So said Adam Lavelle, chief strategic officer, iCrossing US, speaking at a meeting of America’s chief PR associations, including The Public Relations Society of America, for the industry has decided to devise a fresh definition for itself.

Social media, including blogs, Facebook and Twitter have unquestionably and radically transformed the relationship between the public and the organisations communicating with them.

Traditional PR involved a one-way monologue that usually went in one direction – from the top down. Now, we are seeing a new-fashioned PR that embraces two-way conversations. The industry has been shaken up and introduced to new terms such as earned media, word of mouth marketing and buzz marketing.

A search for a new definition of public relations seems long overdue. An updated level of standardisation might help both PR practitioners and the public to get to grips with PR in the age of social media, and may have helped to prevent some of PR’s most memorable recent blunders. Anyone remember BP’s mishandling of online reputation following the Gulf of Mexico oil spill? Or ChapStick repeatedly deleting negative comments about its ads from its Facebook page, a move which backfired to the extent that complaints actually soared?

One of the most radical shifts offered by social media is that today, everybody is a content creator. Brands have to rethink their PR and online reputation strategies, bearing in mind that they cannot simply push their own content out to a passive public.

To stay up to date with the redefinition of PR in the US, keep checking in to the Public Relations Society of America website at prsa.org. A new section is set to go live on Monday at prdefinition.prsa.org – and in the true spirit of social, the new industry definition is being crowdsourced with visitors invited to submit suggestions.

Tweets posted by the company have been slammed as wooden, corporate and lacking in empathy, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald.

“Qantas will reimburse the difference between the cost of the new ticket (in same cabin of travel) and value of the refunded Qantas ticket,” read one remarkably concise tweet, failing to offer a human voice at a time of major chaos and upset for many customers.

Word has it that although Qantas generally demonstrates successful Twitter marketing, the social media team had been effectively “gagged” by senior Qantas staff with a corporate message to deliver, yet little experience of using Twitter.

In response, numerous Twitter accounts have surfaced with the sole aim of blasting Qantas, with chief executive Alan Joyce bearing the brunt of the flack.

It’s hard to say how damaging a Twitter backlash can be. One parody account, @AlanJoyceCEO, has posted a healthy 989 tweets since springing up, and has lured 2,740 followers in its short lifetime.

Any social media backlash is likely to fizzle out as the crisis resolves, but we can’t help but feel that Qantas has missed a crucial opportunity to reach out to a global customer base craving open communication.

You may have 10,000 happy customers but it only takes one motivated, IT literate one to turn feral and as generation Y matures, there’s only going to be more of them.

Assuming the website is legitimate and can’t be taken down through legal means – or negotiated with, there is still something you can you do.

The main issue is stopping negative sites appearing directly under your main brand site in Google search results. SEO focused content creation can push the offending site far away enough from the main search results to have little associative impact on your brand.

Adding content about your brand is a good thing to do in any case, not just building a bulwark against attacks but establishing the brand as a thought leader in their respective field and providing material for social media marketing.

In that sense, the famous phrase ‘publish and be damned’ perhaps needs reversing for the online world – ‘publish or be damned.’

Findings from the annual survey ‘The Rising CCO’ III, indicate that as online threats to corporate and brand reputations have increased, so too has the importance of communications officers possessing the necessary crisis management skills. 61% of CCOs currently consider crisis management skills as important, compared to only 33% in 2007.

Social media is identified as the most critical challenge as well as the greatest opportunity in the year ahead, with 54% citing social media experience as key for communications staff. Social media and blogging are expected to be the fastest-growing functions in communications departments in the next 12 months, rising from 28 percent in 2008 to 41 percent in 2010.

Media sentiment is top of the CCO’s list of effectiveness measures according to the research. Media favourability as an indicator of communications success, increased from 75% in 2007 to 84% in 2010.

The annual Rising CCO survey is conducted by global executive search firm Spencer Stuart and global public relations firm Weber Shandwick. The 127 survey participants were from companies based in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific with 78% of respondents working in global Fortune 500 companies.

The report, commissioned by antivirus software company McAfee, titled “Web 2.0: A Complex Balancing Act, reveals Brazil, Spain and India lead in adoption of Web 2.0 technology for business, while adoption was lowest in Canada, Australia, the US and the UK.

The research highlights that although organisations see the potential value in Web 2.0 tools, companies are unsure about allowing employee use of the technology in the workplace, with 60% of companies surveyed concerned about loss of reputation as a result of Web 2.0 misuse.

While a quarter of organisations monitor how staff use social media, almost one in three have not introduced a social media policy in the workplace.

40% of companies found that Web 2.0 tools had led to increased productivity and better results from marketing, and 75% had increased their use of the technology in order to develop new revenue streams for their organisations.

