p> http://www.stephendebruyn.com The Convergence of Marketing and PR

The emergence and rapid evolution of digital media channels is accelerating the convergence of marketing and public relations.  I call it a paradigm shift.

 While marketers have traditionally been engaged in one-way communication with prospects and customers with an eye primarily on branding and revenue generation, PR professionals were involved in more of a dialogue with stakeholders

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As the social web is gaining in size and relevance, it is becoming increasingly critical for corporations to monitor their presence online, and to extract insight from online conversations and comments. To an ever greater degree, corporate strategy and success are dependent on these insights, and corporate reputation is formed by a firm’s online presence. It is therefore no surprise that a large number of providers have come forward in recent years to fill this need for insight. As this number is getting larger by the day, I figured it would be handy to bring all of them together in a list. The vendor list below aims to be as complete as possible (although I’m sure someone can come up with more). It features services such as Google Alert, Technorati and eWatch, vendors which exclusively focus on online/social media such as Radian6 and Scout Labs, as well as the traditional media monitoring services such as BurrellesLuce which have begun to offer online media monitoring services in addition to their monitoring of traditional print and broadcast media.

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It is not uncommon for users contemplating Twitter to come to the conclusion that getting involved with yet another social media platform would be a frivolous waste of time. However, more and more professionals are finding Twitter to be a highly effective tool for a large number of business activities, including market research, business development, lead generation, customer support and recruiting. The key is in the right approach to the platform. Despite lingering questions, corporate use of Twitter is growing dramatically. The platform is also touching more and more corporate departments, expanding from marketing and PR into customer service and HR – essentially reaching every corporate activity. Case in point: Radian6, a social media monitoring firm, recently announced its platform now supports the integration with CRM and web analytics systems, which also indicates that progress is being made in resolving one of the key questions which has been associated with social media activities from the beginning; the one about ROI.

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Remember the days when the corporate C-suite could comfortably live with the illusion that they were able to control corporate messaging; press releases were carefully crafted by the PR team, reviewed and revised multiple times by senior executives until the message was considered ready for prime-time. Once the release was distributed, the PR team was then tasked with ‘obtaining ink’, capitalizing on their carefully –or not so carefully– nurtured relationships with the media. This era of controlled external communication is largely gone. Today any employee representing any organization can publish, with often positive but also potentially devastating consequences...the recent Domino’s Pizza debacle comes to mind, and there are plenty of other examples. Granted, not everyone is following these stories online, but they increasingly tend to spill over into the mainstream media. And let’s face it, today a trendsetter with a captivating message in a specific industry category can have many more followers on Twitter or friends on Facebook than a leading trade publication has in subscribers. We are witnessing a paradigm shift in communications, but are senior management teams in corporate America getting the message? I have my doubts about that. Yes, a few CEOs understand the impact social media will increasingly have on their organizations’ reputation and are taking a pro-active stance, but the majority continues to sit on the fence, holding off until ROI will become clearer.

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