The Council of Public Relations Firms has recently sponsored a white paper examining how social media is influencing the PR industry (PDF). The paper is authored by Paul Rand from Zocalo Group and Giovanni Rodriguez from Hubbub who use a combination of primary research (elite interviews with several media execs.) and secondary research (analysis of opinion polls from communicators) to come up with some interesting themes:

1. Information and influence coming from new sources;
2. Loss of control on the part of corporations and marketers;
3. Convergence in communications disciplines;
4. Increasing importance of trust and relationship.

Actually, there is nothing that is really ground-breaking about their findings, but there are some good anecdotes, secondary research citations, and quotes throughout the paper that make it worth downloading and reading.    Their conclusions also eloquently state and reinforce what many in the space have been saying for some years now.

A couple of interesting nuggets that jumped out at me:

1. Value of usability in social media – “Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, the international investment-banking arm of Dresdner Bank, based in Europe, has used a wiki for a decade to improve communications between its different worldwide locations and business groups. The wiki has gotten much more sophisticated and easier to use in recent years, especially after Socialtext Inc., of Palo Alto, Calif., which makes enterprise social software for collaboration, released a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor in January 2006. WYSIWYG provides an editing interface that behaves like word processors such as Word, making it easier for many more people to access and use the company wiki. Following the editor’s introduction, wiki usage climbed 30%, becoming the primary tool for intra-team communications.”
2. Importance of practicing what you preach – According to noted Silicon Valley journalist Tom Foremski, ““If you are looking for a PR company that understands something about blogging, find out who in that organization blogs, and how long have they been blogging, and what is their blog page rank and traffic. You will find that in many large PR agencies, it is their most junior staff that are the in-house bloggers, and there lies the rub. PR companies that ‘get it’ have senior staff as bloggers, and they blog regularly, and they have decent traffic, and they also use other types of new media such as wikis.”