If it seems obvious, it bears repeating: our jobs as PR professionals is to satisfy the client. By this I certainly don’t mean that when the client wants a news release we say “What kind of distribution would you like on that?”, as often the wrong tools are employed in certain situations because PR professionals are unwilling to speak up against such practices. If one of our responsibilities is to make sure the client is getting value for our work, then it’s certainly worth talking to them about using the right tools for the job. But, I digress…

The most important part of PR is pleasing the client. I know it sounds extremely self-serving, but the best relationships in this business are built on great work. At my firm, our people strive to add value in every place possible, from writing to billing. [Aside: something I never thought about in my entire PR career up until recently became apparent not so long ago. Someone who works in our firm sends out the most amazing invoices to clients. All he/she does is take every spec of time logged in our time-tracking system, dumps it into the invoice, and sends it off to the client. There's no messing around, no preparation - just straight information, direct from our time sheets. What might the client think of this? I wouldn't know personally, but if I'm on the other end of that invoice, I know exactly what I'm being billed for. If there's something wrong, it's right there in front of me on the invoice. It's no one-line invoice for "Services Rendered: $10,000", not even close. This is but one example of a way in which the client is pleased as punch about our PR.]

I’ve found that when it comes to serving clients, doing exactly what your expected to do is rarely enough. Sometimes that’s a good thing because it can force you to consider and reconsider what you’re doing in the first place. If you find yourself repeating the same program for clients year after year, with the same budget, maybe you need to step back and evaluate the effectiveness of that campaign and reconsider. Perhaps there’s a better way after a few years of the same-old, same-old. If you’ve been doing the same outreach campaign to media the past, say, 3 years, maybe you’ll want to go over your media list and think about adding a few new people to it, regardless of what your client’s field is. Only 3 years ago, blogger outreach was nearly unheard of. Today, it’s an important part of spreading the word to targeted publics. The lesson here is that even though the client may not be asking you to do something new for them, as a PR professional it’s our responsibility to approach the client and not the other way around.

So think about your clients. Are they happy with the results you’re bringing them? Don’t be afraid to ask them. Do you really think they’ll rebuff you if you request to sit down and take a look at the big picture with them? Do you think they’ll say, “We’re happy with the way everything is going, we’re not the least bit interested in anything new or innovative,” or do you think they’ll be glad that you’re keeping their interests in mind? I thought so.

Chris Clarke works at Thornley Fallis, a PR firm in Toronto, Canada. He also blogs at Student PR about public relations and social media.

Public relations practitioners are focused on getting things done. “Let’s put out a news release!” or “Let’s start a blog!” are the quick-fix answers to questions like “How are we going to communicate this message to our publics?” when the real need is for careful planning before these questions should even come up.

The problem with being so proactive is the lack of a clear strategy. If the client should happen to ask “Why did you recommend a blog instead of a press release?” or more likely, “We want to do a press release instead,” there needs to be reason why one of these tools would work better than another. Jumping directly to tactics without a well-developed and thought-out strategy is like jumping in your car and expecting you’ll find your destination without knowing the way. You need to plan ahead and map out your route, and even more importantly, you need to know where you want to end up – setting measurable goals and objectives are the oft-overlooked parts of a program.

Granted, that’s not to say that the quick-fix doesn’t work at all. You can throw stuff at a wall and hope it sticks – you just shouldn’t have to hope.

What really needs to be developed are well thought out strategies before executing tactics. Here are a few questions to ask before going full-steam ahead with tactics:

1. Who’s interested?

A lot of the information coming out of public relations isn’t anything of value beyond a small handful of people. Finding out who’s interested is important because PR practitioners will only then learn how to best reach our client’s audiences.

