Wrestling Social Media

Social media – communicating via push or pull over the Internet – has found its place in today’s world and is part of most of our everyday lives. Sharing stories and photos with friends and family on Facebook, showcasing resumes to the professional community on LinkedIn, emailing correspondence via Gmail or Yahoo, spouting opinions on Twitter and keeping up on instant news on CNN.com or sports scores on espn.com are becoming second nature and can be a lot of fun, whether searching from our iPhones or computers or soon, an iPad. Juggling these different sites is easier now with Internet Explorer's tab feature where you can have all the sites open at the same time, checking regularly for updates and new news. Never have we been so in touch, so intertwined, so expected to respond quickly to one another. When you think about it, it's kind of scary that we know so much about the frequent goings on of so many people and are developing a compulsion for instant knowledge.

But I digress...in public relations, one of our functions is to harness the information that is written from and about our company, executives and employees, online and in traditional media. This can be laborious and inaccurate if one doesn’t subscribe to an expensive monitoring service or if there isn’t some kind of a simplified system in place to keep an eye on what’s out there. I have found HubSpot a great resource for webinars on all things social media and they have a webinar coming up on keeping track of your social media presence in 10 minutes a day. For more information, you can go to http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-webinars/ to sign up for this webinar which is being held on March 10.

I know I need all the help I can find in figuring out how to keep track of all the different infusions of information today and know that my credibility lies in providing strategic counsel to companies on what is being said about them and how they can influence, interact and promote their wares. If anyone has advice on this topic, please send your comments to marcydockery@gmail.com and I will share them with my readers.

Thanks, everyone, and have a great day!

What is considered a success in a PR person's world? I pondered this as my job was recently eliminated and I was laid off from Posit Science as director of Communications. Even though in six months we garnered some great press coverage, including a wonderful column by Walt Mossberg in the Wall St. Journal; articles in Newsweek, NY Times Wheels blog and Scientific American MIND; and a two-page story in TIME that unfolded as I was leaving. Generally, I consider this a pretty decent lineup of media hits for a small startup and strong results for my resume.

Though millions of dollars are spent on run rates, research and reserves in a typical Silicon Valley startup, dollars are often not budgeted for integrated outbound marketing and instead public relations is expected to carry the weight of getting the word out about products to the public. So stardust is sprinkled and hopes rise and good old economical PR spins its golden stories and the company is a success. But unfortunately not everyone is going to have a story like Google's rags to riches based on its incredible PR good fortune. In the real world of most struggling emerging growth companies, every day needs to be a "USA Today day", meaning that type of coverage is constantly necessary to raise sales numbers to keep the company afloat. And this is not a realistic accomplishment in most PR pros' worlds.

So back to what makes a person in public relations feel successful? Is it the number of media hits, ability to get everyone on message, generate discussion on social media sites, create a buzz in its customer community? It is all of these but most of all it is a confidence in telling the truth...being true to your PR instincts and experience in counseling senior management about expectations and the role PR can play - and not play - in building brand. That honesty and respect for the profession is what allows us to look in the mirror every day and say to the reflection, "job well done!"