I’m still working on the Q&A from my December 7^th Vocus Webinar on “The Techniques of the New PR Champion.” Below is Part III of my responses.  The questions from participants range from strategy and planning to the best tool and techniques of the New PR Champion.  Parts I and II of the Q&A are also available for review.  I’m thrilled at the level of participation from webinar attendees!

1. Which social media tools should you put the most focus on if you have limited resources?

If you have limited resources, the listening or monitoring tools are really important. You want to make sure you can respond in real time to questions, comments and engage in dialogue related to your company.  You can also address any negative sentiment as it occurs, and not wait until complaints spiral out of control.  A few of the free tools to monitor include Hootsuite, TweetDeck, Social Mention, BackType, Boardreader, CoComment and, of course, Google Alerts.

2. In protecting a company’s reputation and dealing with crisis, what advice would you give in creating internal social media policy guidelines for company employees.

It’s really important that your social media policy guides your employees’ social media participation. You have to let employees know the best way for them to engage as well as educate on some of the practices that they should avoid.  Many policies discuss the use of acceptable content, personal vs. professional use, legal issues including copyright, intellectual property and privacy, IT issues to protect the company’s network and to mitigate risk, proper procedures such as an account management process, and the best practice guidelines on the rules of engagement.  By spelling out, training and updating your employees, you will put a system of participation in place; one that works to prevent crisis from occurring based on your own employees’ interactions.

3. Where does the time come from to be a new PR champion? Is there a lot of sharing and delegation involved?

Being a new PR champion is an investment in your future and also an investment in your company’s social media growth.  Years ago, when PR professionals were first introduced to social media, the notion of becoming the “Research Librarian” surfaced. PR professionals learned that they had to bring information into the organization and rally for change.  I suggested back then that sometimes it might take some “after hours” effort to make social media a greater part of the company’s culture.

The same is true with the new practices and becoming a PR Champion.  Of course, as you research and share information internally, it often creates a grassroots approach that grows participation as others to pick up on accepted practices.  By involving additional champions from different departments in your company you will create synergy and more impact.  It’s also important to seek out buy-in from an executive who is extremely enthusiastic about social media. Having acceptance from the top down truly lends support for your efforts, and the new processes you are suggesting.

Eventually this type of buy-in leads to increased internal sharing practices that make your job more efficient and suddenly there are other champions who will share in your efforts and work toward common social media goals.  The more people you can involve and efficiencies you can reach through sharing internally, the more you will be able to delegate responsibilities and increase your own productivity.

4. Which sentiment analysis do you recommend, especially to measure competitor sentiment?

There are several platforms that help you to measure your brand’s sentiment vs. the sentiment of your competitors.  They include the following:

• Vocus Social Media Monitoring
• SentimentMetrics
• Alterian sm2
• Sysomos Heartbeat
• Collective Intellect

5. How often do you engage dialogue through social media platforms? How often should this be done? Daily? Weekly?

The question should always be what type of engagement are you trying to achieve and how often do your stakeholders want to interact with you.  I could say you should have three to five Facebook posts and Twitter updates a day to keep your profiles active, but if you have people interested in the information you’re sharing, then the conversations may double, triple or quadruple in size.

Before you can determine how many times to share, think about your audience and their behavior/participation. What interests them and what do they want to hear from you.  By listening first to the conversations and studying the behavior, it will give you a better idea of how you should participate.  Then determine exactly what type of engagement you want from the groups you want to reach or specific individual influencers.

When it comes to engaging in dialog, for example, you might be asking questions, monitoring trending topics to develop meaningful content to share, or even crowdsourcing with your customers to have them solve an issue and you’re using their intelligence.  The dialog will largely depend on what you want to achieve.

6. Should a company do social media if it can’t show return – leads, sales and success stories?

Not every social media program in the organization is directly tied to leads, sales, success stories or registration, although executives want this type of reporting. In many cases, it’s a series of strategies and outputs that eventually show the return the executives what to see.  You should keep in mind, there are other important reasons for companies to participate in social media, which includes: recruiting the best talent, thought leadership in the market, reputation management, customer service through social media platform participation, and social good or cause related efforts through social media. Many of these activities affect good will and public confidence, which is an extremely important measure that’s tied to higher-level company goals.