2. How does our audience like to receive their information?

Is your audience reading blogs? Are they getting their information online instead of from the daily newspaper? Are they traditional radio listeners or iPod people? A little information goes a long way. Obviously, creating an RSS feed for an audience who are not tech-savvy is the wrong course of action. Perhaps creating an RSS feed for a journalist who is bombarded with emails is a good idea. It’s

3. How can we best reach those interested?

It’s important to know or find out how people like to receive information because the wrong method of delivery can either turn people off or not reach them at all. A good example that is radio. A lot of people ten years ago were either listening to the radio or CDs. Today, people have MP3 players, audio books, internet radio, and Satellite radio to choose from when they want to listen to something. The FM and AM dials aren’t going away, but there are fewer people listening to them and those who are listening to them might not be your intended audience. Trying to reach a young audience on the radio probably isn’t going to happen.

4. Can we reach our audience through X channel?

This can be tricky. Knowing who your audiences are and how they best receive their information is important. But if you can’t use that channel to communicate with them, you’ll have to find another way of reaching them. For instance, if your audience are known to be readers of a national daily newspaper, and you have nothing of worth to the journalists at said newspaper, you’re not going to be able to reach your audience that way, unless you can afford to buy ad space – and that’s not at all what PR is about. While a press release might be the most advisable tool, if it’s going to be completely ineffective, then there’s no reason to use it.

Those are only the basics. I don’t doubt that there are numerous other questions one might be inclined to ask or ponder before rolling out a campaign. Many more would be situation-dependent as well.

Hopefully, this will make the difference between splitting your head and getting you all wet.

Chris Clarke works at Thornley Fallis, a PR firm in Toronto, Canada. He also blogs at Student PR about public relations and social media.

Fifteen years ago, a conversation about how almost anyone can become a member of the media would not have been conceivable. Similarly, fifteen years ago there was a lot less material PR professionals had to keep up with on a daily basis. My point: there are a lot more ways for PR to get their message across these days, but there is also much more that PR professionals need to keep their eyes on. Constantly.

The action item from our lunch and learn session was to go out and find the people within the world of citizen journalism that might be talking about our clients and their industries. Ideally, we should all be able to take time out of our days to find out who’s writing about which client and where they’re writing about them, read that person’s material regularly and religiously, then get to know that person by commenting and/or emailing them and building a relationship with them, and once that’s happened, gently pass something valuable their way in hopes that they’ll be more receptive to it, sort of a soft pitch, than if we were to pitch them without previously having built that relationship.

Now, if that doesn’t sound time consuming to you, I don’t know what does! Sure, reading one writer regularly isn’t hard, and reading one single publication regularly isn’t a major demand either. But if your client operates in the tech sector, can you realistically read even a percentage of every single person’s work? How about a percentage of everyone writing within that space? Could you read everything from a single day in the tech world in the course of a month – including newspapers, blogs, consumer and trade magazines, etc. Doesn’t that sound a little bit difficult? Wouldn’t it be hard to actually do your job if it were necessary for you to read everything first?

The tech industry is but one example. I don’t doubt that there are smaller circles of journalists in other industries, but my point is that it’s not easy to read everything and keep up a relationship with everybody. I would have to assume that picking and choosing your journalists to build relationships with is the only way to possibly get anything done besides relationship building. Plus, to think one would be able to read and befriend everyone who operates as a journalist within a certain industry is ridiculous. Every company has some competition, and that competition also has PR vying for the attention of a particular journalist, too. We can’t all be the NY Times’ business editors’ best friend.

So how does a PR professional stay on top of everything printed about their client and the competition in this day and age? We’ve established that we can’t read everything, so I think it’s fair to say that reading those who are influential and whose writings would be the most beneficial for one’s client is a good starting point. There’s no sense in developing relationships with unknown bloggers with few readers when the client is starving for mainstream media coverage at a national daily. Keeping a variety of sources is also a good idea. Instead of reading and developing relationships with only newspaper journalists, read a few blogs and magazines and find out who’s influential and trusted within them. I think it’s better to have one of everything than to have a lot of one thing. Finally, trust your instinct and read what you enjoy. There’s nothing worse than having to drag your eyes over text that is of no interest to you or is poorly written. If you don’t find the journalist interesting, then others likely feel the same way. Move on to something you enjoy more – you’re committing to reading someone regularly, so you might as well enjoy it!

Chris Clarke works at Thornley Fallis, a PR firm in Toronto, Canada. He also blogs at Student PR about public relations and social media.

“Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages, which are universally undesired.”

Anyone who uses email understands spam. It’s something unsolicited and almost always unwanted. If you’re lucky, you don’t get a lot of it. It’s rarely useful/tasty due to the fact that it’s mass produced and, by and large, artificial. At times, this is exactly how one could describe an unsolicited press release sent from a PR practitioner to a journalist: information that is electronic, unsolicited, useless, mass produced and artificial.

Spending some time chatting with a PR professional the other night, I was reminded of how our business can be perceived by outside observers. Working in PR affords me only the rarest of opportunities to speak with people outside the industry, so I found the exchange to be pretty amusing. The person I was speaking to was putting together media kits (or an information package of some sort) with her husband, with the intention of sending them to certain media persons. Her husband was probably more than unhappy to help and probed the purpose of the exercise. “So the journalists you’re sending these to all asked for this, right?” he said, to which she obviously replied, “No.” His response was straightforward and oh-so-telling: “So you’re a spammer! Your job is spamming the media?” She did not take that accusation well at all. A fairly good debate ensued between the two of them, according to her, and they simply ended up agreeing to disagree. Nonetheless, he made a good case: journalists didn’t ask for this information, so it must therefore be deemed spam, or at the very least, spam-esque.

The only defense I can come up with for PR is that we know our business. If our client has information about a new product in the pharmaceutical business, we know better than to send it to the entertainment editor, food columnist, and sports reporter. If there’s something to be said, we know who within the media might want to hear it.

Granted, PR is not bursting with what the media would consider news all day everyday. Sometimes we have news; sometimes we don’t. It depends on who might be interested in what we have. The national newspaper might be interested in a story about golf, while a small trade magazine might be interested in a story about the latest Acme widget. That’s half the battle: finding your audience within the media.

Also, our job is to help determine if the client has news or not because it’s far less effective trying to get a hit in the national newspaper if we know it’s of no interest to them. If a client tells us to send their latest press release to every business editor in the country, it’s our responsibility to evaluate whether or not we’re putting our reputation on the line (assuming it’s a good reputation) by sending this to the media for consideration as news. The more press releases we send the media that are of no value to them, the worse our industry looks from an outsider’s perspective and from the media’s perspective.

Even when PR professionals use their best judgment when pitching the media, at times they can be almost completely wrong. In my short career, there have been times when I expected something to work and it’s fallen flat. I’m sure there have also been times when I expected the worst and the result was quite positive, but I can’t actually remember any such occasion. The lesson is that PR is an art, not a science, according to former journalist Mark Evans.

A few ways to avoid being spam when emailing a press release include addressing the journalist by name, referencing recent articles, actually knowing if a release may or may not be of interest to them, being direct in your approach, and not making it easy for them to do their job should you have something for them that is of interest. There are many more ways to be successful, and there are a number of ways to learn from those who have been unsuccessful. To read up on the former, visit the Good Pitch Blog. For the latter, check out the Bad Pitch Blog.

Those of us working in public relations understand the challenges associated with trying to get our clients’ message out to their desired audience. Sometimes are easier than others, depending on the client and the story, but generally the mass media aren’t falling all over themselves to write about our client’s latest widget or sprocket.

For the time being, a terrific alternative to pitching our stories to the mainstream media is the blogosphere. In it, there are millions of people writing about the most obscure and specific topics known and unknown. Chances are pretty good that some of the people who make up the audience your client is trying to reach are reading the blogs associated with your client’s work. If your client sells ice cream, chances are that they would be interested in reaching the ice cream aficionados reading the ice cream blogs of the world. They’re the people who are engaged in the subject matter. They’re the people who tell ten friends. They’re so attached to the subject matter that it helps them create their own identities. Clients tend to like those people because they’re like walking ads.

So you have your influencers on the left, and you have your mainstream media on the right. It’s impossible to determine for certain, but a question we need to be asking ourselves when creating a campaign is which is more important right now, in today’s world: great exposure in mainstream media or great exposure within the blogosphere? Two different audiences, yes, but which do you think PR people today would rather have, and which would you take if the client left the choice up to you?

