Early on during an economic downturn, companies cut marketing communications (marcom or marcomm) staff, often too deeply. Then they realize that there's still a lot of work that needs to get done to maintain a market presence.

Some today think PR is dead. It is not; it has just changed and significantly. PR, marketing, lead generation, SEO, social media – these activities are all blending into what I call the new marketing matrix. Here’s what getting publicity, either via a press release, social media, blog, or whatever, can do for you and your business:

Listening to a HubSpot webinar yesterday on content marketing, it discussed how we all are becoming publishers. I thought, to become publishers, we must be writers first, or at least know the right content that our target audience wants to read. We must write articles that are interesting and will engage readers. But this takes time, energy, and creative juices.

Traditionally, public relations is about crafting strategic messages that communicate exactly what the organization wants people to hear.  Today, more and more businesses are creating their own content in the form of blogs, articles, “Tweets,” and white papers.

This user-generated content, like traditional PR, improves communications, generates publicity, builds awareness, and increases rankings in search engines. 

Marketing is all about pushing the company messages out to target audiences through a variety of channels, which can include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. However, social media is about engaging in conversations with your target audience, something that push marketers aren’t that skilled at. Try promoting your business on Twitter and Facebook, and you will lose followers. Social media is not specifically for lead generation (marketing) but more for raising brand awareness and thought leadership (PR).

Remember when you were a child and you sat in a circle and one person whispered something into the ear of the child next to them and this continued around the circle until the message came back to the original speaker? Was the message ever the same? Rarely!

This is what happens sometimes when we issue a press release. Journalists may trim your press release to a few sentences. With twitter, well-intentioned followers will reinterpret your release into less than 140 characters, potentially causing the message to be garbled and lose its full meaning.

Social media is fast becoming a leading outlet for savvy marketers to capitalize on their brand. By some estimates, social networking now accounts for 11 percent of all time spent online in the US. Between December 2008 and December 2009, total visits to the top 10 social networking sites increased 63 percent. Nearly one in 10 Internet visits ends up at a social network; nearly one in four page views is on a social networking site.

When Search Engine Optimization (SEO) became a hot topic in the early 2000’s, it was very easy to write a press release with targeted keywords and end up at the top of the Google listings for those keywords.

Today, this doesn’t happen.

With all this socializing going on, the challenge of coordinating and integrating messages across multiple social networks platforms has become top-of-mind. Businesses, large and small, are using social media platforms – but for very different reasons.