7. What’s the best way to measure traditional media exposure through newspapers, magazines now that social media is a part of the reach for each of those outlets?

There are turnkey solutions that include the ability to monitor and measure both traditional media, as the reach of these outlets extend digitally and through social media.  At the same time you can measure the conversations and comment via newer media, such as blogs and new influencers, which are also reporting on your company and the market(s) in which you compete.

8. We have a web-based business and know that 40% of our traffic comes from social media.  What is the number one thing that we can do to convert people to paid registrations on the site?

When a visitor gets to your site, the #1 thing you can do to move him/her from click to the conversion is to make it easy to understand, “What’s in it for me?”  Every website should be set up for the different buyer personas.  If you’re able to drive people to your site through meaningful stories and content, then they will expect you to engage with them on a more intimate level, based on their expectations and needs. In addition, they should never feel lost on your site.  The value-add you will provide to any group should always be present, front and center, and it should be easy and immediate for them to find ways to engage more intimately.

9. What is the most effective means to neutralize negative conversations about a product when the complaints are reaching critical mass?

There are several steps you should take when negative comments surface and especially as they are reaching critical mass.  These steps include:

1. Acknowledge the situation.
2. Fight social media fire with social media water by answering where the negative conversations surface.  For example, don’t communicate through Twitter, if the complaints are coming in through Facebook.
3. Be sorry and mean it!
4. Create an FAQ to answer those questions that people are asking frequently about the situation.
5. Create a pressure valve or an area devoted to answer questions, address complaints and ease concern.
6. Know when to move the conversation offline into a more private method of communication (i.e., Direct Message, Facebook Message, email).
7. Provide information company-wide so your employees are not in the dark and know when to refer comments and questions to official representatives.
8. Learn your lessons and don’t make the same mistake twice.

10. What advice do you have for fostering internal collaboration among departments?

The first step would be to figure out what level of sharing or internal collaboration is right for your department or organization.  Sharing can be on different levels from simple document editing and project management alerts for your programs all the way to enterprise collaboration and social computing, where you may have employees connecting through an internal social network by sharing videos, blogging and using innovative idea generation in wikis.  Similar to how you participate externally in social media, you have to find out how people want to share internally and what information would be the most valuable to them.  By researching or doing your homework first, you will develop a best practice approach to sharing internally with the most helpful tools and educational resources to engage your peers, whether they are in your department or you’re working cross functionally on a larger company initiative.

On December 7, 2011, I participated in a Vocus Webinar on “The Techniques of the New PR Champion.”  It was exciting for me to present some of the material from my new book, “Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional.”  With a lot to say on the topic and very little time, the Q&A period was cut short. So, I’m taking the time now to answer questions asked by the participants that were not addressed during the session.

Here’s Part I of my Q&A:

1. How do you convince dinosaurs in companies to join in with the social media revolution?

At this point, it’s important for people who are not active in social media to understand that social media is not a trend that’s going away.  Social media is a way of life and business.  The people, who you want to interact with your company, including customers, partners, suppliers, media, bloggers, employee, etc., are active and using social media daily for their news and information, to connect with their family and friends and to receive updates, promotions, discounts and customer service from their brands.  Not everyone in a company will participate the same way.  I wouldn’t expect every CEO or senior executive to blog or to be out there on Twitter.  However, if company stakeholders were actively participating in web communities, I would expect executives to provide the resources, tools, trust and empowerment to their employees who need to make meaningful connections with constituents, from creating awareness and interest to generating leads and sales.

To provide the inactive with a better understanding of the value of social media is to approach employee participation through a more formal “ask” process.  Social media is not something that you can just throw out in a casual conversation.  It deserves research including: uncovering best practice examples, identifying what competitors are doing, and showing how its use can save the company money, increase awareness as well as coverage and credibility. It’s also important to be prepared with information on the internal resources and people who would be involved.