At this stage of the social media game, I’m not even going to blink before I answer: give me the big news media hits over the blogosphere today, tomorrow, and the day after that. Each have shortcomings, but the shortcomings of the blogosphere today far exceed those of mainstream media today. No matter how many times Dan Rather screws up, I’m betting on his reporting every time over the blogosphere. The news organizations of the world have facts, data, evidence, copy, budgets, salaries, experts, and most importantly, trust. What does the blogosphere have? Opinions, virtual information, link bait, buddy lists, spam, and the freedom to grab stories from mainstream media and make it their own.

Are bloggers faster than journalists at getting stories out? Absolutely. Do journalists make mistakes sometimes? They sure do. Does everyone trust the mainstream media? Of course not. But, for the most part, journalists are the ones reporting (and thus, making) the news, getting it right the first time, and holding the majority of people’s trust for it. That isn’t changing overnight. That hasn’t changed in ages.

Don’t get me wrong – we still want to reach the influencers, trend setters, and overall “cool” people. But are we sure we know where to find them? Is it fair to say that I’ll find the influential ice cream lovers reading ice cream blogs? I think that based on where social media is at right now, we’re jumping to conclusions. We might find it fair to say that there are a few places that everyone in a certain sector or industry are aware of, but it’s wildly irresponsible to say that everyone interested in any given topic are reading about any given topic in that topic’s corner of the blogosphere.

Taking my skeptic cap off and putting on my full-on skeptic spacesuit, are we really sure that this is all going to work out? Are we really going to change the way we put our clients’ “news” in the hands of journalists thanks to social media? Will we be changing the way we pitch stories? Are we going to kill the press release altogether, or maybe just tweak it a little? Where is all this hoopla headed? Certainly, there are more questions than answers at this point, but I think the excitement surrounding social media might be getting wildly out of control.

People make predictions all the time about these social media. Think back – “You” were named the person of the year by Time Magazine, which is all fine and good, but what exactly did you do to earn such a distinction? Give yourself a pat on the back if you uploaded a photo online, and a bonus point if you tagged it. Woo. Hoo.

What’s 2007 the “Year of…”? Is it the year that PR finally comes through selling social media to clients? A lot of us hope so because if it isn’t, 2007 might be the year we hoped would come but never did, or in other terms, “2007: The Year PR Looked Foolish”. Conferences, meetups, geek dinners, email groups – all for what exactly? Networking purposes? I don’t know exactly what the dotcom bubble felt like as it approached it’s peak, but PR people have been over excited for almost a year about social media and it hasn’t really proven itself yet.

I feel like we’re waiting for a train (made of clues?) that we’re not sure is even coming. A crowd has formed, people are excited as to where the magical train might take us, and the anxiety is feverish. And we wait. And wait. And the platform is getting crowded. And we’re hungry for having waited so long – we’re hoping there’s a snack car on this train, of course. And we wait.

Does anyone know if the gravy train is coming? If you really think it’s coming, would you say it’s running late?

Chris Clarke works at Thornley Fallis, a PR firm in Toronto, Canada. He also blogs at Student PR about public relations and social media.

As a PR practitioner, I want stay on top of the latest everything. From Britney’s breakdown to business buyouts, it’s important to be trivial. A few years ago, before PR was even a realistic career move, I got into social networking. At first things were lonely. Really lonely. As others can understand, it’s only fun to be in early on something when other people discover that something and it becomes popular. That most certainly applies to the only two social networking sites that matter, Facebook and MySpace.

The funny thing about them is that for me, MySpace is still lonely, whereas I have no shortage of friends on Facebook. Doesn’t that sound strange for a network that got out of the gate far ahead and was talked about ad nauseum in the media for months on end? I think it’s bizarre, but there’s an easy explanation for it all: Facebook is for extending existing friendships online. It’s for staying in touch with old friends in a way that IM or email simply fail. MySpace is for, in my opinion and experience, everything else.

