Earlier this week Advertising Age took a look at how PR heads are shifting towards the center of marketing departments. The role shift at top levels evidence of a larger shift for communications and PR as a whole. The media meltdown, combined with the explosion of social media, has served as the great equalizer for the PR and marketing / advertising industries.
Corporations no longer able to leverage “old media” to reach mass or niche audiences with messages are moving their budgets online to new media channels. Channels that are up for grabs in the agency world. And guess what? PR agencies have the early leg up on owning these channels.
PR leads marketing in the management of all social media communications channels.
In 51% of organizations, PR lead digital communications compared to 40.5% where marketing leads
PR is responsible for blogging at 49% of all organizations. Marketing is responsible for blogging at 22% of all organizations. PR is responsible for social networking at 48% of all organizations. Marketing is responsible for social networking at 27% of all organizations.
PR is responsible for micro-blogging at 52% of all organizations. Marketing is responsible for micro-blogging at 22% of all organizations.
Capitalizing on the fact that social media is relationship-based, a top PR characteristic, and that we specialize in creating content, a big part of social media, it’s not that surprising.
However, a troubling stat caught my eye on Mashable earlier this week, given that PR and communications are leading the way with social media. An August 2009 survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education found that 84% of professionals using social media – in a variety of fields – don’t currently measure the ROI of their social media programs.
RED FLAG. No wonder the head of the PRSA is calling out the entire industry to establish measurement standards – Fast. The fallout of Madison Avenue, combined with the digital media evolution, is a huge opportunity for the communications and PR industry. One opportunity that we better get right – with measurement. If we’ve learned one thing from our peers in online advertising, it’s that today, companies pay for measurable ROI. While Google may not have been recession proof, it’s successful because it efficiently provides and measures ROI with its search marketing services. If we hope to move corporate communications where we believe it belongs – into a key component of marketing’s media planning stage, we better make numbers (more than 3)a top priority.
The Valley is still buzzing from yesterday’s news (TechCrunch broke it, before Facebook confirmed it) that Facebook acquired FriendFeed. Although financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, folks are speculating that the price tag was around $50 million.
From Robert Scoble, the #1 FriendFeed user according to FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit:
This is Facebook firing a shot at Google, not at Twitter. Twitter is mere collateral damage but Facebook knows the real money in real time is in search. FriendFeed has real time search. Google does not (although it’s bootstrapping there very fast, some of my FriendFeed items are showing up in Google within seconds now). Facebook has 300 million users. FriendFeed and Twitter do not. Google has Wave coming, along with some other things this fall and that forced a shotgun marriage between FriendFeed and Facebook.
“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”
With these additions Facebook’s quest for real-time search may have a driver. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that Akhil Wable of Facebook announced improved Facebook search functions last night on Facebook’s blog, while using the FriendFeed announcement as an example of these new functions.
FriendFeed, appears to share the same aspirations, although they’d rather talk about open, innovative communication’s platforms for the time being. Their service will remain open to its users, but their founders were very clear to note that this is for the “time being.” The engineering team will likely be working on bigger things than the FriendFeed platform.
FriendFeed’s growth has been flat over the summer, and although they have not disclosed actual users (Likely around 100,000) , their unique traffic has been stuck around 1 million for the last several months. Running into these issues with scaling may have opened the eyes of their founders to the opportunity to work with Facebook’s 250 million + users.
It’s also something the industry should look closely at when considering the future path of Twitter and its ability to scale. Even investors in Twitter have been heard saying that it may never scale close to the size of Facebook. However, they also note in passing that it could be as valuable as Facebook, in the sense of providing a valuable service to a smaller user-base (think Craigslist).
FriendFeed, appears to 