2. How do you implement a social media strategy, with company policy restrictions?

The numbers of companies restricting social media is less than in years past and these numbers will get smaller in 2012 and beyond.  It’s important to educate your executives on employee use of social media, regardless of restrictions; they will use their smart phones during the day and go home and be active on Facebook at night.  It’s much better to open up the social media channels and to have a social media policy along with an overall company strategy to guide the proper participation. It’s also better to offer employees the tools, empowerment and guidance they need.  This may be a crawl, walk and then run type of effort, but baby steps are really important. If you’re currently participating in social media activity, then your strategy will reflect the types of social media that is permissible, as stated in your company policy.  Of course, you will need to focus your efforts on showing some benchmark wins on what’s currently working. If you can show some small wins then executives will slowly move toward more activity and less restrictions.  The PR Champion often uses a grassroots approach, in this case, and rallies other champions to form a team or a Social Media Core Team.  Forming a strategic team or perhaps even an Advisory Board outside of the company is an opportunity to create a solid strategy where social media contributes to the higher-level company goals and proves to executives there’s true value in social media and employee participation.

3. The PR Champion role looks like it’s becoming an internal social communicator, as well with external audiences, would you agree?

Absolutely! The PR Champion works from the inside out, realizing there are new processes and procedures that should be set in place to accommodate better communications externally with the public.  A few examples in my presentation included the Internal Collaboration Generator who creates better team sharing on the inside of the organization and the COMMs Organizer who guides the content creation and distribution of communication, as the process has changed from mass communication to direct one-on-one engagement in web communities.

4. Is it the C-Suite who creates the core team?

The C-Suite is informed of the effort to create the Social Media Core Team and they buy into the idea.  But, typically, the Core Team is not picked/appointed by the C-Suite based on title, but rather a person’s knowledge, use and passion with respect to social media.  A Core Team usually develops from the first set of champions in PR, marketing, web and IT.  Sometimes, it could even include HR, Sales or other active departments.  These people are social media actives and they (1) have a greater understanding of social media, (2) realize there will be different objectives to reach social media goals, and (3) will uphold policies within the organization.  The C-Suite should, of course, give its blessing and communicate to all employees that they are on board and senior leadership should show employees there’s buy in from the top down.

5. What kinds of policies?

PR Champions will be involved in the creation and guidance of social media policies, which include:

• Overall employee policies for participation
• Department policies
• Comment policies
• Public participation policies
• Training / education of policies
• Blogging guidelines, with respect to advertising/spokespeople endorsement

6. How do you us PR to promote a small business, which seldom has news stories to put out over the wire.

Social media is great for small business, which have stories to tell that are more targeted and customized, and should be shared directly with their stakeholders.  More companies need to realize that not every story should go over the wire.  Small business can make great connections with bloggers and the media who are looking for interesting and unique story angles.  Using social media is also a great way to build community through awareness and to drive people to the company’s website, where you can offer more information and have people engage more intimately with the company.  Of course, this all starts with a plan.  Using PR through social media is a more targeted way to create one-on-one interactions through direct connections.  You can “listen” or monitor keyword conversations to hear what interests your audience and then use social media as an opportunity to share relevant content, provide meaningful advice and build relationships with them.

7. How do you start knocking down the walls between departments to incubate the hybrid position?

You should start by auditing your social media properties to see who is active and to take a look at the useful and not so useful efforts to date. This is often the impetus to approach management with the idea that there needs to be a dedicated team of champions to create a plan/strategy for the company, rather than different departments working in silos and not using social media to align with higher level goals.  Let management know that forming a social media Core Team will begin the strategic policymaking process, which will make senior leadership more comfortable.  Share the audit with the champions in different departments and once you have the buy in from management, begin the process to meet on a regular basis. You will slowly start breaking down the silos with internal communication (you will also need to set up an internal sharing platform, if one is not already in place) and get your champions on the same page. Using the audit, you will work together on the policy and a social media strategy to guide the organization’s participation.  The effort will naturally take off from there.

8. How can I get my social media team on the same page so our social media content is consistent?

A good social media policy will often refer to the brand guidelines and also to acceptable content that can be used.  An Internal department and universal calendaring system helps to keep everyone on the same page with respect to content, so you can visualize what’s be shared, by whom, every week or month.  It’s also important to remember that there will be a brand voice often supported by resources and materials (perhaps your driving to information on your website) but that employees should also be developing their own unique voice.  There are great examples of companies who use internal twitter feeds to share daily, in 140 characters or less, what’s going on in the company (a tweet or a message a day). Employees are encouraged to take the tweets and use the content, but to say it in there own voice externally through their social media participation.  You have to make sure that everyone understands what’s considered acceptable and unacceptable, and you have to trust people to use what you provide and to share it in their own unique way.

