Week 3 ::Essential Online Public Relations and Marketing Skills::

By:  Mohamed Firdaus bin Mohamed Noor  2009462752

Essential online public relations and marketing skills is a research that was done by Eric Schwartzman, the founder of iPressroom with the collaboration of Trend Stream, Korn/Ferry International and Public Relations Society of America.

Online world has been around us for years and has already been the trend over the past years. This report by Schwartzman was done in intention of helping the public relations, corporate communications and marketing professionals to better understand and appreciate how organisations are integrating online communications into their business practices.

The research was done in six weeks and about 278 respondents were involved. The main objective was to get unbiased, quantitative information on the impact of the emerging channels such as social media on organizational communications, both in terms of what activities are being employed and what skill sets communications professionals need in today’s job market.

From the research, Schwartzman found out that new media and social media are now a core part of the web-based communications mix. The new media and social media have become the important channels of the organisation’s communication. The e - mail and social networking outranked Search engine optimization (SEO) as the activities in the web-based communication. The findings also suggest that the organisations have the intention of using the social media to get the word out, but they do not have the planning and the strategies to do so.

 

Schwartzman also said that, according to the According the “2009 Edelman Trust Barometer,” as a source of company information, a company’s own website is seen as more credible than business blogs, personal blogs, social networking sites and advertising. But, many of the organisations’ communicators failed to see this and continue to think that social networking, micro-blogging and blogging as more important than actively managing the content at their own corporate website which can create a fundamental gap in judgement with respect to online communications planning.

The research also stated that small to medium-sized enterprises are better than larger organisations when it comes to adopting Twitter (64% versus 47%) and social networking (74% adoption versus 38%) as the activities in the web based communications. But, the large organisations fight back with blog and website which stated that both are well maintained by the larger organisations compared to the small to medium - sized enterprises.

Public relations are leading the social media revolutions inside all organisations. This can be seen in the stats provided from the research that is provided below where public relations have come on top in almost every aspect;

• PR leads marketing in the management of all social media communications channels. Marketing leads PR in managing only by email marketing and SEO.

• In 51% of organisations, PR lead digital communications compared to 40.5% where marketing leads

• PR is responsible for blogging at 49% of all organisations.  Marketing is responsible for blogging at 22% of all organisations. PR is responsible for social networking at 48% of all organisations.  Marketing is responsible for social networking at 27% of all organisations.

• PR is responsible for micro-blogging at 52% of all organisations.  Marketing is responsible for micro - blogging at 22% of all organisations

The result of the research in the question ‘In my search for PR and/or marketing job candidates, knowledge of the following are or were important or very important’ showed that almost 80% of respondents agree that knowledge of social networks is either important or very important. It is almost as equal as the knowledge for the mainstream media.     

The research also showed that social media is growing as one of the important activity in the communications approach, with the majority of organisations considering hiring a specialist.

Schwartzman stated four important things in his conclusion. The first is the risk of obsolescence; he said that public relations and marketing professionals should equip themselves with social media and new media knowledge to reduce the risk of obsolescence. Next is public relations lead in social networking. It was stated in the research that public relations leads marketing in social networking, micro-blogging, blogging, podcasting, social bookmarking and even web content management.

The last two are potential gap in strategy and ROI evaluation challenges where Schwartzman said that it is good for the organisations to take social and new media seriously but there is maybe a potential gap in strategy because the channels that they use might not be the ones used by the public. The evaluation challenges are the difficulty that the organisations will face in evaluating their return on investment for these emerging channels until they learn to develop a more sophisticated approach to building and managing landing pages and web content management on their websites.


http://www.ipressroom.com/pr/corporate/document/ipr_2009_Digital_Readiness_final.pdf