Steve Rubel is spearheading a new project to get the PR industry up-to-speed on social media mastering (read more here).  Beginning today, a new public forum has been created (via the New PR Wiki) where agency PR practitioners, consultants and corporate folks can collaborate and hopefully reach agreement on best practices and battle-tested applications of social media tools and tactics. 

While this is an ambitious effort, it comes with its own set of challenges, not least of which is the challenge of getting people to share their knowledge — especially among professional firms where the long-standing business model is to protect IP, not give it away.  But with that said, there are a lot of smart firms and savvy consultants doing great work with new media, and if in some small way our team here can share our experience and insights working on social media projects these last few years, in the interest and spirit of raising the industry game, then so be it.

In many ways we’re already doing this: Case in point, over the summer we partnered with Cooley Godward and organized a panel discussion around the legal/IR/PR implications of corporate and employee blogs using real-world client case studies from Yahoo! and Network Appliance.  An extensive Q&A from that discussion was posted here shortly thereafter.  Similarly we’ve posted content here on this blog about other social media projects and via our podcast about client case studies.  And lastly, we’ve leaned on our internal team of social media gurus to beat the drum online and offline via their personal blogs and podcasts, as well as within their professional organizations and interest groups.

More can be done, we admit that, but talk’s cheap and going the distance requires real action. We have some fun things in the works, stay tuned.

– Mike Manuel