If you take a snapshot of what the PR industry looks like today, that may literally just last for today. Who knows, tomorrow we may be trying to think of ways to get our clients’ content on Google Glass lenses! The world we live in is constantly evolving and one of the keys to staying on top of this near-constant change is asking questions and engaging in industry discussions.

Yesterday evening, I had the chance to do just that while attending an event put on by the Publicity Club of New England entitled “PR and the Battle for Your Attention: First Earned Media, Then Owned, Now Paid?”

At the event, panelists, including Michael Bourne of Mullen, Melanie Collins of Hubspot, Nathanial Eberle of Weber Shandwick, Tom O’Keefe a.k.a. @BostonTweet, Francis Skipper of 451 Marketing, Jennifer Spencer of Perkstreet, and Peter Stringer of the Boston Celtics, discussed the value of paying for social media content and exposure – another key and ongoing trend in the PR industry. One of the more interesting dialogues that evolved around this topic was the question of maintaining authenticity.

Can you still be authentic if you pay for exposure?

As panelist Nathanial Eberle noted, PR has always been where companies have gotten their most trusted content. Usually by pitching credible media and enticing them to write an unendorsed, third-party article, PR has been able to avoid ‘paid for’ content. But, with the advent of social media and new paid methods like sponsored tweets or Facebook ads, this is becoming a more viable method, which also shows the increasing cross-over between industries like advertising, marketing and PR.

Depending on the industry and brand, paid social media content could very likely extend a company’s reach and, some argued, that it gives your content more of a chance to be seen – even if only by 10 percent of your target audience (hey, that’s 10 percent more than you had before!). But, many agreed that, if this is a route you decide to advocate for in your PR campaigns, it will surely take some educational efforts to show clients why they may need to shift their spend to paid social media content.

How can you be authentic in times of crisis?

Whether paid for or not, having an authentic social media presence was a big topic of discussion – which recently came to light after the horrific Boston Marathon bombings. To have automated tweets or paid, promotional content being sent out on a schedule, instead of intelligently designed, can be a huge PR goof rather than a boon (although even personally managed social presences can goof up – with Epicurious’ insensitive Boston tweets being the latest example). No company wants their paid social ads going up next to breaking bombing news.

All panelists seemed to agree, however, that paid content needs to become more agile since it can often be more difficult to put a halt on paid content than one might think. Although, paid content could be turned into a helpful mechanism if companies wanted to pay for ads to spread vital news. For instance, Peter Stringer mentioned that the Celtics put a halt on all social media activity and simply retweeted the Boston Police during the marathon bombing crisis – while not a case of paid social media, this is still a great example of ensuring an authentic presence.

Are certain industries better suited for paid social media opportunities?

To round out the event, there was some disagreement around this topic. While certain industries like finance or pharmaceutical may have too many regulations or strict guidelines to capitalize on the fast-paced nature of social media, others greatly benefit from promotional social content. For instance, while the Celtics refuse to pay for any social exposure, one of Francis Skipper’s clients saw huge returns on a paid Facebook ad promoting a new variety of its consumer product. Many agreed that email marketing is still king, but there’s no question this is evolving too.

At the end of the day, sometimes a friend telling you about a great article or product is worth more than the most credible journalist writing about it. It comes down to who you trust, how you consume media and who maintains authenticity. There are whole agencies being formed just for social media management and strategy. Clearly this is a huge element of PR and marketing as a whole and Skipper argued that PR pros should be thinking about paid media when they start a campaign; no longer as an afterthought.

Have you effectively integrated paid social media into your PR campaigns? How do you see this trend evolving? Interested to hear other thoughts! Just leave a comment below.

SlideShare

Consider this: SlideShare drives three times more traffic for business owners than other social media sites and 40 percent more traffic from C-level executives than LinkedIn, which is often touted as the number one B2B social media platform and could be why LinkedIn acquired the platform last year for $119 million.  So, perhaps it’s worth a second look?

In a 2012 analysis, LeadFormix found that the top two content categories on SlideShare are ‘business and management’ and ‘technology,’ so it seems that any B2B tech companies looking for a new platform to engage users and spread awareness would be in good company. And, with 60 million visitors each month and 3 billion slides viewed each month, it has the potential to reach a very widespread audience.

So how can tech companies use SlideShare?

Recycle – With all the work that goes into creating both internal and external PPTs and demos, it’s a great platform to recycle old presentations – perhaps even ones from speaking engagements at industry tradeshows – in order to widen the target audience.