9. What are a few of the top resources for keeping up to date with PR practices and social media action?

• Ragan.com
• PR Daily
• Spin Sucks
• Social Media Today
• Mashable
• PRNewser
• Bulldog Reporter
• Social Media Examiner
• eMarketer Charts

10. How do you build thought leadership through PR?

Thought leadership is built through direct interactions. You’re able to create trust and credible communications by sharing insight, direction and industry information that’s forward thinking.  Social media in your PR program is an excellent way to build thought leadership because you can listen, evaluate and respond in direct one-on-one conversations, and use interactive mediums including video, podcasting and blog communities to go deeper into a subject and to also show more of your passion, interest and knowledge.  Many B2B companies are capitalizing on thought leadership through social media sharing more information and resources in communities, where they would never have been invited to participate before.  You can use social media to create multimedia and collaborative learning opportunities with your constituents, and to position your experts as valuable and knowledgeable resources.

It’s important for PR Technology Testers to have the right social media tools in their toolkits.  There are a number of excellent tools available today that help you develop strategy, analyze relationships, add to your productivity and visualize the affects of social communications.  I’ve come across a few tools that help the PR professional, when time is precious and social media accuracy is a must.

Here are a few of the tools that I believe communications professionals will find useful:

Vocus

Vocus Social Media Strategy App:  Recently launched, the Vocus Social Media Strategy App is a great tool for professionals who want to supplement their planning. It helps you get a handle on how to set goals, determine challenges, identify who to follow, and then to choose the right tactics.  The result of using the app is a 35-page customer report/workbook. The app is great for companies or professionals short on resources.  If you check out the app, I recommend moving through each module (click on the colored circles) and answering the questions carefully, although you can download a workbook at any time. This application is swift, smart and helpful.  It was developed in conjunction with MarketingSherpa, a leader in market research.  I give the Vocus strategy app two thumbs up!

Post Planner

For small businesses that need to stay connected to their fans on Facebook, and have useful content to share, Post Planner is good option for scheduled posts.  I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to use.  I really liked the “Your Plan” area, which allows you to see your update schedule. Post Planner also includes all the native Facebook tools in status updates. You have the ability to add photos, links, and videos.  Users are able to schedule posts weeks/months/ in advance as well as manage posts for multiple pages, all without leaving the application.  Too many times I come across applications that are complicated or take too much time to set up and use.  Post Planner does exactly what it says, simply and with ease.

Asterisq Mention Map

Although this tool has been around for a while, for me it still provides value and is worth checking out.  The Asterisq Mention Map is a Twitter application that allows you to visualize the relationships in your brand’s network.  For example, if you type in your company’s handle, it will provide a social graph with connections; deep orange lines designate more conversations and mentions and gray lines are less connected members of your community.  By analyzing the lines or connections you can easily figure out your brand champions; the people who would be happy to share your content.  On the flip side, for the relationships that are designated by the gray lines, it’s an opportunity to see potential connections that you can work on to build deeper relationships.

Cloud.li

I thought Cloud.li was a really interesting technology tool. I discovered it during a recent #journchat discussion.  @Journchat had just shared the #journchat Cloud.li word cloud, which visualized the most popular conversations (keywords) during the chat session.  I’ve always relied on word clouds for better visualization of hot topics.  It’s a great way to identify critical issues for better content development.  Cloud.li allows you to discover prominent hashtags and emerging trends related to any topic. You can type in the hashtag name or phrase that you want to learn more about and see in real time what’s popular, trending or the most interesting topics in a community.  What’s also great is Cloud.li provides an ever-changing cloud.

Finding the right technology for your toolkit is trial and error.  But as the PR Technology Tester, you have to roll up you sleeves to experiment.  Gone are the days where the PR person has to wait for the digital creative team or IT to evaluate and recommend technology.  It’s a new and exciting role.  Although it may seem like additional work, in essence, most of the useful technology you find will ultimately add to your team’s productivity.

How have you enhanced your PR Technology toolkit?

I’m really excited to moderate a rapid-fire small business panel at Blogworld on May 24^th in New York City.  We are going to dig into the challenges and successes of the small business, when it comes to social media communications.  In preparation for the panel session, I was reviewing some interesting materials, and came across a great chart from the Vocus 2011 Planning Survey, which compared the size of the company’s revenues to its social media sharing and contributions.

