuss and what is considered proprietary to the organization and/or its stakeholders.  Employees also have to understand that there are Public Record Laws that may apply and/or policies relating to privacy laws (i.e., HIPAA and FERPA).  Should your policy cover how you have the irrevocable right to use, reproduce, republish and edit any information that is posted on your social networking sites? When do you have the right to remove content or information that is posted?  What is your policy on trademarked or copyright information?

IT Issues:

There are several questions that you will need to answer that relate to IT participation in your social media policy development.  For example, how will IT continually work to mitigate network system risk and how will they institute any necessary controls? In addition, will IT monitor the transmittal of any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising,  promotional materials, junk mail or spam? What about the possibility of the transmission of any material that contains software viruses, worms or any disabling code that can interrupt and quite possibly damage the functionality of a computer software or hardware or telecommunications equipment?

These are only a few areas and a handful of questions.  There are many more to discuss and each organization will handle the answers to these questions differently.  I wish there was a “one policy to fit all,” approach, but I don’t think that would really protect our brands or the stakeholders in our communities. What do you think?  Do you ever look at those two-page social media policies and wonder if there should be more represented to help employees participate the right way?

We’re gearing up for our September 15^th #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.”  Our student community is excited to get some new insight on what it’s really like in the PR world and our PR pros are there to share their knowledge and experiences too.

This #PRStudChat session would not be complete without a PR student joining us; to ask the questions, guide the discussion and join in the conversations.  It’s my pleasure to introduce our special guest and PR student moderator….. Ashley Funderburk (@amfunderburk1).

For those of you who don’t know Ashley, she is a student at Western Carolina University where she majors in public relations and journalism.  Ashley is very active in PRSSA as the chapter’s vice president and she is the firm director at Catamount Communications (CatCom), the student-run PR firm on campus. Ashley is expected to graduate from WCU in the summer 2011.

With respect to Twitter chats and learning opportunities, Ashley said, “Getting involved with Twitter chats has helped me connect with PR students across the world, and I am so glad I found out about them. #PRStudChat was one of the first chats I participated in and I recommend it to any PR student or pro!”

We feel this discussion will be another excellent opportunity for the PR and marketing community to help students learn more about real world PR.  Please join us on September 15^th at 8:30 p.m. for another dynamic session.  We look forward to “seeing” you then!

Click to enlarge

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.

However, in many cases, we can’t always be there from start to finish.  There are times when my team works with clients on the strategy part and the client’s in-house team executes the program.  There are other times when we have the opportunity to manage the program from strategy through execution. The best scenario: if you have the opportunity to roll up your sleeves and get in the trenches (whether it’s execution for your own brand or for your client) then do it! It’s your opportunity to visualize the success of your strategy, to see the innerworkings of the program and to adjust for any of the pitfalls or shortcomings, as you go along.

Social media has changed the game, not only for communications, but also for businesses in general.  I think we realize by now that social media is much different than traditional communication.  It can’t be handled the same way. Social media has changed our approach to communications and interactions with consumers.  It moves across an organization and we must rework and learn new ways to communicate.  When I look at my social media strategy wheel from the channels, content, and engagement to the tracking, monitoring and measurement, there are many new considerations.  I find myself more hands on as a result.

Whether you are just starting out in your career or you have 15 to 20 years under your belt, I recommend that you dig into social media.  If you can be involved in the execution from the ground floor up, you’ll get a much clearer picture.  You’ll learn quickly that sometimes what we advise, and the time it takes to get the results we want, may take longer or may require communications and resources that we didn’t even think about prior to our “trench” work.  Being in the trenches will enlighten you and hopefully lead to providing a better education to those who rely on you for your strategic input.

Strategy and execution….together is a best case scenario.  I know we can’t always be there to do both, but when we’re able to, I believe it can lead to better outcomes.  And, regardless of the part we play….we should be held accountable for the results.

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.

Working through a competitive intelligence exercise means getting past the obvious and digging into an audit with your eyes wide open.  Of course, you’ll immediately check out how many followers your competitors have and the lists where they appear. And, yes, you should review their tweet stream to figure out their approach. You can also scour through their followers to see the influencers they’ve connected with and the level of engagement.

However, here are a few less obvious ways that you can figure out if your competitors are just getting their feet wet or if they are well on their way to a successful social media strategy.  With your eyes wide open you should ask these questions about each competitor:

• Do they have a standard Twitter profile or a customized background? You can tell if a competitor is a beginner or more advanced just by their Twitter background.
• Do they use images in their profile that relate to the brand (logo, product, people)?  Images tell you if they are branding their profile(s).
• Does the URL in the profile lead to a dedicated landing page vs. a home page? This is the difference between the competitor that may or may not be closely paying attention to website analytics and driving traffic to specific area of a website.
• When you look at their profiles can you immediately identify what they want to talk about?
• What’s the percentage of their tweets, retweets, and actual conversations (@replies) over a specified time frame?
• What platform(s) are they using?  Are they just starting out on Twitter.com or have they advanced to TweetDeck or HootSuite? Using more advanced platforms may translate into filtering information, managing multiple handles and timing daily tweets.
• Are they shortening links yet?  Do you they use Tiny URL or have they advanced to Bit.ly links (which means they are tracking/measuring links)?
• Are they timing tweets? You can tell by analyzing patterns of tweets over a period of time.
• Do they have one Twitter feed or many feeds?  If there are different feeds then you should ask the same questions above about each profile.
• Do they have an employee retweet strategy? In other words, you need to analyze who is retweeting and determine if other members of the company (their internal brand champions) are involved in the social media strategy.
• How often are competitors tweeting per day, per week, per month? Is there a consistent flow of tweets?
• Who tweets about your competitors on Twitter the most (media, bloggers, industry partners, employees, customers, etc.)?

There are so many questions that need to be asked, more than what’s listed above. What questions do you ask? Do you evaluate your competitors on Twitter with you eyes wide open?