May 11th, 2009

Social PR Survey II: Continued disconnect between clients, agencies

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 8:58 am

Categories: Branding, Corporate Social Networking, Marketing, Public Relations, Social Business, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices

Tags: Agency, Social Media, Client, Survey, Advertising & Promotion, Public Relations, Marketing, Corporate Communications, Jennifer Leggio

Back in February I published the results of a social public relations survey that attempted to gauge client satisfaction levels with their current PR agencies. What showed up was dismal - and really showed that client trust in their agencies was low.

Given that data, and several requests, I teamed with Nicole Jordan (read her take on the survey) to issue a follow-on survey to examine the agency side of things and find out what the account folks believe their clients expect. We also tried to determine what sort of training entry level PR people are getting at the start of their careers. Again, this is not a scientific survey. We’re merely trying to jumpstart conversations.

To be frank, we were disappointed. Not so much in the quantity of respondents (though it was lower than the initial survey), but in the types of answers we received. More than 80 percent of PR agency participants believe they received stellar PR training to address business issues of their clients. Almost as many believe their agencies are meeting the needs of their clients in terms of social media programs. As the first survey results indicate, it’s clear that several clients don’t see it this way.

So, we still have a disconnect. However, the upside is that the agencies who did participate in this seem to be willing to close the gap - otherwise they likely would not have participated.

Let’s get into the details:

• 524 total responses
• 386 completed surveys (reported data is based on this number)
• 176 different named PR agencies

Next: The basics –>

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