The CIPR’s Social Media Panel has announced an ambitious programme of activity for 2013. Working with newly elected Chair, Stephen Waddington, the Panel are pushing forward on a number of projects, including:
- Updating and expanding the CIPR’s Social Media Guidelines
- Updating the CIPR’s Wikipedia Best Practice Guideline
- Developing a guide to social media and the law for PR practitioners
- Mapping the roles and skill sets for future PR pratitioners in a digital media environment
- Not to mention the launch of Share This Too, a follow-up to last year’s Share This: The Social Media Handbook for PR Professionals
One other work stream (that I’m taking a lead role in helping scope and develop) is the creation of a directory of social media monitoring and analytics tools to support modern public relations practice. While there are a number of ‘buyers guides’ for social media monitoring tools out there, one of the most frequent enquiries from PR practitioners to the CIPR is for guidance on monitoring and analytics, understandable given it’s a crucial activity for planning, managing and evaluating campaigns, its a rapidly growing field and an increasingly specialised areas of practice.
The scope for this document is still be scoped out by the team working on the document, but is likely to cover:
- Use cases for and the role of social media monitoring in PR
- Some commercial context to help practitioners understand the monitoring/analytics technology marketplace
- Best practice case studies
As I say, the final document will be finalised shortly – but there is still time to gather input into what a successful document might look like from broader sources.And this is where you come in! To help ensure the final document is as useful and up-to-date as possible I’d love it if you had suggestions or ideas as to what information you think PR practitioners should know about social media monitoring and analytics. What should be covered? What do you want to know?
I should stress this isn’t going to be a totally comprehensive offering – it’s designed to be practical and useful without covering all angles – but the more insight we can gather from practitioners the more robust it will be. Please leave any comments below.
I’d be particularly interested if you had case studies to share? Feel free to drop me an email at simon [dot] collister [at] gmail [dot] com. Looking forward to hearing from you!