Repurpose – Many other pieces of content are conducive to being turned into a slideshow, which not only forces the content to be shortened to be more concise and to the point, but also adds a more engaging, visual element. Companies can easily consolidate the main points of content such as blog posts, whitepapers and eBooks into a suitable presentation for SlideShare.

Integrate – With other social sharing features, SlideShare can seamlessly integrate into companies’ existing social media strategies. Promoting presentations through Twitter, Facebook and Google+ will drive even more traffic to SlideShare content and further education and marketing campaigns.

Beyond this, a premium SlideShare membership will win over any B2B marketing department since it boosts SEO and allows companies to capture leads by gating presentations while also providing detailed analytics on viewers.

How else have you seen B2B companies effectively use SlideShare?

On the positive side, such visual-based networks can certainly allow businesses to provide photo snapshots of what they do and what products or services they offer to entice users through a different medium. They also help companies to showcase more personal faces for their businesses, brands and staffs, giving users “behind the scenes” insights. Networks like Instagram and Pinterest can easily integrate with other social tools like Facebook and Twitter to support broader social media campaigns.

And, with such a wide user base, these tools can be used from a demographic analysis standpoint to track what people are following and what is trending, which could yield helpful information for companies as they form larger marketing strategies or look for issues and hot topics to latch onto for PR outreach. The use of keywords and hashtags can also provide SEO benefits when linked to other social media accounts and company blogs – and can effectively include your Instagram posts or Pinterest pins in relevant, ongoing conversations targeted at users’ specific interests.

However, neither Pinterest nor Instagram seem to be strong enough in the B2B realm to be a central aspect of a campaign. According to Simply Measured, 59 percent of the top 100 brands are active on Instagram, but, if you take a deeper look at the study, you’ll find that these are all consumer businesses. For instance, while B2C companies like MTV and Starbucks have well over a million followers on Instagram, Intel has just over 2,000 and HP has barely more than 200.

So, with the appropriate expectations, photo-based networks can help augment other activities and add visual components to blogs and such, but they are not yet at a point where they provide powerful, standalone tools for B2B marketing or PR initiatives. Perhaps as the platforms evolve, more B2B companies will find uses for them as a way to target specific user groups in their space or promote their brands, services and products. But for now, it seems to be proving a difficult task for more strategic efforts.

And, while many B2C companies have joined in the fun (have you seen Google’s scent-enabled search Google Nose, Twitter’s vowel-free service Twttr, or Virgin’s glass-bottomed plane?), some funny stunts have been pulled off by B2B companies too, including two of my clients ExtraHop Networks and CloudSigma.

This morning, through a formal email from a member of the senior management team, IT operational intelligence solution provider ExtraHop announced a new website design to its staff that positioned the company as a “technology pirate sailing ahead of a wild hurricane of disruption.” Click on the new homepage and come to find a complete redesign, resembling a pirate map, gracing ExtraHop’s site. While it was only live for a few hours, it surely left many questioning the strategy and competence of some mysterious design firm on the East Coast.

Also in jest, public cloud IaaS provider CloudSigma today made an announcement on its website and through RealWire that it would now be offering remote VM access via fax so customers can have their cloud server screen faxed to them every thirty seconds. Complete with a quote from its CEO, mentions of beta customers, and plans for a 2.0 version, the release may have caught a few eyes before people realized it was dated April 1, 2013!

Seen any more good April Fools’ Day pranks? Keep an eye out and watch your back!

Well, now there’s a site that helps you find just that. Launched today by the creators of Someecards and HappyPlace, The Gist gives a comedic take on the day’s top news in as few words as possible – usually just a sentence or two!

With sections for politics, business, sports, tech, entertainment, nation, world, and big picture news, The Gist seems to have all its bases covered. Both informative and funny, The Gist strikes a winning combination for wannabe news junkies with too little time to get fully caught up on all of the day’s hot topics and who have grown accustomed to the easily digestible, 140-character Twitter messages.

In a recent conversation with Dave Kornfeld, editor-in-chief of The Gist, he noted that what inspired him most to launch the site was the chance to mimic the hectic pace of the news cycle in a funny, yet highly abbreviated way that people might possibly get real information from.

Kornfeld says The Gist is targeting anyone who’s willing to spend a few minutes (or seconds) reading short takes on whatever’s going on in the news that day, and he sees his biggest competition as major news sources like CNN or The New York Times.