It seems obvious now that I spend a few minutes thinking about it. MySpace is good at promoting music, celebrities, movies, comedy, arts of all kinds, and generally showcasing people, places, and things. MySpace is a showcase. It’s also, more or less, a lightweight content management system, like blogging software. It’s like the new Geocities: ad-supported web space for all. It might be meant for connecting friends and being social, but Facebook does that far, far better.

Facebook functions far better as a social network than MySpace. It doesn’t set out to try to be everything to everyone like MySpace. At first, it was a students-only social network, free of commercial interests and completely free of advertising. Since that time, the only thing that has noticeably changed is that the network is open to all. Nobody on Facebook is bugging me with personal messages or random wall postings about something they’re trying to sell. At least not yet. Right now, it’s a utopia of social networking.

The similarities between the two are obvious. The difference is that Facebook connects people. The groups are basically channels that people affiliate themselves with. I associate myself with my grade school’s channel, my high school’s channel, my University’s channel, my college’s channel, and my city’s channel. I can easily connect with people in my channels through the intelligent use of hyperlinks Facebook uses (and MySpace doesn’t). I’m not sure how to describe it, but Facebook is categorizing their users’ information much better than MySpace. The users, in both cases, create the information/content/groups/channels/whatever, but the way things are organized just works far better on Facebook.

After all that, I still think I need to explain why MySpace is for marketers and Facebook is for PR people. First, I don’t mean it literally. I don’t mean to say that MySpace is where marketers should inhabit and Facebook should be the place to find PR people. In terms of philosophy, MySpace is for marketers and Facebook is for PR practitioners. It seems obvious that for marketers trying to bring products and services to consumers, MySpace is the ticket. Relationships on MySpace aren’t solid, as most people’s friends are celebs, athletes, musicians, and the like. People spending time on MySpace are there to be entertained, advertised to, and promoted to. Thirty-second spot’d. That’s what Facebook is about: spectacle in short burst. I know I’m selling the world of marketing short saying this. I’m certainly speaking in generalities, and for that I apologize. But for the sake of my argument, just go with it, marketers.

PR people, in a perfect world, are real people first and foremost, trying to reach out to other people on a more individual level. We’re more interested in building relationships than moving units. We don’t care about the spectacle of promotions or celebrities or messages requesting friendship from someone with over one million “friends”. We’re trying to persuade gently. We’re not in your face at all. Most PR people will gently stroke your ego (some while reaching into your pockets in search of loose change, but that’s another topic of discussion altogether) instead of trying to sell you on the latest craze or hottest new act. That’s what Facebook is about: relationships.

Now that you’ve come through the other side of this post, I bet you’ve figured out which social network brought me and my two long-lost friends together, haven’t you?

Chris Clarke works at Thornley Fallis, a PR firm in Toronto, Canada. He also blogs at Student PR about public relations and social media.

PR practitioners come in all shapes and sizes: some are great, some aren’t, and some are downright bad. Since this is the Blog Herald, I want to focus my attention online. When we look at how public relations is being done online, we need only look at how it’s being used in the social media space. More communications efforts are targeting online media outlets and bloggers, which means PR people like myself are going to be asked to deliver on blogger relations campaigns. The term “blogger relations” is just a term cooked up to describe PR for bloggers. It’s not traditional PR because bloggers aren’t the mass media. It’s difficult to describe what “blogger relations” actually are because it hasn’t been a glowingly successful part of PR practitioners jobs yet.

Edelman are the PR firm at the forefront of online PR and “blogger relations”. When Business 2.0 released their 101 Dumbest Moments in Business 2006, Edelman found themselves peppered throughout the list (in all fairness, they do represent Wal-Mart, which is no easy task). From “Wal-Mart Across America” to the Vista/Laptop dust up, Edelman have been involved in virtually all of the high-profile blogger-relations efforts.

As I’ve heardMark Evans say, Edelman are on the bleeding edge of this stuff, so they’re bound to make mistakes. Their mistakes are the biggest and, depending on your perspective, the best or the worst mistakes they could possibly be making. The fact that Edelman are learning on the fly is great for Edelman – they’re going to benefit in the long run, and they will lead the rest of the industry into a new era of communications. The short-term result is that Edelman end up hurting the industry’s image because a firm like Edelman are extremely high profile and are bound to make news when things turn sour or secrets are uncovered.

