Vocus is sponsoring a free webinar that will offer marketing and PR professionals tips on how to incorporate social media into their public relations strategy.

Entitled “Maneuvering the New Media Landscape,” the webinar will be held on Tuesday, April 24, 2007 at 3:00pm ET. To register for the webinar and download Vocus’ accompanying whitepaper, “Optimizing Your Public Relations with Social Media,” go here.

The emergence of social media has significantly altered today’s media landscape and presents public relations professionals with new opportunities to promote their organization as well as a wide array of risks.

“Maneuvering the New Media Landscape,” will feature Tim Cox of Zing Public Relations sharing his experience adding social media into the PR strategy. Cox will provide tips for working within the new media landscape using Vocus and PRWeb, including:

This free webinar is part of the monthly “Vocus PR Best Practices Webinar Series” designed to provide an educational and informational resource for organizations to gain insight into the best practices for public relations and practical techniques that can be applied to their everyday communications campaigns. Each session follows real-life customer case studies focused on the challenges and issues PR professionals face every day.

A replay of the webinar will be available free of charge following the event on the Vocus web site here, under Events.

The Vocus White Paper has some interesting information about the benefits and advantages of social media:

Advantages of Social Media
Social media is important for a number of key reasons:

Stickier than traditional media – Social media has the potential to attract and hold the attention of a vast demographic of people who have grown numb to more traditional forms of marketing and advertising. According to a study conducted by InsightExpress, a market research firm, consumer trust in advertising has decreased 41% over the past three years (Elkin, 2005). Meanwhile social media engages consumers in a way that encourages trust and profoundly increases message retention. According to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), 92% of consumers cite word of mouth as the best source of information on new product ideas.

Viral Nature – Social media has a tremendous viral capacity to reach wide audiences in just a short amount of time, a substantial opportunity and threat for communications professionals. While a well-placed outreach effort can reap tremendous rewards if executed properly, it can just as easily result in a negative viral outcome for organizations that were not properly prepared to deal with the ensuing firestorm. For example, Warner Brothers has attributed almost $100 million in revenue for March of the Penguins, to positive buzz generated from the independent podcast ‘Mommycast’ (Gillin, 2006). Whereas, Dan Rather can attribute his demise to Rathergate, when rumblings of unauthenticated documents spread throughout social media and ended up in the celebrated news mans early retirement.

Interactive – Traditionally, media organizations would make investments in research in order to assess the efficacy of their media efforts. Through social media, organizations can now communicate and get immediate feedback from users, encouraging a process of dialogue between user and organization. Enabling comments on a corporate blog, for example, has resulted
in a positive impact for many organizations that have been able to gain valuable customer feedback from the practice.

High visibility on the ‘Net – Social media has grown up on the ‘Net. As a result, social media holds a favorable position for visibility. Wikipedia is perhaps the most notable example of this phenomenon. Spannerworks, a search engine marketing specialist, recently reported that social media platform Wikipedia appears in the top 20 Google search results for 88 percent of searches for the top 100 global brands (Mayfield, 2007).

Vocus, Inc. (NASDAQ: VOCS) is a leading provider of on-demand software for public relations management. Our web-based software suite helps organizations of all sizes to fundamentally change the way they communicate with both the media and the public, optimizing their public relations and increasing their ability to measure its impact.

Our on-demand software addresses the critical functions of public relations including media relations, news distribution and news monitoring. We deliver our solutions over the Internet using a secure, scalable application and system architecture, which allows our customers to eliminate expensive up-front hardware and software costs and to quickly deploy and adopt our on-demand software. Vocus is used by over 1,700 organizations worldwide and is available in five languages. Vocus is based in Lanham, MD with offices in North America, Europe, and Asia. For more information please visit www.vocus.com or call 800.345.5572.

Are you looking for marketing services such as social media optimization, search engine marketing, pay per click program management or consulting, or search engine optimization services? Feel free to contact me.