Call for PROs to complete social media survey

Social media and PR seem like a natural fit - both involve finding ways to pique the interest of an audience to allow you to get across your marketing message. In many ways the tools you use are similar: carefully targeted medium, good stories, snippets of information, pictures and videos that get taken up by middlemen and broadcast to lots of other people.

Social media can also make PRs uncomfortable - new technologies, strange etiquette and customs, bitchy inner-circles, and blurring of the line between PR, advertising and direct marketing.

Daniel Atwater, a graduate student from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, US, will be conducting this study as part of his internship work with Sentient Communications. The survey (which is concise and should take only five minutes to complete) will seek to answer three main questions:

1. Do SA's PR people use social media tools?
   
2. If so, which ones? And
   
3. What do they think it will mean to their business now, and in the future?
   

Early preview

Agencies that participate in the survey will be sent an early preview of the findings, which will be published in an analysis exclusive to Bizcommunity. This will provide a benchmark for agencies that would like to know if they're lagging or leading in the industry locally, and how they stack up against international practice.

The survey can be found on online at Survey Monkey. It starts with a few questions to establish agency size and billings, before moving onto the juicy bits. Agencies can be free to be entirely frank in their demographic details, as it will remain confidential. Atwater will be processing this part of the data independently before working on analyzing the feedback on the social media parts with the help of the Sentient team.

Note that this survey is oriented towards practices of PR agencies - not advertising, not web development, not Internet marketing.

The deadline is 3 August, so complete the survey now. Remember, one lucky participant will win an iPod Nano 8GB worth about R2000.