As we get ready to meet at the end of the month in New York for the Digital Impact Conference, I thought I’d share with you my thoughts on what I think is the biggest challenge for public relations professionals regarding digital communications today. Of course, this naming of “biggest” is a judgment call at best, and therefore open to debate, but I’ll take a stab at it anyway!

I have been active in the world of digital communications for years, focusing most recently on how organizations can successfully use emerging social media tools such as blogs, social networks, communities and so on. I guess you could call me fluent in the language of digital communications. And yet, I often feel as if I am drowning in that selfsame world. There are so many tools, and so many ways of using them, that the complexities of it all can be overwhelming. And this is what leads me to claim that the biggest challenge facing us in digital communications is simply keeping up with it all.

The challenge I am describing here is many-layered. 

First, we must teach ourselves about the tools themselves: what they are and how they work. But it goes much further than that. It has become common for the various social media platforms to interact with each other, giving us the ability to aggregate all of our different digital personas, activities, etc., into one “lifestream,” visible to all, should we choose to make it so. This is also true for brands. So not only do we need to understand each of the tools themselves, we need to understand what happens at the intersection points of the tools. With new tools being introduced all the time, simply keeping up with the technology is a major challenge.

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The Conversation Prism debuted in August 2008 to provide a visual representation of the true expansiveness of the social Web and the conversations that define it. In this short time span, over one million people have crossed its path.

When Jesse Thomas, of JESS3, and I initially mapped “the conversation,” we recognized that the act of categorizing social networks within a visually rich graphic would be momentary at best, demanding endless iterations in order to accurately document evolving and shifting online conversations as well as the communities that promote them.

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Click here to view Sergio’s 2009 Digital Impact Conference presentation Social Media’s Role In Building Your Brand: Your Brand Is What “They” Say It Is.

Whether you are fortifying your brand to endure the economic downturn, or repositioning your brand in preparation for the economic rebound, consider this:

Your brand is no longer what you say it is, it’s what “they” say it is. And the social media marketplace is where “they” – customers, prospects, journalists and other influencers – are talking about your brand. They are forming and sharing opinions that will impact your brand at the speed of light, and you need a clear strategy to effectively foster these conversations. You also need to get it right the first time by understanding which tactics will help you control your brand before “they” control it for you.

We, at MarketingSherpa, recently conducted the most comprehensive study of social media marketing and PR practices to date.  1886 social media practitioners participated in this study.  When we asked them which strategic communications goals social media has been most effective at helping them accomplish, more than 90% said it was brand building. They also told us which tactics rated highest, not only in achieving their branding objectives, but in producing a favorable marketing ROI.

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This is a vexing question that so many are asking themselves these days. Is that target audience for your news the “media”? To be more specific, is it just your known media as in trade media? How about your clients and prospects for your business? How about your customers?

According to a 2008 Bureau of Labor Statistics study, one in four media jobs have disappeared since the year 2000.

This figure is growing every day. I’m afraid to believe that this will grow to be two out of four media jobs by the end of this year. So, I have to ask the question again about who is the target for your news.�

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