On a smaller scale in the online space, PR practitioners are making some big mistakes.

Bloggers are a tricky bunch. As a PR practitioner, it’s great to be a blogger because I know what I do and don’t want to find in my email inbox. I don’t get pitched a lot, but when I do, I’m ultra critical. As my colleague Michael O’Connor Clarke has said, the majority of bloggers are less interested in the content of a pitch than they are fascinated by the fact that they have been pitched. And bloggers are much smarter than the bad PR practitioners give them credit for. They will know if you’re reading their blog or if you’re wildly throwing stuff at a wall hoping it’s going to stick.

An example of bad, bad blogger relations that should be easy to relate to is a personal one. I’m being a bit harsh, but just yesterday I had someone from a place called Clutch Media post a comment to my basketball blog. At the time, this post was the most recent one on my page. Here’s the comment I received on a post I wrote linking to someone else’s hilarious post about Yao Ming and The Office:

Hey Chris, this may be of great interest to you…Remember Air Jordan 20 years ago… He’s Vintage Already! Word on the street is that Mitchell & Ness Nostalgia Co. and Nike have teamed up to recreate the jersey MJ wore in the 1987 Slam Dunk competition, commemorating the 20th anniversary of his first slam dunk title when he took off from the foul line and bested Dominique Wilkins. The authentic vintage jersey is a ’87 Chicago Bulls road red with MJ’s #23 in black font. Apparently the jersey will be manufactured to the exact specification of the original and will include special labeling to reflect the order in which it was produced….only be 500 of these bad boys will be made.

According to CNBC sports business reporter Darren Rovell’s blog… “they come encased in a white handmade wooden collector’s box with faux lizard skin interior. The jersey will be unveiled next week in Las Vegas — the site of the NBA All-Star Game — and will be sold in 23 selected outlets, including the NBA Store in New York City and various Niketown outlets.”

Wow, this is also the first time a non-Nike product will be feature in Niketown outlets.

My criticisms:

* The comment has nothing to do with the content of my post. Clearly, this is someone who does not read my blog.
* The comment isn’t even a “comment” per se – it’s a chunk of a press release pasted into my comments section.
* The commenter, InsideScoop23, did not post a link under the URL portion of the comments section.
* The commenter, InsideScoop23, chose to not use his real name, instead choosing InsideScoop23.
* There is no action item, no “Chris, I would like you to do this,” or “Chris, this is so interesting I think you should write about it”.
* InsideScoop23 did not disclose that he is from Clutch Media, who are working on the promotion he talks about ad nauseum.
* There is nothing of interest to me in the “comment”. It’s not like he said “Would you be interested in receiving one of these products?” which would have, at the very least, helped.

In short, this guy spammed me. He didn’t read what I had to say. He disrespected me on my own blog. As a blogger, I take that very personally. Does InsideScoop23 think I’m going to turn around and write a post about this? Assuming he did, why didn’t he just come out and ask me to write a post on it?

I understand that not every PR practitioner is going to understand what blogger relations are, at least not now. There will come a time when this is just as important as media relations. I really believe that because in such a short time, blogging has proven itself to be extremely influential. Every story “breaks” online first because television and print just can’t keep up.

As an industry, we need to be doing more than what InsideScoop23 did. Clearly, some of us aren’t doing our jobs right. We’re all going to make mistakes, but at what point will we be able to learn from them and shed our old, ignorant ways? Personally, I find it more than just ignorant – I find it disrespectful.

I hate to lump anyone in with InsideScoop23, but we’re only as strong as our weakest link, and this person’s blogger relations are extremely weak. We’re better than this. Let’s prove it.

Chris Clarke works at Thornley Fallis, a PR firm in Toronto, Canada. He also blogs at Student PR about public relations and social media.

If you don’t know what RSS is yet, there’s still hope. Go read all about it on Wikipedia and come back. Don’t worry, I’ll wait…RSS (or feeds, as some prefer to call it) is like signing up for free delivery of content. All you need is a reader (TechCrunch did a great review of them here) and you’re all set.

