Filipino PR Professionals should be Social Media savvy

I recently gave a short talk to PR professionals during the seminar hosted by the International PR Association and the Public Relations Society of the Philippines. The thrust of the talk was to just get them in on the idea that social media is here and it will continue to grow at an exponential rate. As PR professionals, they should be aware of this and eventually become good at it because I personally believe that social media is the responsibility of PR, not just the Marketing Department. PR is all about the flow of brand communication on the grassroots level. It’s about getting influencers and mavens to start talking so that it cascades down to the rest of the prospects. The only difference is that instead of columnists you have bloggers and you have social networks instead of print and magazines.

In the 2009 Digital Readiness Report made by iPressroom, it was revealed that PR companies in the US are leading the charge for social media and not traditional advertising agencies. This makes perfect sense because it’s the brand image management is the core essence of social media campaigns. As social media and internet marketing gets more traction locally, more and more companies will be turning to their PR agencies to come up with ideas on how to tap bloggers and how to use Facebook or Twitter. My best advice to PR professionals and companies now is that you should have your people trained properly so that when the time comes that a client asks for this, you are ready to deliver exceptional campaigns that will really have an impact on the bottom line of the business.

This seems like a good point to plug a social media/internet marketing seminar but I won’t do that, haha!

Anyway, here are pictures of the recent seminar held in SMX.

Thank you again for having me at the event! Cheers!