Social media and online PR report reveals room for improvement 

Econsultancy and bigmouthmedia's Social Media and Online PR Report 2010 has been published this week, to the interest of search engine optimisation firms and internet marketing consultants.
 
The report predicts that investment in social media is set to rise next year, with some 73 per cent already spending more of their resources on the marketing channel than they did last year.
 
Despite this rise in investment, the authors of the document say businesses are still not the making "cultural and budgetary" commitments necessary to make social media the powerful marketing platform it could be.
 
"Broadly speaking companies and their agencies remain self-critical about their social media tactics, with most acknowledging that they need to improve their approaches to the channel across the board," commented David Hardy, group marketing director at bigmouthmedia.
 
For instance, just seven per cent of companies have integrated their social media channel with their television advertising, while around a third of firms still do not employ in-house staff dedicated to the channel.
 
Around half of companies cited a lack of resources as the reason for their failure to fully grasp social media.
 
Companies studied also cited difficulties in integrating the strategy with other parts of their business, such as sales, customer relationship management, human resources and product development.
 
However, according to Mr Hardy, this should encourage them to take a "long, hard look" at the evolution of their corporate culture.
 
Linus Gregoriadis, research director at Econsultancy, added that 2010 has been the year that saw companies wake up to the power of social networking sites.
 
"Much of their activity is concentrated on the use of Twitter and Facebook, with the vast majority of companies (83 per cent and 80 per cent of respondents respectively) using these sites as part of their social media strategy," he commented.