Where Does Social Media Belong?

I must thank Twitter and everyone on it for continuing to expand upon the conversation that was generated from my previous post. Someone I follow on Twitter brought up the excellent point that I've singled out PR as the sole profession at fault here. She's right - I did. With that, I double-checked the letter that my friends received received and sure enough, the PR side of the agency wasn't credited - it was the Social Media Director. So, I stand corrected for blaming bad strategy & execution on their PR personnel. (But that still doesn't change my opinion that it is a flawed strategy with bad execution.)

But this did bring up a couple great points which I'd love to discuss further:

1. Who should manage social media outreach - PR, Marketing, WOM Agencies?

2. What is the definition of PR in today's social media world?

My fellow tweeter questioned "why is poor outreach always blamed on PR." I replied that typically PR agencies are assigned the outreach while marketing agencies develop a strategy. I want to clarify that PR does need to be part of any marketing strategy so we PR folk either work closely with those agencies or we develop client-direct PR strategies. One of our roles as PR practitioner is to understand how to effectively manage the communication flow and which tools are the best used in the process. What I'm trying to say is that when it comes to outreach, it typically lands in the laps of PR professionals, however she is right -  in today's multidisciplinary environment, all personnel under the communications umbrella should be held accountable. At very least I would expect that anyone managing social media outreach on behalf of a client should be communicating with other members of the communications team (including PR) to ensure the strategy and execution align with the brand itself.

The PRSA definition of public relations is "the practice of managing the communication between an organization and its publics. Public relations gains an organization or individual exposure to their audiences using topics of public interest and news items that do not require direct payment." So in the traditional sense, one would assume that tweeting to gain exposure would fall under the PR category. 

There's an awesome post by @JasonFalls of Social Media Explorer that I feel presents a great argument for SM being handled by PR practitioners -"PR as social media owner in many ways also addresses the concern of the online community that marketers don’t belong. Assuming we can trim away the corporate speak and manage transparent communications efforts in years to come, public relations representatives are the least likely to sell and most capable of speaking as humans to humans, rather than up-selling hucksters to “consumers.”

So now its your turn, what is your definition of PR and do you think Social Media 'belongs' to any specific practice?