One of the surprising findings in the 2009 Middleberg/SNCR Survey of Media in the Wired World, along with such facts as 70 percent of journalists are using social networking sites for their work, is this:

More than 90 percent of journalists agree that new media and communications tools and technologies are enhancing journalism to some extent.

Instead of seeing social media as a leviathan destroying news rooms and enfeebling the quality of news reporting, they are recognizing that “Social media is changing the profession. It has enhanced the dialog between audience and writer and expanded the scope of those who can participate in disseminating news.”

Spot on . . .

As best as I can recall, I have never used this blog to promote either my own consulting practice or that of my employer -- the public relations and public affairs consultancy Hill & Knowlton. Forgive me, then, if I make an exception this one time with the reassurance I'll return to my normal probity immediately afterwards.

Having spent 25 years or so providing counsel to organizations and companies on reputation and issues and crisis management, and seven years as head of the corporate communications practice for Hill & Knowlton Canada, effective this month I'll be focusing almost exclusively on helping build H&K's social media and digital communications business as practice leader. I will be working with a team that includes the inimitable dean (my description, not his) of social media in Canada -- David Jones -- the talented and creative Lynn Crymble, the Quebec digital communications luminary Michelle Sullivan and others in Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver.

Although I am not, shall we say, in the demographic usually touted as the natural home for social networking, I recognized five years ago -- about the time I began blogging -- that social media and social computing are a rupture in the fabric of personal, political and business communications. For five years I have been proselytizing within my firm, on this blog, in classrooms, with clients and in speeches globally that the public relations business' media relations, crisis management, government relations, product marketing and reputation enhancement and defence models of the past will over time have to be vigorously renewed if not replaced.

Rather than this belief remaining a passion, I now have the freedom, and the charge from our CEO, to help people more expert than me at H&K do something about it.

Yes, I can already hear some of the 'snark' about me positioning myself as a 'self-styled social media expert', which of course I am not.  As with any young discipline, there are people within social media consulting and writing in North America who are nasty, gossipy and narrow-minded especially when they feel others who aren't part of the clan are pushing into their territory. I'll ignore them because as Cato the Elder said "We cannot control the evil tongues of others; but a good life enables us to disregard them."

My juiced up new focus will change the content of this blog only marginally. I will continue to write about the intangibles, but now through the more apparent filter of how social media can make things more tangible and persuasive.

Wish me luck.

Reading studies about trends in digital marketing is not how I prefer to spend leisure time. But they can be a nice counter balance to the time spent trying to convince organizations that social media are not going away (unlike mainstream media).

A comScore Inc. recap of digital marketing in 2009 in the U.S. released yesterday tells us, among other revealing findings (Would you have guessed that the largest growth rate in e-commerce in 2009 was in the purchase of books and magazines?), that people in the U.S. continue to flood to Facebook and Twitter, and to a lesser extent MySpace.

According to the study:

"Facebook grew substantially across nearly every performance metric in 2009. Unique visitors, page views, and total time spent all increased by a factor of two or more. Frequency metrics such as average minutes per usage day (up 6 percent) and average usage days per visitors (up 37 percent) also saw gains. As more people use Facebook more frequently, the site has grown to account for three times as much total time spent online as it did last year."

Others with an analytic predisposition can deep dive into the charts and graphs in comScore's study. Suffice to to say from my perspective this even more important than the huge numbers tossed around which compare Facebook's 350 million or so users to the populations of various countries.

The numbers are telling us that people are coming to Facebook more often, spending more time there, and exploring the Facebook landscape more broadly.