What’s really interesting about the chart is the highest statistics of meaningful social media sharing or contribution run the gamut from the large billion dollar companies down to the companies that have revenues less than $1 million dollars.  You would think that larger companies, with their deep pockets for marketing dollars, would be sharing or contributing significantly more than smaller companies.  According to the chart, that is not the case.

You can check out the numbers on the chart, but here are a few highlights.  According to the Vocus Survey:

• The revenue size shows that larger organizations are very confident in their social participation (sharing and contributing), with survey responses over 80%.  However, small and midsized businesses follow close behind with 55% and 60%, respectively saying they are either sharing or contributing.
• There is greater confidence in social media maturity, particularly among small businesses, which is reflective that these organizations have changed their expectations of social media.
• Organizations are giving themselves high marks for social media participation whether they are large companies or smaller businesses, which shows the importance of sharing and contributing in the social landscape.

So, for all of the small business out there, you can use social media effectively and share and contribute with meaning.  And, you don’t have to be a large company. Yes, it does it take time, resources, and a consistent approach.  It also requires a strategy, proper planning and meaningful communication to engage audiences. But, you don’t need to spend millions on your social media outreach.  I would recommend taking a realistic approach to what you are trying to achieve and setting the proper expectations in place with your leadership team.  In order to set expectations, you may need social media education, which includes examples of what other companies are doing, especially the competitors in your industry.

Remember that social media has to be a part of a media mix to reach your constituents where they congregate, and to provide them with value at every touch point.  I hope this information is helpful and gets small business owners motivated and looking at social media through a different set of glasses!

On October 18, 2010, I will have the pleasure of joining many of my communications colleagues at the PRSA International Conference in Washington, DC.  This year I’ve put together a panel to discuss a hot topic, “The PR Influencer.”  Joining me on this panel are Sarah Evans, founder/owner of Sevans Strategy, Mark Drapeau, director of public sector social engagement for Microsoft and Geoff Livingston, co-founder and chief marketing officer, Zoetica.  Moderating the panel is Kami Huyse, president and the chief operating officer at Zoetica.

Our session will focus on the “PR Influencer” and what it takes to become an influencer.  There are many different views on the subject.  Is being an influencer (whether it’s PR or any other industry) a matter of the numbers, a person’s reach or is it the personality and content that a person shares?  Is it their Klout (as in Klout.com) or is it the strong connection or bond that they form with the members in their network that make them influencers.  Are there different types of influencers, similar to what I wrote about in a recent post, highlighting the Visionary, Rising Star, Educator and the TechnoSav and why do we trust these types of individuals and their insight?  We’ll also discuss the new roles of the PR influencer within their own organization and how they can build relationships for a brand and drive value.

Vocus recently conducted a study called the “The Influencer Poll” and enlisted the help of Brian Solis to analyze the study results.  There are some very interesting findings about how communications professionals view today’s influencers.  Here are a few highlights/key taken directly from the Vocus study:

• Influence is different from popularity but… An overwhelming 90% of respondents perceive a big difference between “influence” and “popularity.” However, qualitative review of open ended comments on this question shows the distinction is not always clear. A follow-on question also adds ambiguity, with 84% of respondents saying that there is a correlation between “reach” and “influence” on social networks.

• Quality of network and quality of content have a defining impact on influence. The top contributing factors that make a person or brand influential include the “quality or focus of the network” (60%), the “quality of content” (55%), which tied with the “capacity to create measurable outcomes” (55%), and the “depth of relationship” a person or brand has with social contacts (40%).

• Content is king, but context is queen. 50% of respondents said that the single most important action a person or brand can take to increase their influence online was to “create, post or share compelling content.”

• Views vary on effective measurement. A majority, 29% of respondents, said “action” is the most important measure of effectiveness in social media, yet more than one-third (36%) also ranked “action” as the least important.

• Senior execs are willing to pay for influence. 57% of respondents said they would be willing to pay an influencer to help “drive actions and outcomes.” Cross-tab analysis by title, role and organization provided additional insight as to who exactly is willing to pay for influence. A cross-tab analysis by title showed that the executive level, such as CEOs and CMOs (63%), would be most willing to pay for influence.

