It is amazing how many people who work in PR, and how many agencies, do not have blogs. Their benefits are clear: enhancing reputation, credibility and word-of-mouth recommendations; SEO; and walking the Goddamn talk! It is less amazing – even if it is professionally sinful – that if you are a committed PR blogger like me you struggle to find the time to check your peers. Bearing this in mind, I would officially like to go some way towards repenting and recognise some of the excellent PR bloggers out there.

The key to engaging stakeholders through Facebook, said then Weber Shandwick’s, but now Edelman’s, Matthew Gain at Frocomm’s 2010 New Media Summit, is identifying existing communities where fans can be recruited, forming strategic alliances, leveraging off existing communication platforms and utilising Facebook advertising. This post focuses on tactical aspects of utilising Facebook for public relations results.

Public relations professionals external to an organisation can ‘control’, facilitate and contribute to an organisation’s social media activity as effectively as any in-house professional. (In fact, even marketers can do this if they can actually get their head around the notion of true dialogue.) So I was flabbergasted to read of marketers making the claim that it is best that social media should not be run by consultants.

Free report on PR and social media…Trust, crowds (utilisation of, communicating to, segmenting of…), integration (or not) of social media and corporate websites, the death of ‘networked’ communication, content generation issues and the challenges of change within social media were some of the primary themes that were either explicitly stated at the 2010 Frocomm New Media Summit, bubbled under its surface or were notable not for their articulation, but by their surprising absence…

This is the second part of a two-part series on social media’s impact on the practice of PR and the profession itself. This post talks about how, in the 21st century, PR should be leveraging its logical leadership of social media for all its worth and use it as an opportunity to position itself more favourably as a management discipline that delivers business-relevant results.

Whilst I don’t pretend to have any great insights on this matter, I was recently interviewed by British uni student Hayley McDonald (@HAYCMAC) on how social media is impacting on the practice of PR and how it is changing the way PR pros work, with the critical upshot being that making the right strategic decision, on a variety of levels, is more important (and, yes, more challenging) than ever.

In the rush to become social media experts, and to grab the largest slice of its revenue, responsibility and thought leadership pie, public relations pros are at risk of missing the main digital game: that of providing meaningful, resonant and useful content for corporate websites that is search engine optimised and customised to the needs of organisational stakeholders.

Working in a PR agency often grabs the headlines, but there are far more public relations positions working in the in-house environment, conceivably a far more satisfying milieu in which to work – read the views of a very experienced in-house PR leader, who shares his views on what it takes to carve out a successful career in public relations.

A joint-managing director of leading Australia’s technology and business PR consultancy shares his views on what it takes to carve out a successful career in public relations: experience and literacy in social media, passion and an ability to take it on the chin – they all help build the ‘personal brand’.

The defining theme of best practice public relations is that organisations which proactively create mutually meaningful and mutually beneficial relationships with their stakeholders are, “…more likely to develop relationships with their publics that make it possible to achieve organisational objectives and develop a positive reputation…”