â–¶ Social Workers: The IABC Research Foundation’s Employee Engagement Survey found that 45% of communications pros say they are connecting with their employees through Facebook, Twitter and instant messaging. Other findings:
• E-mail (83%) and intranet (75%) are reported as the most frequently used communication vehicles for engaging employees.
• Compared with last year’s results, a higher percentage of participants have established external and internal social media policies.
• A majority of respondents (60%) reported that surveys are a key method for measuring employee engagement and workplace satisfaction.
• More than two-thirds of respondents stated they conduct employee listening activities at least once a year. However, 32% stated that they rarely or do not conduct employee listening activities.
Source: IABC Research Foundation
â–¶ Tech Media Titans: The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are the top tech business publications for tech PR professionals, according a PRSourceCode study. Bloomberg Businessweek, USA Today and Forbes round out the top five in the category. “2010 Top Tech Publications” also offers a snapshot of tech PR professionals’ go-to journalists, media outreach methods, and results measurement tactics. Other findings include:
• While 97% of tech PR pros will call a print journalist, only 53% will call a blogger. Sixty-eight percent use Twitter to connect with online publications, while 52% use Twitter to connect with print publications. However, 96% of PR pros use e-mail to communicate with journalists, regardless of medium.
• Of participating tech PR pros, 86% say that online publications are extremely important to their 2010 PR efforts—compared to 75% in 2009.
• Ninety-two percent say that blogs are important to their current PR efforts. Traditional publications received votes from 56% of participants for the second year in a row, indicating that while newer forms of media continue to gain traction, traditional outlets remain important.
Source: PRSourceCode
â–¶ Media Relations Decline Forecasted: A survey of Worldcom Public Relations Group’ s independent offices finds a rise in social media outreach and research, and a decline in media relations and advertising services over the next three years. The Worldcom study polled more than 70 of its 104 offices worldwide. Specific findings include:
• The services respondents expect to decrease are: media relations (19%), advertising (17%), and direct mail and marketing (11%).
• More than half of the respondents expect social media, interactive/Web development and search engine optimization services to increase—93%, 73% and 61%, respectively.
• Yet obstacles still remain for firms to determine how to increase revenue from these digital services; particularly search engine optimization —for example, no agency reported more than 10% of revenue from SEO.
Source: Worldcom PR Group
â–¶ Speaking of SEO: A search query study by search advertising company Chitika finds that three-word queries on search engines were the most popular. With data culled from 40-million search impressions over a seven-day period, specific study findings include:
• 26% of search impressions were three-word searches; 19% of search impressions were two-word searches; 17% of search impressions were four-word searches; and 14% of search impressions were one-word searches.
• The best click-through ratios (delivering the most bang-for-the-buck) were for the five-word, six-word searches and four-word searches.
• To expand SEO strategy from one-word and two-word keywords, the study recommends increasing the words in incoming link anchor text and expanding page titles and content category titles as appropriate.
Source: Chitika