“How the HECK do I manage that!”

That was the last line written to me in a Google chat from a former client at my old agency. He happened to find me on LinkedIn and really wanted my point of view on how to approach and manage new media/social media as part of his overall marketing/communications plan.

My answer:

“There are a lot of ways. Depends what your goals are.”

For purposes of full-disclosure, I spent more than three years doing qualitative and quantitative media analysis in addition to PR consulting. The issue of measurement in PR has increasingly become a hot issue in recent years due to the rise of social media. More and more services are emerging that allow PR professionals to measure and in turn effectively manage all kinds of data. A snippet of the kinds of measurement include: weighing an article based upon coverage (favorable, neutral, negative); messaging points mentioned in the article; the placement of the article in the publication , where it was mentioned in a broadcast, or where it appears online; and perhaps the oldest metric of all – ad value or “publicity value.”

Social media presents a greater challenge to public relations professionals. While some companies are successfully using sites such as Facebook and MySpace to enhance their brand recognition and promote their corporate cultures (check out our Flickr page!), measuring individual campaign success online means really digging into data and making sense of it.

Public relations professionals are slowly but successfully (imho) accounting for social media in their public relations plans. The industry is doing a good job of explaining why clients need to be engaged and also monitoring the online space and mobile media. So why is it so hard to measure and manage?

A lot of it has to do with the vast amounts of information out there and the fear companies have about their inability to react should something negative emerge. When I was in college, I was fortunate enough to read The Death of a Thousand Cuts: Corporate Campaigns and the Attack on the Corporation, by my strategic communications Professor, Jarol Manheim.

In the book, Manheim outlined the small systematic ways corporations are attacked in the media by an offended party in attempts to redefine or control the perception of that company. As the title suggests, it is not necessarily a BIG action that can bring down a company, but the thousands of little assaults on a corporate reputation. In the age of the Internet and social media, the thousand cuts can multiply rapidly.

Earlier this year, I attended a symposium where a PR company stated that they advised their clients against using social media because they would be unable to control the message. I was stunned and appalled to hear this coming from a fellow communications professional. There are so many ways to effectively engage and still get one’s messages out there in social media. I was shocked!

Choosing not to engage or at the very least monitor a company’s coverage online is the equivalent of standing at a podium in an auditorium and rigging the microphone so only fifty percent of those in attendance can hear what you have to say. The remaining fifty percent can’t hear you and/or they’re already busy talking about your inability to talk to them and you just don’t know it yet.

So how do you approach, manage, and measure the social media aspects of a public relations campaign? You begin by acknowledging it is important. Next, you match your overall communication objectives and goals to social media tactics. Not every campaign requires social media activities, but they should at least be considered. Then you should actively monitor, engage, update, and report on any social media activities frequently. The online and mobile worlds are not static. The landscape and the conversation are constantly evolving. Finally, measure objectively. Did you social media strategy and tactics help you achieve your overall goals? If not, what did it accomplish?

I would love to hear from fellow communicators on how you manage your social media strategy! Links to case studies and other blog entries are much appreciated.