I look forward to digging deeper into this topic with my peers on October 18^th to uncover the personality, credibility and the clout behind the PR influencer.  It’s a fascinating topic and definitely worth the time to study whether it’s the metrics or the personal characteristics that create influence.

I’ve been gathering my thoughts, notes, interviews and articles and compiling them into a presentation for the Social media Congress Conference in Amsterdam on February 18^th.  My topic is the Value of Social Engagement for the 21^st Business.  As a part of my presentation, I thought it would be interesting to pull some of the findings from the Vocus PR Planning 2010 Survey and compare results between the United States and the United Kingdom.

One part of the survey asks an interesting question: “What is the SINGLE most important thing you, as a PR professional, will do differently in 2010 than you did in 2009?” What a great question.  It did not surprise me to see a high response rate of answers pointing to Social Media.  Here are a few of the responses as they pertained to Social Media from both the US (over 1,570 responses) and the UK (over 250 responses) to this open-ended question (courtesy of Vocus):

United States:

• Measure my social media timing against news cycles
• More cross-marketing collaboration
• Incorporate social networking into marketing plan
• Develop compelling multi-media content for distribution
• Combine the use of traditional media with social media, which we’re just starting to do.
• Rethink social media strategies
• The social media fire hose is too big with too much spam
• Coordinate more efficiently with the marketing departments, in order to fully utilize the limited resources of both areas
• Further integrate social marketing techniques and tools into our overall PR mix.
• Sell social media marketing services in conjunction with traditional PR services in order to maximize results
• Train others to know what I know about integrating traditional and new media.
• Learn to leverage the social media “spread” to our advantage for increasing awareness, donations and clients
• Focus much more on social media and experiment with ways it can help to meet our PR goals

United Kingdom:

• Change evaluation techniques to adapt to changing PR instruments (social media, etc.)
• Target audiences specifically (niche marketing) rather than blasting mass messages
• Be less traditional and more innovative
• Integrate online and social media
• Use social media such as Twitter and Facebook
• Increase social media awareness to clients
• Focus on social media brand building
• Integrate campaigns more solidly with social media
• Expand opportunities using video and social media
• We need to have a clear landscape of our agencies, as some practices are starting to be redundant
• Educate the organisation on the importance of engaging new media
• Embrace more fully the different platforms available to communicate with my public, especially social media networking

Although I agree with many of the responses, if you were to ask me the same question (of course I don’t have a single response), here are a few of my answers, with respect to social media:

• Build more social media policies (or update what’s currently in place)
• Continue to strengthen internal brand community with employees and engage employees in social media through recognition programs (not necessarily money or a gift, but something as simple as a “thank you” from an executive or supervisor for their social networking participation).
• Evaluate resources on a quarterly basis to make sure infrastructure can support social media monitoring and measurement requirements (whether in-house PR or agency).
• Review and discuss with employees how listening and engagement is a part of their job functions and assist with any challenges they may face as Research Librarians.
• Encourage more social media learning through webinars, seminars and conferences, both on and offline.

How would you answer the question?  Would your answer(s) be similar to some of the answers provided by the respondents of the Vocus survey? Or, would they be completely different?

I’ve been working on my presentation to the graduates of Syracuse University’s Masters of Science and Communications Management program.  The University is holding it’s reunion this coming weekend and I’ll be presenting on PR 2.0 and the state of the industry.  Part of my presentation discusses the results of the Vocus survey, “PR Planning in 2010.” I participated in a Vocus Webinar in November 2009 and wrote about some of the findings just after the event.  I wanted to share with you a few more of the thoughts from the 1,800 PR and marketing professionals (who participated in the survey and who perform PR functions), with respect to their roles in 2010.

I was very happy with the response to the statement:  In 2010, PR’s role in the marketing mix will (a) become more important, (b) stay the same or (c) become less important.  Approximately 64% of the survey participants stated that their roles will become more important, about 33% said that the role will stay the same and only 3% stated that PR’s role will be less involved in the marketing mix in 2010.

This clearly illustrates a positive outlook with respect to how professionals feel about their roles and responsibilities moving forward in 2010.  In my opinion, it appears that despite a tough year in 2009, in the eyes of the professional, the PR person’s role is more important now, and will be more integrated into the marketing mix.

