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.

How much control that the public relations discipline seeks to exert on organisational reputation has, due to the emergence of social media, accelerated to become one of the profession’s defining issues. There are benefits in ceding more ‘reputational’ control to stakeholders than has been traditionally the case, just as there are rational reasons for retaining the paradigm which seeks to exert the ‘command and control’ mindset.

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.

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.”

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.

There is incessant chatter about the dialogic dimension of social media and how this enhances the potency of public relations. We can exchange views. We can influence each other. We can build relationships. So, hello, we can help make money and build brands through PR. But you know what, there is a burgeoning ubiquitousness of advertising or money-making distractions through social media, so you have to wonder if this preponderance of ‘dialogue, ‘sharing’ and ‘relationship building’ is just a load of total camouflage bollocks for turning a buck.

Employer branding is something of a chic sub-section of contemporary branding, yet marketing has yet to get its head around how to leverage PR to achieve a best-possible outcome. Actually, marketing has yet to figure out how to leverage marketing to best effect! But it’s an exciting and incredibly worthwhile dimension of business communication and one where dialogue/conversation/change based on feedback really does have an opportunity to occur.

The value of employer branding is becoming clearer each day as the battle for workplace talent gets increasingly fierce. Australia, for instance, is going through a severe skill shortage crisis in key areas. Yet many organisations are lagging in their thinking and application of employer branding, including how public relations can be incorporated into this quite specific, and generally marketing-aligned, business communication activity.

Public relations is critically important to branding; perhaps even its most important element. This is because PR is the primary architect and facilitator of stakeholder engagement, its brief being to be concerned about both the organisation and its stakeholders – their knowledge, opinions and behaviour. And a brand is built, these social media-powered days especially, as a partnership between multiple entities.