2009 Digital Readiness Report

by Fiona on September 15, 2009

A wake-up call to PR people. This is the report that outlines online communications skills that employers want, therefore candidates need, in today’s PR and Marketing job market.

This report provides insights into the specific strategic and tactical digital communications skills that employers are seeking from public relations and marketing job candidates.

The research report is intended to help public relations, corporate communications and marketing professionals better understand and appreciate how organizations are integrating online communications into their business practices, and what online communication skills they need to acquire to be competitive in today’s job market.

Some of the key insights include:

• Very high levels of adoption in online communications, demonstrating that new media and social media are now a core part of the web-based communications mix. They have become integral to organizational communications.
• Social networking adoption out ranks natural search engine optimization, with 70% utilizing them compared to 66% for SEO. The report found it is counter-intuitive for organizational communicators to not rank web content management higher in importance since social networks and micro-blogging services are frequently used to distribute hyperlinks into websites.
• According to the 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer, a company’s own website is seen as more credible than business blogs, social networking sites and advertising.
• Micro-blogging has grown slightly bigger than blogging due to a lower barrier to entry. It’s easier to type short messages.
• Small to medium-sized businesses lead the way in social networking and Twitter – but not in blogging which is squarely in a large organisation’s domain. Large organisations are managing web content better than their smaller counterparts.
• When searching for prospective candidates, knowledge of social media is almost as important as traditional media relations skills.
• The highest ranked skill for small to medium businesses is social networking and the highest ranking skill for $1Bn+ is blogging, podcasting or RSS.
• Social media is growing in importance as a communications approach, with the majority of organisations considering hiring a specialist. This indicates that businesses consider social media a core discipline to be maintained by a dedicated resource.

Key conclusions of the report:

• The risk of obsolescence. PR people without new media and social media skills will not satisfy today’s hiring decision makers.
• Public relations leads in social networking, while marketing is responsible for email marketing and natural search optimization.
• Organizations are serious about social media engagement and new media communications.
• Rather than focusing on attracting or pulling visitors to their website by publishing high quality content, businesses seem more interested with pushing out messages to friends through social media, even though those messages tend to include hyperlinks back to company websites. Building and managing landing pages is extremely important to9 enable evaluation of return on investment for these emerging ch