“We’d like to be the go-to source for people who are only skimming the first one or two sentences of a news story anyway,” he said.

With the ability to respond to news stories in real time, Kornfeld seems keen to bring both humor and knowledge to his readership – something that will surely be appreciated in today’s face-paced world. Check it out for yourselves at http://thegist.com and let us know your take on The Gist!

But, it’s not only useful for client campaign measurement, it’s also useful to track what’s going on in the PR industry. So, I typed in a few key terms that are important for PR and the results were quite interesting, though much of what you may expect:

As you can see from the screen-captured chart above, over the past nine years, there has been a steady increase in both SEO and social media while the press release has declined. It’s important to note that these trends are only showing Google search popularity – so, the frequency of which people have typed in those three terms over time.

For social media, it’s interesting that the real uptick in searches didn’t gain ground until around 2009 when you consider Twitter was born nearly three years earlier. But, for SEO, people have long since been trying to optimize the content of their webpages and the steady stream of SEO searches is still outstripping social media.

A few interesting points in time that may have contributed to these increasing trends include when Google AdWords introduced its duplicate content filter, the 2008 milestone when Facebook hit 100 million users, then in 2010 when  Twitter reached 65 million tweets a day, when Facebook reached 1 billion active users in 2012, and just recently as LinkedIn hit 200 million members… just to name a few!

In terms of the declining searches for press releases, it’s no secret that the traditional press release has fallen out of favor with many companies and journalists alike. Today, used more for SEO and record-keeping, the press release is no where near as important as the content it contains – which is easily summarized on social media sites! And, as 84 percent frequently or exclusively use social media tools for news and information – not press releases – this trend is sure to only continue as time goes on.

What do you think has impacted these trends over time? Will we continue to see growth and declines in these areas or will new trends surpass these three PR areas altogether?

The answer is simple: social media.

Implementing a new naming system, The Weather Channel has designated tomorrow’s storm as Nemo in an effort to employ social media and help people stay on top of important updates and new information. For instance, by using a hashtag with the blizzard name, people on Twitter can instantly pare down their feeds to focus solely on blizzard news. The Weather Channel meteorologist Tom Niziol notes that “hash tagging a storm based on its name will provide a one-stop shop to exchange all of the latest information on the impending high-impact weather system.”

But, with more and more social media users jumping on the bandwagon, the useful news feed is quickly becoming populated with jokes about Disney’s lost fish or other things that should be named. The growing Internet interest in the storm has also seemed to increase latency on The Weather Channel’s website, as noted by many users’ frustration.

The Weather Channel seems confident in their naming plan though and have made compelling cases for its ease of use and social appeal. Bryan Norcross of The Weather Channel is quoted on the site, saying, “The fact is, a storm with a name is easier to follow, which will mean fewer surprises and more preparation.” Similarly, Niziol noted, “the name itself will make communication and information sharing in the constantly expanding world of social media much easier.”

But, the weather community does not seem entirely on board with the plan as there’s been some dissent over the topic of naming weather systems other than hurricanes or tropical storms. The Weather Channel is a private company and the blizzard naming convention has been called a “gimmick” by those not on board with the concept.

I suspect the majority of people, especially social media users, may disagree though. Especially as it was found that 84 percent frequently or exclusively use social media tools to follow or monitor news and information – myself included! And, if the power goes out, you may still be able to use your cell phone service to check social sites like Twitter for updates.

What do you think? Is The Weather Channel’s storm naming system a social media success? Here’s hoping #Nemo won’t hit too hard tomorrow, except on the ski slopes!

What is brand journalism you may ask? This growing trend  is when brands create their own journalistic content instead of relying on traditional, third-party media sources. Used as an incredibly effective self-publishing tool, more and more companies are realizing the impact brand journalism can have on shaping their company’s public perception and message.

In a recent video interview, Stacey Acevero, social media manager at Vocus, described brand journalism, saying, “Instead of letting the media create stories about you and shaping the perception about your brand, you want to shape the perception of your brand yourself using your own media.”

Already a hot topic at shows like SXSW this past year, I believe brand journalism is getting an extra boost from two driving forces: (1) the declining traditional media market and (2) the choice of many top-tier journalists (and analysts!) to go in house as company evangelists.

