With hundreds of service providers who offer secret sauces and black-box solutions, how can a PR pro know if his results approximate reality? How does he compare reports from one vendor to the next?There is good news. Thanks to a cross-industry collaboration of PR trade bodies—social media analytics, advertising and word-of-mouth associations, and a handful of blue-chip client companies—the industry is definitely making progress.Tim Marklein of W2O Group and Katie Paine of KDPaine & Partners—who are both leading the charge—gave an update at the 4th Annual AMEC European Measurement Summit a few weeks ago. See www.smmstandards.org.The work follows the AMEC Barcelona Principles in 2010 and the AMEC Valid Metrics Framework in 2011, both of which established preliminary methods to measure social media.The next steps are to create standards in six priority areas, which are below. The first is complete, and the subsequent five are slated for updates this fall after additional cross-industry collaboration meetings.

via PR industry developing social media measurement standards | Articles | Home.

There are jokes about every profession, some more than others. Sorry, lawyers.We rounded up 10 jokes about various aspects of public relations, from writing and editing to media relations and many points in between.

via A PR pro walks into a bar … | Articles | Home.

When it comes to creating content for a company blog, “if you build it they will come” is not the right mantra. Smart social media promotion of your content is key, and it’s almost as important as creating the content itself.

That said, copying and pasting the same old thing to every social network — or worse, automating it — isn’t an effective strategy. Each platform has its own unique nuances that, when wisely taken advantage of, can increase clicks on links you share and page views for your blog. Here are tips on how to do that on each platform.

via How to Make B2B Content More Shareable.

etting around a social media site is not always easy. For some users, it’s a matter of getting used to social media. For others, the issue is keeping up with constant updates and changes to features, privacy settings, and account specifications. This, of course, is why social media cheat sheets exist.Cheat sheets are basically infographics that can give a user a simple rundown of various features and how to use them. Here’s a roundup of great cheat sheets for the most popular social networking sites.

via 12 Essential Social Media Cheat Sheets.

The Great Cash-Out got under way in May when Oracle paid $300 million for Vitrue, a cloud-based firm that mans social media communications for McDonald’s, American Express and Gillette, among others. Oracle followed that acquisition by gobbling up social media monitoring firm Collective Intellect for an undisclosed sum in early June.

Meanwhile, Salesforce.com paid $745 million for Buddy Media, a Vitrue competitor that counts Ford Motor and Hewlett-Packard among its clients. Soon after, reports circulated that Microsoft was interested in buying Yammer, a provider of a Facebook-type solution for businesses, for $1 billion or so. Just last week, the smallish Syncapse bought a smaller social media firm, Clickable. That flurry of activity came after Adobe bough Efficient Frontier, another player in the social CRM space, back in November. Don’t expect things to die down, either — the latest industry rumor is that Facebook is going to buy Wildfire Interactive.

via Why Are B2B Social Media Firms So Hot?.

Today’s American teenagers are digital natives — connected to the Internet since youth. About 75% of 13 to 17-year-olds have personal social networking accounts. Since 2008, there has been a huge spike in teenage connectivity; only 59% of teens were on social media four years ago.

Despite seeing “racist, sexist and homophobic content” online, teenagers view social media networks positively. A national survey of 1,030 13-to-17-year-old individuals, conducted by Common Sense Media, reveals teenage perceptions of their digital lives.

via Social Media-Connected Teens Seek Time Offline [STUDY].

What are some great public speaking tips one can pick up from watching Barack Obama?

via Public Speaking: What are some great public speaking tips one can pick up from watching Barack Obama? – Quora.

In March, I wrote about Gawker’s new quantity-over-quality experiment. Each day, one Gawker staffer was tasked with pageview-chasing duty, a quest to post enough cat videos, Miley Cyrus pics, and local news ephemera to keep the clicks coming en masse. That staffer’s work would free up others to work on longer, more involved pieces. Pageview duty rotated, because — who could stare too long into the Internet’s bright raw id and not go blind?

Neetzan Zimmerman, apparently. Editor A.J. Daulerio hired him two months ago to focus exclusively on viral content. Zimmerman’s title at Gawker is Editor, The Internet. He is assigned to cover the Internet.

This machine-like person has generated more than 300 bylines for Gawker since he started on April 9. These are not lengthy tomes, usually; nearly every post is just a funny photo or video, with body text barely longer than a caption. The average word count of a sampling of his recent stories is about 200.

Zimmerman sits comfortably atop Gawker’s leaderboard, garnering two to five times more pageviews than his highest-performing colleagues. Zimmerman is so prolific, his posts so magnetic, that Daulerio has now relieved all 10 full-time Gawker staffers of their pageview chores.

via What makes something go viral? The Internet according to Gawker’s Neetzan Zimmerman » Nieman Journalism Lab.

We know professional journalists on Twitter. Over the past several years, the Muck Rack team has gained many insights into some of the best practices for how PR professionals can use Twitter to maximize their interactions with journalists.

Twitter has become an efficient way for journalists to find sources and cover news in real-time. One thing hasn’t changed, though: They still hate receiving irrelevant pitches.

via – Muck Rack.

But when I ask a P.R. person to boil down a pitch to 300 characters, it often turns out that they’re actually pitching something cool: “This new app shows you, on your phone’s screen, everything you need to know about a potential romantic partner: Time since last breakup, hygiene standards, emotional stability score and more.”

via A Few Good Ideas for Products – NYTimes.com.