Qualitative market research is a public relations and marketing professional’s best friend. It provides evidence and insights which inform communication strategies. It identifies issues and content to be addressed or included. And because the generation of qual is also an iterative, exploratory process, when an excellent researcher is interacting with the interviewee, the information gained can become very profound and useful.

The direct marketing power of LinkedIn is partially driven by its customised databases, the influence 3rd party credibility provides, the extra oomph an organisation can gain by using its employees’ profiles and its excellence as a thought leadership platform.

One of the mantras of ‘effective’ or ‘best practice’ public relations is ‘customise’. Customise, for the target audience: the methodology through which information is communicated; the language that is used; how much the approaches of broadcast, consultation, negotiation and organisational change are applied; and, most critically, how much ‘truth’, or how much ‘depth of truth’, is actually revealed through the communication process.

The hub & spoke methodology of digital communication is incredibly important to public relations and marketing communication because it is, strategically and tactically, a fundamental means of understanding, reaching, engaging with and influencing target audiences, as well as generating and leveraging ‘free’ viral ‘explosions’ of organisational messaging across the internet.

Three of public relations’ best practice pillars are either commonly not applied to their potential or, worse, not applied at all. These pillars, the Holy Trinity of public relations – thought leadership, 3rd party credibility and strategic alliances – should be default characteristics of any public relations strategy. This lack of application, and the minimal amount of discussion on them, prompted me to produce a free white paper on the topics.

With the preponderance of social media in the form of blogs or ‘mini-blogs’ (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, even Pinterest) there is an opportunity to revolutionise traditional media’s approach of taking a negative, divisive and conflict-fixated approach. Of course, it has been observed that conflict is what interests people, but that doesn’t always need to be the case. Not being negatively oriented would provide a marketable POD.

The triple treat of content marketing, inbound marketing and brand journalism should be a default inclusion in any holistic organisational public relations strategy. This is because the internet is where people go to for information and where they are influenced; the relevance of SEO; social media helps drive SEO and viral word-of-mouth; it facilities content generation; increasingly mixed reviews on media credibility.

Gaining editorial media coverage will be a key tactic in generating awareness and support of infrastructure projects, but its primacy will be determined by market research and internal stakeholder liaison. The application of strategic alliances will also help give credibility to the project and expand its communication ‘footprint’.

Whilst I strongly believe that marketing plays a central role in business and that PR can and must support the brand, I also believe that PR and marketing must remain two distinct responsibility centers: PR must not answer to marketing, period. They must work closely together – marketing centered on the brand, PR centered on the relationships. Or, put another way, marketing centered on the consumer and PR centered on the citizen.

A new study on social media, and its use by public professionals in particular, found, “that organisations need, but most currently lack, a social media strategy – an overall framework of objectives, performance indicators and management processes to achieve these, including training, governance, monitoring and measurement.”