Confirming a recent survey from Arketi, a new survey commissioned by Brodeur from Marketwire found that:

• Blogs are a regular source for journalists: Over three-quarters of reporters see blogs as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles and insight into the tone of an issue
• Nearly 70% of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis:
• The majority of journalists said blogs were having a significant impact on news reporting in all areas tested – except news quality.

Note to PR people – an increasing share of reader attention is moving to social media, and that is why you need to engage in the social media space. Two recent surveys now show that if traditional media is still your main goal, then an increasingly effective way to influence traditional media is by engaging with social media. So one way or the other, you can no longer ignore social media!

Oh, one more point – creating anemic, corporate-speak-laden, CEO blogs does not count
(via Marketing Charts)

The Society for New Communications Research released preliminary results of their New Influencer Study at the SNCR Research Symposium last week.

While there is no question that social media is rapidly gaining importance, it was interesting to see how they are (or not) measuring the effects of social media initiatives. Only 51% reported to be measuring the effects, and of those, the metrics they most value are enhancement of relationships with key audiences, enhancement of reputation, customer awareness of program and comments/posts relevant to organization/products.

As was brought up in the discussion following the presentation last week – it is interesting to see how soft most of those measurements are. First off, how many companies really measure “enhancement” of relationships or reputation? And how many measure customer awareness? Sure, large consumer-facing companies probably still do some of that – but aren’t those yesterday’s measurements cooked up by the advertising industry? Those that were meant to hide the fact that advertising cannot be effectively measured?

Surely we can come up with better metrics to measure the impact of social media initiatives – what about new customer acquisition, customer loyalty and customer lifecycle value, new product innovation success ratios, return on information, and customer referral ratios & values.

Many companies are still confused about what role social media should play in their PR strategies – wondering whether social media impacts buyers or whether social media strategies can help with traditional PR efforts.

The first question relates to the information consumption that leads to buying decisions – and nobody will question that there has been a tectonic shift from traditional media to consumer generated media in this area.

The second one relates to how traditional media writers and journalists source their information. And a new survey from the Arketi Group shows that the role of social media in influencing traditional media continues to grow as well (via Shel Holtz – granted, delayed, but we never claimed to be a news service).

Some interesting tidbits from the survey:

• 84% of journalists say they would or already have used blogs as primary or secondary sources.
• 54% of journalists report to get their story ideas from blogs, 51% from RSS feeds
• 60% of journalists say they spend more than 20 hours on the Internet

So it sounds like if your company does not make a conscientious effort in trying to engage with social media channels today, you will likely find yourself the winner of an award in stealth marketing in a few years time – an award given to companies that manage to make their companies totally invisible in the marketplace.