As for Twitter, someone commented on a recent Tweet of mine which asked whether I should try to be funnier in my posts that I shouldn't because it is a "business medium."  The comment may have been justified a year ago given the demographic composition of users, but the change in the age of Twitter users (which now total 20 million in the U.S.) may bring that assumption in question:

"The initial success of Twitter was largely driven by users in the 25-54 year old age segment, which made up 65 percent of all visitors to the site in December 2008, with 18-24 year olds accounting for just 9 percent of visitors . . . Despite Twitter's initially older skew, as it gained widespread popularity with the help of celebrity Tweeters and mainstream media coverage, younger users flooded to the site in large numbers, with those under the age 18 (up 6.2 percentage points) and 18-24 year olds (up 7.9 percentage points) representing the fastest growing demographic segments."

There may be troubling questions about the options for monetizing these platforms so they can be sustained and about the ability best ways to harness online networks for marketing purposes, but there is clearly every reason to keep at it. These platforms are in increasing part of how the world plays out its relationships, idea and information excahgne, civic engagement and, yes, product and service research.

The Economist, as it often does, sums up a business trend succinctly: In the introduction to its special report on social networking, its author argues "Lastly, it will contend that this is just the beginning of an exciting new era of global interconnectedness that will spread ideas and innovation around the world faster than ever before."

If that is not reason enough, here are four other arguments for caring about social communications (For the contrarian perspective, you can always depend on Paul Seaman blogging at 21st Century PR Issues, who believes "Social media is looking less glossy after bruising encounters with business, personal and political reality"):

1. Major brands are beginning to invest heavily in social media projects. Unless a company or organization creates a strategy based on an analysis of its readiness, balancing of the opportunities and risks, and designing a road map to social success it could easily be out-manoeuvred.  Although missing the point about Twitter, even venerable Procter & Gamble apparently has dozens of projects underway looking at how social media can benefit their marketing programs and reputation. If coldly sober P&G is taking social media's measure, it's evidence that this isn't kids stuff.
2. If you don't listen to what bothers people about your organization, and don't recognize how social communication has become the midwife for organized anger, you could easily be out-gunned by someone who doesn't like you and knows how to use social networks and social communications to do something about it. This is simply the lucid logic of effective issue management playing out on a new battlefield.
3. People are becoming hardwired to react, take advice, learn and challenge ideas differently. A whack of research studies have identified that the most trusted source or information for people today is someone like themselves. People find people like themselves in social networks. This is unlikely to change, even if the social networks or social communications infrastructure within which they seek the advice. Such an evolutionary reconstruction of culture is always hard to accept since it happens slowly and often finds itself questioned by short-sighted talking heads. But organizations who need a public license to operate should recognize that the zeitgeist of engagement is bending differently today.
4. The marketing and corporate communications vocabulary in social media is also shifting, and some marketers insist on speaking the wrong language. An example: Marketers have slapped the social media concept of 'engagement' on top of their beloved 'brand' and come out with a concept called "engage with a brand". Engage generally means to interact with or attract (It can also be defined as 'to enter into combat with'). It is personal and reciprocal, and it is only wishful thinking when it comes to the relationship between a person and a product or company. Avoiding this type of awkward and alienating juxtaposition of a social communications reality with a marketing communications ambition happens when you recognize your word-stock doesn't fit anymore.

I'll leave the conclusion to David Carr writing about Twitter in the New York Times at the start of the year in an agreeable precis of the personal pleasure and business opportunities of social communications that is better than anything else on the subject I have read recently . . . "The most frequent objection to Twitter is a predictable one: 'I don’t need to know someone is eating a donut right now.' But if that someone is a serious user of Twitter, she or he might actually be eating the curmudgeon’s lunch, racing ahead with a clear, up-to-the-second picture of an increasingly connected, busy world."

An interesting discussion took place at TechCrunch about an intern who asked for compensation for a blog post. After an investigation, the intern (who TechCrunch refused initially to identify) was fired and Michael Arrington posted an apology.

The next day, the intern (Daniel Brusilovsky) self-identified on his own blog and also apologized to his family and friends: "To my family, friends, colleagues and especially, TechCrunch, I am sorry. I am taking this entire experience, learning and moving on."

Well handled on everyone's part I think.