Media monitoring is an important part of public relations. It allows us PR practitioners to know what’s being said about our clients in places we might not be looking ourselves. It also keeps us from having to purchase subscriptions to every single newspaper in the world and watch every single second of television in case our clients’ name comes up. Some budgets allow for extensive monitoring, done through third-parties, like Bowdens here in Canada. Most budgets aren’t big enough for Bowdens or the like, so instead we do the monitoring ourselves. Services like InfoMart are terrific for monitoring mainstream print media, but they’re only just getting into online media monitoring. Fortunately, there are many simple ways to monitor the online space.

I use my reader (Bloglines) every day. Through it, I’m keeping an eye on some of the conversations happening online for some of our clients. It’s easy, too. For instance, I keep an eye on the blogosphere for the Ontario Science Centre. What I did was set up some searches on using certain key words, like “Ontario Science Centre”. When setting up feeds for search terms, it’s important to use the quotes because search engines return more relevant results when searching for names or titles. Here’s an example: a search for ontario science centre without quotes is interpreted by the search engine as a search for the words “ontario”, “science” and/or “centre” anywhere in a document or web page. This will return many results perhaps not associated with the Ontario Science Centre. A search for “Ontario Science Centre” will return results for exactly what appears within the quotes, providing fewer but more relevant results.

Subscribing to the feed of a search, be it a Technorati search, Google News search, or a Topix search, is fairly simple. Input your search term, hit the search button, and find the RSS icon associated with your search result. It’s usually easy to find – Technorati puts theirs at the top of the page next to the word “Subscribe”, Google News puts theirs on the left-hand side of the page on the sidebar without using the RSS symbol, instead choosing to offer both RSS and Atom feeds, while Topix puts theirs at the bottom of the page of search results. Once you find the RSS feed for the search term, subscribe to it using your preferred reader and voila! Every new search result for that term will appear in your reader, saving you the time and effort of searching these engines every so often manually. If you want to try something a bit more broad-reaching to monitor your searches, check out MonitorThis. I don’t use it because it can’t interpret the quotations, but it’s still really neat.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Go read my original post for more. Better yet, if you have a social media tip for PR practitioners, drop a comment.

Next time out, I’ll talk about more social media tools for PR practitioners.

Public relations is a business in a state of change. When the Internet emerged as a force roughly ten years ago, I suspect that PR practitioners were wondering what the future would hold for them. Since that time, the ‘net has boomed, busted, and recently re-emerged, yet PR practitioners as a whole aren’t ready for the new media that we call “social media”.

How come? For starters, most PR practitioners don’t have time to learn new things. This is probably true of every industry: you’re so busy trying to catch up on yesterday’s work that you can’t even begin to think about what tomorrow will bring. It’s no different for PR, as we’re talking about an industry that hasn’t changed a whole lot historically.

Another reason PR professionals aren’t catching on with social media: nobody is teaching them! Personally, this is my biggest issue. Working in my office, everyone is expected to “get it” but nobody takes the time to teach anyone what “it” is. No matter how much everyone else talks about, unless you sit down with some people and show them exactly what this Technorati thing is, or how to sign up for a del.icio.us or Bloglines account, they will never even begin to understand what everyone is talking about.

Another group who aren’t jumping on the social media bandwagon in PR are the skeptics. I appreciate the skeptics because without them this would be one big love-in. I find there are two kinds of skeptics though: those who have a clue and those who don’t. Those who have a clue are the intelligent people who check things out, formulate an opinion based on facts and experience, and voice it. Those who don’t have a clue are the ones who use sweeping generalizations and make wild assumptions without any tangible evidence, facts, or even much thought. Clearly, one is more important than the other as we move forward as an industry.

I grew up in front of a computer screen, whereas some of those who have been in this business for decades are still learning basic computer skills. Personal computers have been around for a very long time in the workplace, which makes me wonder why most people haven’t figured out how to get their Google through the tubes. But like those who don’t understand social media, they were probably given a PC and expected to figure it out on their own.

