Many small businesses have already experienced the benefits of social media and have started actively engaging with current and potential customers. A new research by VerticalResponse discovered that there's been an increase in investment and efforts in social media marketing by smaller organisations, however they still struggle with the workload and the lack of time.

VerticalResponse conducted a survey with almost 500 small-business owners to find out how much money and time they spend on social media. Here's what they found:

• 43% of small businesses spend 6 or more hours weekly on social media, 7% spend more than 21 hours a week.
• 66% of surveyed businesses are spending more time on social media this year in comparison to 2011.
• 90% of small companies are on Facebook, 70% on Twitter and 50% on LinkedIn.
• 55% of small businesses have a blog with 43% publishing a blog post at least once a week.
• 1/3 of CEOs/owners want to spend less time on social media and focus on growing their business instead.  
• 1/3 of small companies post on social networks every day; 32% post on Facebook at least once a day and 29% tweet at least once daily.
• Finding and posting content is the most time-consuming activity.
• Small businesses are spending more on social media at a faster rate than the overall marketing budget – 22% have increased their social media spending compared to a year ago.
• To publish and analyse their activities 36% of small businesses pay for such services with 57.5% spending $26 a month for it.

The four main conclusions after analysing all data were:

You may already know what a fashion fan I am, but my shoe addiction is unrivaled :P In this blog post however I am not going to talk about how many pairs of shoes I have (yes, you’d be shocked!). I will instead share with you a great PR stunt that really got my attention as the campaign gave free shoes away! And this in exchange of a simple photo! Amazing, right?!

The cute out-of-home stunt, called ‘Ring My Bell’ (reminds me of a popular song), was aimed at promoting the footwear brand Aldo in Israel, where the campaign was staged. People who passed by Rothschild Street in the middle of Tel Aviv were invited to take a photo of their shoes, upload it on Instagram including their shoe size and the tag #aldo, and then ring the bell in front of them. Briefly after that a big, rolling and prettily wrapped up present box would appear containing a brand new pair of Aldo shoes in the specified size! How adorable! I wish I was there too! Definitely wouldn’t mind a new pair of shoes!

The campaign was created by Smoyz - a boutique creative agency from Israel - and it drew a lot of attention offline and online. As the agency said, the bell rung more than 450 times and 500 photos were uploaded on Instagram, which led to nearly 800,000 interactions.

Check it out!

Now that you’ve seen the survey results of my dissertation about social media’s impact on PR, it’s time to post some of the interviews I conducted with PR professionals from the UK.

The first one to go online is my interview with Heather Yaxley – a ‘Public Relations hybrid academic-educator-consultant-practitioner’ with more than 25 years of experience in the industry. Besides working as a consultant and a part-time lecturer at Bournemouth University, Heather is also a CIPR Fellow and Accredited Practitioner as well as a honorary member and director of the Motor Industry Public Affairs Association Ltd. She is co-author with Alison Theaker of The Public Relations Strategic Toolkit – a must read for anyone in PR. You can check out Heather’s blog here http://greenbanana.wordpress.com/ and follow her on Twitter @greenbanana.

Q: How do you think the emergence of social media changed PR? Is it a positive or a negative impact and why?

Journalism and Public Relations go hand in hand. Journalists need PRs to provide them with stories, facts and figures and access to spokespeople etc., whereas PRs need journalists to feature these stories in media outlets to gain exposure. However, in today’s world, strongly dominated by social media, journalists can themselves find plenty of information online and often so they come across such on social media platforms like Twitter or LinkedIn.

According to a research by Cision social media has become an embedded part of the daily work routine of UK journalists with the majority of them using two or three social media tools regularly for professional reasons. (Below you’ll find a webinar that talks about the findings in more detail.)  

This in turn is not much of a surprise – we’ve all seen how traditional media has been struggling because of the growth of digital. But is print really dead? Is the future of journalism digital? I guess we’ll find out soon enough. Undeniably though what matters for journalists is not so much the source (print, digital or social media), but the quality and reliability of the information from that source.

Understanding the implications of social media’s impact on journalisms, as Cision calls it ‘social journalism’, can provide PROs with more effective ways of pitching journalists and building good media relations.

Here are some of the most interesting findings that PR professionals should take into account before approaching the media: 

Video is everywhere. More and more people view videos online on a daily basis. By 2015 online video watching is expected to double. No wonder YouTube is the third most visited website in the world and the second largest search engine after Google. Even video creation has become much easier with all these new gadgets and phones that allow us to make videos in a fairly good quality anywhere, anytime.

From a business perspective, video is becoming a must in marketing and PR strategies and campaigns to improve brand awareness and promote products and services.

But why video?

Simple. It’s a more compelling and interactive way of creating and sharing content that’s more engaging than plain text is. In the world of social media solely broadcasting a message is no longer effective; however storytelling is. Telling the story of your brand, your products or services through video can be way more exciting for your audience that is often not patient enough or doesn’t have the time to sit down and read through a lengthy product/service description. Demo videos for example are a great way of showcasing how your products work - something text often cannot explain well enough.

What’s more, videos can create a unique viewer experience much more realistic and life-like than text because they communicate feelings and expressions that can be easily perceived by yout audience. This is where the power of web videos for brand lies – in the ability to show their “human” side to build loyalty and trust. And by that, videos can be a great promotional campaign to boost your overall PR and marketing efforts.

Besides increasing online brand presence and consumer engagement videos can also improve SEO efforts - the chance of your business to appear in the first pages of a Google search. Most importantly, inspiring, provoking and funny videos are often shared, liked and commented by your audience, which can potentially make them go viral.