Social Media PR Skills Wanted by Employers, Study Shows

Social media PR skills are just as critical as mainstream media relations experience, according to a study that we released this morning with Trendstream, Korn/Ferry International, and the Public Relations Society of America.

Social Media Public Relations Skills Highlights

• Public relations firms lead marketing agencies in managing and overseeing all organizational social media communications channels.
• Marketing agencies lead public relations firms in managing and overseeing email marketing and search engine optimization.
• According to public relations firms and marketing agencies, social networking and blogging are the two most important marketing communication skills for job candidates.
• Most organizations are considering hiring social media specialists.

Schwartzman & Associates will record a podcast discussion about the results of the study.

If you have a chance to read the report, I’d be curious to know what you think of our conclusions. Are the channel’s employers are most interested in the ones that offer the greatest opportunity, or is there a potential gap in strategy, as we suggest?

And are destination websites here to stay, will they be increasingly marginalized as Steve Rubel, Jeremiah Owyang and Paul Gillin predict or is the answer different for organizational versus individual websites?

And how will organizations determine the real value of social media engagement, when their efforts to account for interactions occurring on the social web are frustrated by Facebook’s walled garden business strategy?