Online Marketing Blog

[Editor's note: We're excited to share this next guest post from David Alston of Radian6. A fast emerging leader in the field of social media measurement, Radian6 (a TopRank client) provides social media monitoring tools to hundreds of leading PR firms, ad agencies and brand marketers.]

David is VP Marketing at Radian6 in New Brunswick, Canada with previous experience at several tech startups in the interactive advertising and the video over IP space. Most recently, he was partner and VP of Marketing at PR firm, Revolution Strategy. His blog is TweetPR.

The last session of the day for me was “Press and Public Relations Campaigns” with Robin Liss of Reviewed.com and Joe Beaulaurier from PRWeb. Moderation duties were scheduled to be handled by Brett Tabke but were switched at the last minute to Melanie Mitchell, VP of SEO/SEM at AOL. Sorry Brett, but I don’t think anyone had a problem with the switch.

Robin presented a case study for a promotion on the iPhone her site wirelessinfo.com did using multiple channels including Digg and a YouTube video that went viral. Joe presented the multiple media format press release options offered by PRWeb.

With our involvement in the PR, search and direct marketing industries through consulting and speaking at conferences, we’ve seen a huge boost in resources allocated to understanding and implementing various social media marketing tactics.

Despite that, the meaning of social media as a marketing/PR channel doesn’t seem to extend outside personal universes of interest. ie, search marketers often look at social media as using tools like Digg or StumbleUpon to drive web site traffic. PR practitioners often see social media as a branding tool using sites like YouTube & Facebook.