I spent part of yesterday afternoon talking about social media and public relations with the next graduating class of PR Creative Communications students at Red River College. It was a good group, full of great questions about how to make practical use of social media trends in public relations and corporate communications.

Some of the themes I reviewed included:

• If you own a website, consider yourself a publisher. Publish new content continuously that is relevant, that speaks to your key audiences and that demonstrates your authority in your niche.
• Where PR pros have always needed to understand how to put together things like print specs, or ad buys. Today, they also need to know how to get blogs noticed on Technorati, Twitter, Friendfeed, etc. The web has become the core of communications programs.
• If you’re going to go down the social media road, you need to think ahead about how it will fit with your corporate culture.
• A decision to use social media also means you have to think about how to moderate user-generated content. Whether it’s text, photos, videos, mash-ups or whatever, consider how you’re going to monitor that content before you ever ask for it. (P.S. consider using our client: ICUC Moderation Services.)

Though the class I spoke to will be looking for jobs during the weakest economy in a generation, I strongly believe that they are entering a growth field. Organizations of all types will need competent communications pros to compete in the world of the 21st century. More than ever, corporate communications and public relations are vital for business, government and non-profits.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 7:53 am and is filed under ICUC Moderation, Social media and blogging, old media vs new media, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.