Education is important from within the business and externally – look at what peers are doing. Educate your staff to be useful to your business in this space as more business will be done this way.

PR, well that will have to change it's name not only how it does things.. PR is dead

As I see it there are so many fields coming together in social media that I wonder if we shouldn't consider to let go of traditional breakdowns in PR, advertisement, marketing etc. For the next years to come I'd wage on the need for a new renaissance social media man – a jack-of-all-trades – rather than verticals of focused specialists.

The reasons that many PR-agencies wave with new applications in the faces of their clients is probably that they have become redundant. You no longer need the connections with the journalists to the same extent as before and being human qualifies you to communicate with other people. All you need is to now what options and possibilities you have.

Actually, the reason I actually feel that way is that PR is communications, and conversational media seems more readily adaptible to that. Advertising? If ad people can adapt to the 2-way model (and I don;t mean just interactive chickens) then ok, make an argument. our fair cousins in Marketing? Just don't treat fellow facebookers or Tweeters like lead-gen targets or direct-mail statistics and you could be fine.

Customer service? that's a bit closer– you could argue that somewhere in it's heart, customer service is a form of PR.

that said, I agree there is still change and evolution ahead for most Pr practitioners. The industry as a whole is a big, slow-moving beast. I suspect the movement in the right direction will slowly continue (and stop well short in many circles).

Would love to hear Marketing and Ad's cases for “owning” social media.

Great blog post, David. Thanks.

Organizations like yours and work like I am involved in goes a long way to help move the ball. But I don't think we're going to see much change until the market forces agencies to change the way they do business,

I agree with you that it's not about using the next new shiny tool to shout out a client's message. But too many clients feel like they're paying a LOT per month in billings, and dammit, they oughta' be getting something in return for it. It's incumbent upon PR agencies to explain to their clients that social media is not as simple as “insert X to get Y” and that it's more about building relationships and connections. It may not translate well on a monthly billing spreadsheet, but it will certainly help in the long run.

Terrific post and thoughts. I tweeted it.