رسانه های اجتماعی برای روابط عمومی: درس از چهار مورد موثر  Social media for public relations: Lessons from four effective cases

1. Introduction Public relations scholars and practitioners alike agree that social media are changing the PR industry and increasingly playing an important role in the business planning process. Marketers and professionals find that social media have transformed businesses priorities; Brown, Sikes and Willmott (2013) report that 56% of executives say digital engagement with customers is at least a top-ten company priority. Marketers typically think that social media goals are predominantly related to brand awareness. In fact, 87% of marketers believe that the goal of social media is to increase brand awareness; while 62% find that social media increase web traffic; 61% report that social media improve a brand’s or client’s reputation, 45% use social media in order to generate leads, while 40% use social media in order to increase sales and, lastly, 38% of marketers find that social media improve customer service. From another perspective, journalists have also spoken in favor of being reached via social media; one in four journalists report that they prefer that PR professionals contact them through social media (Institute for PR, 2013). There is reason to believe that social media are becoming the preferred channel of engagement, both with the target audience and service providers. This paper investigates the practices that have enabled better interaction and engagement among companies and their target audiences. As Valentini (2014) suggests, empirical evidence of the use of social media for public relations remains anecdotal and depends on the specific case studied as well as current practices. This paper attempts to address this by providing evidence of good PR practices using social media: through our examination of prize-winning social media awarded campaigns in international and regional PR festivals and competitions, we argue thatthe integration of social media in the strategic communication mix adds to the effectiveness of a campaign and is, quite often, highly impactful. Furthermore, and to address Valentini’s critique, we conclude with a series of prescriptions for future success in social media campaigns.