To provide further details into the mindset of PR professionals, a follow-up question probed into what they believed their roles would be.  You can see the response chart below:

Click to enlarge

The Vocus summary of results stated that the “percentage of responses is much higher if we tallied this count by adding up those that ranked each function with a ranking of 6 to 10.”  Therefore, when identifying what roles closely related to the PR function (when adding up 6 to 10) the following ranked a response over 50%:

• Content Management
• Corporate Communications
• Strategic Communications
• Marketing Communications
• Social Media Communications
• Media Relations
• Public Relations

For me, it was no surprise that Strategic Communications, Corporate Communications and Public Relations ranked highly (above the 50% mark).  However, it’s interesting to note that there’s emphasis on new roles including Content Management, Social Media Communications and Marketing Communications (showing more integration between the PR and Marketing disciplines).  As a matter of fact, the second highest percentage appeared under the Marketing Communications category, with 24% of professionals ranking this area as a primary part of their jobs.

How do you see the public relations professional’s role in 2010 and moving forward in years to come?  Are you in agreement with these percentages? And, how do you see PR roles and responsibilities increasing?

Here’s Part II of my blog post: Q&A from the Vocus Webinar: PR Planning Considerations for 2010.  These are the last of the questions that I wasn’t able to address, due to time constraints.   Once again, I wanted to share my responses on my blog:

Q: You and I met when I was a magazine editor, but now I work for a “boutique” PR agency serving high-tech agencies. How much emphasis should our agency be placing on developing podcasting or webcasting products for our clients?

A: There are a few factors to consider before building social media tools/resources for your clients.  First you should take a look at your customers, their respective markets and their external footprints.  Are webcasting and podcasting effective tools to use and if you create this type of content for your customers’, will their target public(s) use and share these resources? When you develop a content strategy it’s important to consider the type of content that is preferred by the people you want to reach, and always align your content strategy to the company’s business objectives.  You should always ask: What are we trying to accomplish by developing these specific types of social media tools?

After considering the external factors, then you should conduct an internal audit of the organization to see what resources internally can be relied upon to create podcasts or webcasts.  Will the company be able use its own resources or will it have to use an external service provider and what are the costs to hire an outside service?  It’s also really important to consider the time commitment of the executives/experts involved in creating the webcasts and podcasts. Will the executives or experts participating in an audio or video streaming series be available for live streaming or to record the sessions, and how much time will they commit to the program.  The external and internal considerations are key to determining the type of content strategy and what will be the most effective social media tools to use moving forward.

Q: I am alone in my PR efforts. We recently purchased Vocus/PR Web services. I just released my first release. I created the RSS availability but have not set up a Twitter page yet however, my question is; Is there a tool to sync all of the business/personal social sites to display a released blog?

A: If I understand the question correctly, it sounds as if you are looking for a tool that will allow you to sync or update all of your community sites simultaneously.  So for example, if you write a blog post and you want to share it on all of your networks, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., then you can use a tool called Ping.fm.  Ping.fm is a resource that updates all of your communities, at the same time, saving you the time, energy and effort of posting separately in your networks.

Q: Our company has been using a few different types of social media for several months now but we have seen almost no ROI (limited sales from promo codes, limited site visits etc). How long should a company be experimenting before giving up?

A:  I don’t think that you should give up on social media outreach; you may have to adjust your listening/monitoring strategy.  Are you in the communities that have the people that you want to reach? Are you finding in-depth conversations on topics that relate directly to your brand?  After you listen, observe and identify the right community and understand the dynamics of the culture, then you can engage with the members.  When you begin your outreach, you may also want to position yourself as a helpful resource by engaging in conversations and then sharing information about promotions and other offers available.

It’s really important to make sure that you are in the right community at the onset and that the community members find value in the content that you are sharing. You may also want to identify certain new influencers/bloggers who would be interested in sharing your content because it has relevance to their community members.  I would go back to the Conversation Prism listening exercise that I mentioned during the Vocus webinar to see if you can find relevant conversations and people in specific networks through key word searches.  After you listen and observe, then you can move toward participation once again.

Also, make sure that you have the proper measurement in place to capture people who are interested in your offers either by directing them over to landing page to capture information or to a specific area of your website where it’s easy to take advantage of a promotion or similar offer.

If you have questions or answers to share on any of the topics posted above, it would be great to hear your feedback. Thanks!