The technological gap is huge. While I may be listening to the two premier PR-industry podcasts, For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report or Inside PR, there are thousands of other PR practitioners who aren’t listening, or aren’t aware of the podcasts themselves, or aren’t even aware of what a podcast is. There is so much to learn from these two shows and many others like them. If I were to walk into a PR firm today and announce that two leading PR professionals were going to have a chat in their boardroom about current happenings in PR, I’m sure many, if not all, would attend. Call it a podcast and you lose over 99% of the audience. Frustrating? Absolutely!

The PR community online is still growing. According to our official scorekeeper Constantin Basturea, the community almost doubled in 2006 to 630. Terrific, right? One would hope that with more PR blogs, the industry would be increasing it’s awareness of social media. More PR bloggers means more individuals telling their friends and colleagues, “Check out my blog.” Sadly, the second most-trafficked PR blogs is the self-appointed potty-mouthed ombudswoman of the PR community, Strumpette. Even when we do good, the bad stuff seems to stand out above the rest.

Here’s hoping that 2007 will be a year where PR practitioners lend each other a hand and we can all come to understand social media a little bit better.

Chris Clarke works at Thornley Fallis, a PR firm in Toronto, Canada. He also blogs at Student PR about public relations and social media.

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The field I call home (or more appropriately, work) is one that requires a few words of explanation. My friend and co-writer of this column Ed Lee has already taken to introducing you to public relations in his column entitled “PR 101“, which just became required reading if you have any interest in this column. Ed and I have known each other in RL (real life for all you Second Lifers) for about 4 months, which adds up to about 20 years online.

So who am I? I’m Chris Clarke, and I plan to spend a few minutes every second week talking about public relations and social media.

A little about me and what makes me qualified to write for the Blog Herald: For the past six months, I have been employed at Canada’s most social-media friendly PR firm, Thornley Fallis Communications. I was hired soon after my post-graduate PR studies ended, thanks to my enthusiasm online in the blogosphere and the launch of my own PR blog. The next thing I knew I was knee-deep in the fast-paced, slowly-evolving world of PR two weeks after my 23rd birthday.

And yes, I said slowly-evolving. PR has traditionally been a “press”-ing field: press releases, press kits, press releases, press conferences, and more press releases. Of course, that’s all about to change. As a reader of the Blog Herald, you are likely a classy individual on the up-and-up when it comes to this thing we like to call “social media“. Traditionally, PR practitioners have used the mass media to convey their clients’ messages. The problem with using the mass media today is that only a fraction of a percent of that mass audience is going to have even the slightest interest in your message (and the ones we really want to reach are probably not even participating in that media anyway). Thank goodness for social media.

Social media allows PR professionals to connect with our clients’ audience on an individual basis. Sure, it’s slow to catch on among more traditional clients, but those who “get it” don’t hesitate. Instead of putting a press release about an innovation in shipping (which we recently did for our client Shipping Pal) to a national daily newspaper, we can put it in the hands of those who we think would be interested in it online – blogs, podcasts, message boards, or whatever and wherever else (which we also did for Shipping Pal). We’ll encourage our client to have an online presence (Shipping Pal completely agreed and launched their own blog). If we’ve done our job properly, people will talk about it. They’ll try it. They’ll give our client feedback. If they like it, they’ll tell others. If they don’t like it, we make sure our client will hear about it and look to consider correcting what customers don’t like, which would probably make the person who suggested the change tell others about how he helped make a company better. It might even go viral and have a lot of people talking about it within hours. Now, take a moment to imagine mass media trying to do that and try to refrain from laughing.

For good measure, here are a few things we don’t do where I work yet take place at other PR firms: creating fake social networking profiles, submitting stories to user-generated news sites like digg for our clients benefit, editing Wikipedia for our clients, paying journalists to cover our clients, paying bloggers to cover our clients, astroturfing (very well explained here), and trying to game Google search, among others.

So that covers my entire knowledge of public relations. Hopefully in the next two weeks I’ll have learned something new to talk about for my next column.