Brian Solis shows us how to put the public back in PR

Our next speaker, Brian Solis, Principal of FutureWorks, visits us straight out of California.

He asks us, "Who is using Twitter and Facebook for business purposes right now?" Nearly the entire room full of people shows their hands.

Solis shows us a comparison of monthly visits to popular Web sites:
CNN - 30 million
Twitter - 25 million
Facebook - 300 million
MySpace - 260 million

Did you know that more than 1 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook each month? Wow! These eye-opening statistics prove to us just how important social media has become in the constantly changing practice of PR.

People have said that social media is killing public relations, but this is actually our opportunity to step out from behind the proverbial curtain and influence this realm. Our audience is becoming more engaged and interested in interacting with us.

Social media is not just a broadcasting medium - instead, it is more about making connections. It's about creating an experience for our audience. It's about telling a story. So when Anheuser-Busch wanted to premiere their Super Bowl advertisements with a social media news release, Solis and his firm created a site that turned the cameras around and showed "the making of" the ads. They included video embedding code, links and other items that his audience could easily access, copy and paste into their own mediums.

If you want to create a social media release yourself, visit www.pitchengine.com. It is a free site!