Security concerns have clearly hindered adoption of Web 2.0 with half of the firms surveyed concerned about security threats- virus infections and greater volumes of spam were the most common.

McAfee chief technology officer George Kurtz said, “Web 2.0 technologies are impacting all aspects of the way businesses work…As Web 2.0 technologies gain popularity, organisations are faced with a choice — they can allow them to propagate unchecked, they can block them, or they can embrace them.”

The report surveyed over 1,000 business leaders in 17 countries and examines the drivers for Web 2.0 and social networking use in business.

TaylorMade is the next most loved brand, followed closely by Wilson and Nike.

While Nike Golf and Callaway are the subject of an equal amount of chatter, Nike is merely liked while Callaway inspires real passion.

Despite the negative publicity, Tiger Woods does not appear to impact the passion level for the Nike Golf brand. In fact, golfers express little negativity towards any of the major brands.

Titleist gets the least amount of love, but is still generally liked. Personally I hate them, keep losing the pesky things!

At that time in the late eighties, Coutts had a rock solid, exclusive reputation which any self- respecting yuppie wanted a piece of. Legend had it that you needed half a million in cash minimum before they’d consider letting you in the door. As with many of the aspirant financial clubs of the eighties, the lack of information available about them just added to their mystique and cache.

Just as the red Porsches and matching braces have all but disappeared from the City, so the era of such corporate reputations, locked tight in a marble clad safety deposit boxes, have gone. It’s not just the high profile Madoff, Enron and Lehman scandals that have shaken public belief in financial institutions but on a micro level, through the internet, reputations now rise or fall on what customers are saying online.

If you put ‘Coutts bank account’ into Google today, the eleventh entry on the page is a site called www.couttssucks.com, a site essentially dedicated to destroying the brand reputation of the three hundred year old institution. I’ve got no personal axe to grind about Coutts (unless on an actress related subliminal level) but many ex-customers obviously do and are enthusiastically warning other individuals, dreaming of that Coutts chequebook, to think again.

In this new era of online brand transparency, negative customer comments are an inevitability and not always a bad thing for the brand or the customer. If it helps highlight a problem which can be put right, the brand becomes hero rather than villain and the customer walks away happy that they’ve been listened to by the corporate giant.

By contrast, not engaging with customers online, can make brands look as if they don’t care, or worse, arrogant and out of touch. Some organisations will only find this out when something goes wrong unfortunately and then it’s often too late. Look at what Toyota are suffering now (1) because of a reactive communications strategy, research by Brand Finance suggests they’ve lost $4bn off their brand value.

To use a banking analogy, ignoring online reputation is like making out a blank cheque from your brand equity account and allowing your enemies to decide when to cash it in and for how much. Not a good idea, no matter how fancy your chequebook is.

(1) This blog was first published in February 2010 by Stopgap

Whatever we think of this as a PR move – and it’s an interesting one – it serves to underline the impact that key social networking sites can have on brand reputation. Mumsnet receives more than 1m unique visitors each month. Its discussion boards attract about 20,000 comments daily. Even the upcoming General Election has been dubbed the ‘Mumsnet Election.’

George at Asda, Boden, House of Fraser, Mothercare and Start-rite have all signed up to the site’s ‘Let girls be girls’ campaign, after members expressed concerns about products on sale in high-street stores. It aims to get retailers to agree to end the ‘premature sexualisation of children though their products and marketing.’

Writing in his Editor’s comment this week, Gareth Jones of Marketing magazine is sceptical as to whether Asda’s decision represents an intelligent PR coup. “Mumsnet is a hugely powerful force that brands should seek to harness but, in this case, it seems George at Asda may be going a step too far,” he says.

However, putting aside the issue of whether or not it should be up to an independent government body as opposed to a commercial organisation to make such decisions – which seems to be his primary concern – what is for sure is that Asda’s move represents a bold acknowledgement of the importance of online reputation management in today’s digital world.

Microsoft has knocked Google off its top spot in the 2010 Business Superbrands survey.

Google, ranked first in the two previous surveys, changes places with Microsoft who were in fifth spot last year.

New entries to the top ten include BlackBerry, 42nd  last year and British Airways, back to eighth from its worst position last year – 36th. Rival Virgin Atlantic however, also appears, above BA, in fourth position.

Revealing the fall-out from the financial crisis, the list of the top 10 biggest fallers includes UBS and Morgan Stanley, with the Royal Bank of Scotland falling out of the top 500 altogether.

Proving that a re-brand can have a positive affect Aviva, the re-branded Norwich Union, is the second highest riser in the top 500 climbing from 315th to 144th.

The biggest year-on-year riser is Premier Inn, which has jumped a significant 197 places to 240th. Other fast risers include DHL, BDO the accountancy firm, and trade media title, Management Today.

Brands are ranked by a panel of judges and 1700 business people for quality, reliability and distinction.