Vocus on "Optimizing your Public Relations with Social Media"

Vocus has recently released a white paper on the need for embracing social media to enhance PR strategies.


Optimizing Your Public Relations with Social Media
A Guide to Blogs, Wikis, and Social Networks for PR Professionals

Introduction— The Emergence of Social Media

In September 2006, Hitwise, an online marketing research firm, reported that the majority of traffic to online music retailer, HMV.co.uk, was referred from MySpace, a social networking Web site. This traffic surpassed searches from two of the most popular search engines, MSN UK and Yahoo! UK. While connecting users with information and content was once defined by complicated search algorithms, MySpace’s impact indicated a profound shift in the structure of the Internet was on the horizon.

Today’s communication’s environment increasingly relies on content generated and distributed by users like you and me. This is the world of social media.

Evidence of the growth of social media is everywhere:

- In 2006, the Blogosphere had grown 100 times in three years, and accounted for 50 million blogs (Technorati, 2006).
- 57% of teens who use the Internet can be considered content producers in some way or another (Fox & Lenhart, 2006).
- More than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use social networking sites (Lenhart & Madden, 2007).
- In April 2006, 35,000 new videos were being posted daily to YouTube and in February 2006, YouTube attracted 9 million visitors who viewed 176 million pages (Liedtke, 2006).
- Wikipedia consistently places in the top-10 results for Google searches on fortune-500 brand names (Fadner, 2006).


Download the complete report here. Enjoy the read.

With the increasing influence of social media, we should make a conscious effort to further integrate our brands' communications and PR strategies in the virtual world which has few boundaries.