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.

Leading Australian corporate affairs and public relations professionals are, on the whole, “yet to be convinced that social media represents a paradigm shift for modern reputation and stakeholder management”*. This is despite there being a tsunami of continually building evidence to support the notion that social media is an incredibly fertile platform for engagement, influence and the achievement of business outcomes.

Here is a black and white tip for you: if you are considering a Sydney PR agency to do your PR work and they don’t do the following, then ditch them from your list: have a blog; employ staff who are active on social media; produce thought leadership content; have employees with professionally filled out LinkedIn profiles; know what they are talking about when you flag the topics of thought leadership, inbound marketing, content marketing, brand journalism, strategic alliances and 3rd party credibility.

When devising a communication strategy, the SWOT phase of will look at the communication elements of relevant organisations, thus helping to build the best possible stakeholder communication, engagement and advocacy strategy. One very important element of the SWOT process is social media, which when implemented should provide social proof and enhanced stakeholder engagement, especially if dialogue leads to change and not simply social chatter.

In an ‘information obesity’ world, what can public relations practitioners do or say to cut through the online corporate corpulence and still add ‘meat’ with nutritional value? Two answers are that we need to ‘re-calorie-brate’ our focus and activities and add internal journalist and search engine optimization (SEO) expert calisthenics into the working skill set.

The rise of social media has created untold new tools and channels for all public relations practitioners. But in the field of issue management it is having a dramatic impact not just on the day-to-day practice of the discipline, but is changing forever an organisation’s stakeholder relationships and the expectations of its stakeholders.

Five critical topics that public relations and marketing communicators need to know about and be adept at leveraging are content marketing, optimising online real estate for search, the value of 3RD party brand advocates, the subtleties of media relations and evaluation and measurement. This post touches on all five, referring you to some excellent PR and marketing bloggers who have recently explored these issues.

The emergence of social media, an entirely new tactical discipline, has presented an enormous challenge to the teaching and strategic and tactical practice of PR. It’s new, it has a wealth of platforms, it demands a lot of content produced in an online-friendly mode, its rate of change is eye-popping.