Social Media PR Skills Wanted by Employers, Study Shows

Social media PR skills are just as important as mainstream media relations experience, according to a study that we released this morning through iPressroom, with the help of Trendstream, Korn/Ferry International and PRSA.

Other major takeaways from the study:

• Public relations leads marketing in the management and oversight of all social media communications channels within organizations.
• Marketing leads public relations in the management and oversight of bulk email communications and search engine optimization.
• Social networking, blogging and micro-blogging skills are the three most important social media communications skills for job candidates to have, according to public relations and marketing hiring decision makers.
• Most organizations are considering hiring social media specialists.

And if you're looking to update your new media and social media communication skills, these are the remaining Social Media PR Boot Camps for the year, most of which I'm teaching on behalf of PRSA:

• Los Angeles (Aug 26 – 27)
• San Francisco (Sept. 24 – 25)
• Chicago (Oct. 22 – 23)
• New York on (Dec. 3 – 4)

We're scheduling to record a podcast discussion about the results of the study on August 13th, which should be available shortly thereafter via @ericschwartzman.

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?