Of course, these two forces go hand in hand. Between 2008 and 2010, 13,500 journalists lost their jobs. And, seeing a need (or perhaps creating a demand) for in-house, corporate writers, becoming a company evangelist was a natural fit. Remember Denise Dubie, formerly of Network World, Andrew Hay, formerly of the 451 Group, or Cindy Borovick, formerly of IDC?

But, despite the many benefits of brand journalism, does this trend pose a threat to the PR industry? With content creation becoming an increasingly important aspect of public relations, initially, one may think bringing evangelists in house would detract from one of PR’s core components. However, this is not the case. According to Juliana Allen, Vice President at March Communications, brand journalism still doesn’t allow for the third-party validation that is such a critical component of PR.

Smart companies will use the two in parallel – similar to how closely advertising and PR used to be – and divide the content creation among the two, says Allen. There’s no doubt that the need for content has increased, but there is room to share, and, by doing so, both corporate evangelists and PR pros can create more insightful and meaningful content across the board.

As content creation can often be one of the most time consuming aspects for PR teams, by working with brand journalists, not only can PR pros can get more interesting material to use for pitches and longer form content, but they can also regain the time otherwise spent on content creation, says Allen. This allows more time to really hone in on pitching and cultivating relationships with key members of the press.

What do you think? Will the rising brand journalism trend positively or negatively impact the public relations field?

No, that’s not a typo. “Zeitgeist” is derived from the German language and means “the spirit of the times.” Through the aggregation of billions of search queries, Google believes it can capture that spirit. And, after reviewing its annual Zeitgeist report, I believe they’re right.

In this year’s Zeitgeist breakdown, The Top 10 Search Trends of 2012, Google reveals what captured the world’s attention in the past year, focusing on people’s passions, interests and defining moments all around the globe as seen through our search requests. I encourage everyone to watch the video – it’s pretty moving.

Some of the trends I found most interesting centered around developments in the technology space for consumer electronics, especially when comparing last year’s top 10 consumer electronics list to this year’s. While the Kindle Fire fell from the number one spot to the 9th spot, the iPad 3 did the opposite, moving from the 10th spot to the first! Is this a sign of Apple’s continuing dominance? When you consider that Apple also claimed the third and seventh slots in the top 10 consumer electronics list for their iPad Mini and projected iPad 4, it certainly seems so.

What trends do you find most interesting? It’s also neat to swap out different countries to see how trends varied across different geographies!

With more than 200 social networking sites in existence today, it’s safe to say the social sphere is a crowded market. But, with most social network users only maintaining an average of three to five profiles, how can newcomers hope to make their mark on the industry?

Undoubtedly this was one of the questions co-founders and brothers Mike and Red Fabbri asked themselves as they started one of the newest social platforms, prollie.

As a social media analytics and user discovery platform, prollie grades its members on their social media ability and helps uncover their passions while letting them search for like-minded users on their favorite social networks outside of prollie. So, if my passion is public relations, prollie will detect that based on my social posts and interactions. Then, I can search for others who are interested in public relations and see where to follow them (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc.).

With ample potential to fuel topical conversations, make user introductions and help businesses target specific markets, is that enough to help prollie stand out from the crowd? According to Mike Fabbri, it certainly seems so.

“We’re not trying to be something we’re not,” Fabbri commented. “We aren’t trying to create another site to commit your day to or add to a to-do list. If we stay true to our users, and the ‘bread and butter’ of prollie, we think it will stand out on its own as a simple extension of your online personality when you need it.”

After recently securing a pretty sizeable round of funding, Fabbri thinks it was their passion for social networking that turned their investors into prollie believers. “We knew what we wanted in social media, and how we were going to build and deliver it. It’s about everyone else, but it was also about us… we actually wanted to use prollie!”

In the analytics space, sites like Klout would be prollie’s natural competitors. However, Fabbri notes that they are not in the game of measuring influence. prollie measures its users’ skill and passion on social media sites, not their popularity. What makes prollie special though is its search functionality. “It’s like a super customized ‘suggested user’ tool. That’s the goal, find others to friend/follow who want and deserve to be found, including yourself,” said Fabbri.

In terms of future plans, Fabbri says prollie would be open to partnering with other major networks like Facebook or Twitter, since, ultimately, they just want their users to have the best social experience possible. prollie aims to be a network-agnostic extension of these sites that helps enhance users’ friend or follower base, so that they can get more out of what makes each network unique and awesome.

What do you think; could prollie be the next big thing? Check out the intro video to see prollie in action and request an invite to its alpha program.