2002 – Friendster launches; 2003 – MySpace arrives; 2004 – here comes Facebook; 2005 – begins the YouTube era; 2006 – Twitter is here… The evolution of social media started 13 years ago.

Fast forward to 2015, social is no longer just a hype, however using social media in business is still a huge challenge for marketers.

But things seem to be changing.

This year’s Altimeter Group Social Business benchmark research uncovered something very interesting: For the first time, an important shift in priorities is happening – strategists are moving from scaling consumer engagement in social to making a larger enterprise-wide shift and integrating social across the entire business.

Isn’t this something that social media experts have been preaching to clients for years? Back in 2013 when I was doing my research on social media for sustainability, one of the main issues was that both social media and sustainability were treated as standalone disciplines within businesses, whereas they should be fully integrated throughout organisations.

So, why should you care?

PR agencies (and agencies in general) are notoriously known for not having the time to invest in their own PR or marketing activities but make their living out of advising and implementing such for clients.

If you are an agency owner or work in an agency, let me ask you some questions:

1. Do you blog?
2. Do you use social media?
3. Do you have a landing page on your site?
4. How much time do you invest in doing PR for your own agency?

Now, let me take a guess about your answers:

1. Hmm when we have time.
2. Yes, but mainly just to curate or share our own stuff.
3. No, no time for that and what’s the point.
4. We just don’t have time because we are swamped with client work.

You might be thinking, “Why do I even need any of that? We have our clients, our team is busy, we can’t invest time and money into something that won’t bring us much result.”

Yep, sure. For now you do. Do you think about the future, though?

Far too often I hear “We just didn’t have time to blog this month, there’s just so much going on with our clients.” 

This is the number 1 challenge for agencies –> we don’t have time for our own PR and marketing.

But that’s just wrong.

Thanks to Scott Lipow from Six7 Marketing for this guest piece! 

Not every product you sell – or service you provide – will deliver unblemished customer satisfaction.  The truth is that some customers will find a way to be negative and complain, even if your company is not at fault. In this day and age, social media magnifies the voice of the customer to a huge extent.

Dissatisfied customers used to directly call the company on their phone line for customer service.  

But times have changed. Now, a disgruntled customer can write a negative review on Yelp or Zagat, tweet about it, or even complain on your company’s Facebook page. Since social media is very public and widely used, this transparency awards the customer with more influence over the reputation of your business. 

The customer is no longer complaining privately to your company. They are complaining publicly to everyone who happens to view that review, tweet, or Facebook comment. Your business must go above and beyond to remedy the situation and make sure that your hard-earned reputation is preserved.

Over the past eight months, I’ve had many PR students contact me to ask for help or advice with their PR dissertation.

The majority of them seem to struggle to find a good topic for their dissertations, but quite a few also find it difficult to identify good resources to start with their research.

That’s why I thought it would be useful to share with you a list of books, blogs and resource banks I recommend for your research, topic brainstorm, literature review and, in general, to help you grow your knowledge in the field.

Some of these I’ve used for my own research – first on social media for PR, then on social media for sustainability. I've had some comments that some of these books might be a little outdated since the industry moves so fast, but I have purposefully included them because current graduates probably don't know how the industry used to be a few years back and it is essential that while doing their research they understand how exactly things have changed since then. 

I hope you find the list useful!

33 Resources for Your PR Dissertation:

You see me write about sustainability lately a lot. So by now, you should know that we need to do something, companies need to step up and take action, we as individuals need to do so too.

But there’s so much to do! So many issues to fix… The majority of organisations cannot tackle each and every one of them on their own. What we and they need is focus – start with one initiative, complete it successfully, tackle that one issue to make an impact and then move onto the next one.

You can’t run into every possible direction as you won’t go anywhere – it’s that simple. So today we are going to talk about one issue that needs to be solved – the growing global water footprint.

When it comes to water consumption, everyone has a responsibility to conserve more and use less. The average American lifestyle requires about 2,000 gallons per day – twice the global average – and shows no signs of stopping. CustomMade has created a really cool infographic, outlining our water usage (domestic, industrial and agricultural) and simple ways we can lessen our water consumption.