Now, social networks act as first-stop sources of breaking news, offering unparalled access to journalists and as-yet unseen speed of coverage.

Yet clearly our sector still struggles to quantify the impact of social media efforts to senior management. We’re therefore grateful to socialmediaexaminer.com for coming up with a useful take on ways to measure the ROI of social media activity, summarised here.

1. Cost per impression

When you show the change in the cost per impression with and without social media, you can make a compelling case for the impact of social media on your PR strategy. On Facebook, you can get impression data on Facebook Insights. It’s trickier to measure on Twitter, but try TweetReach and Simply Measured to assess the reach of your messages.

2. Cost per engagement

Social channels are unbeaten for engagement, which can be measured with shares, clicks, comments, likes and mentions. Aggregate how people engaged with content and divide this figure by the cost to determine the cost per engagement.

3. Cost per click

Online PR drives users to click on links shared via social media, delivering inexpensive clicks on your messages. It’s easy enough to count the clicks generated through your own messaging efforts (use stats from your URL shortener). Add to the mix articles containing links to your corporate website, and page views of the article from the publication that had a social media site’s referring URL.

Take the total number of clicks and divide them by the cost of the outreach to determine the cost per click.

4. Cost per site visitor

Measuring the cost per visitor site across channels is a very simple way to show the positive impact of social media. To calculate it, take the total number of website visits generated and divide it by the total cost of the outreach. How do the costs compare to your online advertising and SEO costs?

5. Cost per inbound link

Adding ‘backlinks’ to media articles can drive traffic to a website. So, another good metric is cost per inbound link, calculated by taking the total number of inbound links the article generated and dividing it by the total cost of the campaign.

6. Cost per subscriber

It’s one thing to woo visitors to your website, but they are worth so much more if they subscribe with their email addresses for follow-up marketing once there. The cost per subscriber is a useful metric for understanding how online PR performs in relation to your overall marketing spend. To calculate, take the total number of new subscribers generated and divide it by the cost of the outreach.

You can use these metrics to determine how social media and PR complement each other to deliver relatively inexpensive results. The goal, according to Social Media Examiner, is not to prove that social media is better than other marketing channels, but to demonstrate how adding social media to the mix drives PR performance.

1. Rayovac: Rapid-response Twitter campaign

In a brilliant example of tailoring PR to the current climate, Rayovac timed its campaign to coincide with America’s biggest snow day, 2 February 2011. Working fast, the brand appealed to millions of housebound Americans with a virtual snowball fight and a two-day snow day ‘tweet-up’, inviting users to tweet about their local weather. The result of tapping into the frosty Zeitgeist? The effort generated 1,188 click-throughs to download the campaign widget, while Rayovac made its first appearance as a top ten global trending topic on Twitter.

2. Healthy Choice: Pairing a social coupon with blogger outreach

In a bid to grow its Facebook fan base, increase engagement and reinforce the brand’s reputation for value, Healthy Choice launched a coupon on its Facebook page. The value of the coupon increased as more people ‘liked’ the page, ultimately becoming a ‘buy-one-get-one-free’ deal. Facebook marketing was supported with blogger outreach, inviting relevant bloggers to purchase a Facebook ad and drive their audience to ‘like’ Healthy Choice and sign up for a coupon. An innovative, two-pronged online PR strategy got results: the Healthy Choice Facebook page grew from 6,800 to nearly 60,000 fans, while more than 50,000 ‘BOGOF’ coupons were snapped up.

3. KFC: The power of a single tweet

Competitions are an excellent way to fuel social PR activity. Take KFC’s innovative attempt to create buzz around the brand’s Colonel’s Scholars college scholarship programme. Working with Weber-Shandwick, KFC broke away from the traditional essay route, deciding to award a $20,000 scholarship based on a single tweet.

Broken via traditional media (USA Today), the scholarship tweet campaign caught the public’s imagination, generating significant TV news coverage and captivating the online world. KFC generated more than nine million social media impressions as a result of tweets made during the brief entry period. Some 2,800 applicants tweeted for their stab at the college scholarship, while KFC gained 20% more Twitter followers in just two weeks.

The winning entry came from 17-year-old Amanda Russell, whose tweet: “Hey Colonel! Your scholarship’s the secret ingredient missing from my recipe for success! Got the grades, drive, just need cash!” bagged her the $20,000.

Called London PR Taxi, the video series covers a number of subject areas that make up what we call ‘new fashioned pr’ beginning with, in episode 1, an interview with Brian Storey – Creative Partner at Wand, discussing Viral Video techniques.

While the subject matter is serious, the context is far from it with coffee flying about as the cab, driven by a mad cabbie – nicknamed psycho Paul, swerves around London’s streets.

Episode 2, which discusses the place of media relations in 2011, ends with a cup of Starbucks coffee literally all over Gorakana’s Michael Davies (thanks Michael, you were a star).

The latest episode ‘Media Relations’ can be viewed on our home page here: http://www.furlongpr.com/ or on YouTube here: http://youtu.be/tsMkYiidC70

Episode one, with Brian Storey can be viewed here: http://youtu.be/zEcDWL-kDVQ

“You can’t sell a Bentley out of a lock-up.” to “Visible signs, such as swanky offices, top-of-the range cars, very expensive lunches / five star hotels, send out the wrong signals.”

Somewhere in between was:

“I would invest in good meeting areas but keep personal work spaces modest and flexible”

This last comment is pretty much where we are in the debate.

It was a leading question because Furlong PR has just moved to Floral Street, Covent Garden where we have lovely meeting rooms and super-efficient receptionists, managed by the excellent MBW Business Exchange.

We’re still essentially a virtual operation though, there’s 16 of us, working day to day from locations dotted around London, using Floral Street as and when we need it.

We’re hoping it will be the perfect compromise, providing a professional meeting environment without the overheads of a full time office.

No doubt there’s a bit of this when it comes to online pr and social media, levels of purported expertise vary hugely, so here are seven questions I’d recommend asking a prospective online pr agency/agent, to establish if they really ‘eat their own dog food’.

1) Do they write a blog? If they aren’t blogging at all, put the phone down or call a taxi. If they’re blogging less than once a week, you have to question their content led online pr strategy – do they really believe in it?

2) How many connections do they have on LinkedIn? – Anything less than 100 connections and they’re playing at it.

3) Are they a mayor of anywhere on Foursquare? OK, this is quite new but if they say yes, you’re talking to a proper social media geek that’s interested in what’s next, not just what’s popular now.

4) What’s the best platform for blogging? If they know, they know.

5) What’s your organic SEO approach? Search engine optimisation is an important constituent of online pr and an agency needs to understand how to co-ordinate with an SEO agency in terms of keyword and link building strategies.

6) Can you name three ways to measure online pr performance? There are several meaningful ways of coming at this, your agency shouldn’t be struggling to name three.

7) Can you describe the last Twitter led pr work you did? Twitter is almost mainstream now in terms of online pr strategy so your agency should be able to demonstrate how they have used it to create meaningful dialogue with prospective customers.

One other thing to bear in mind, some agencies will have a digital Tsar, a specialist who parachutes in to answer just these types of questions. You also need to meet the staff who’ll be running the account day to day and feel comfortable that the team is cohesive and skilful enough to deliver the plan.

We see this as a natural extension to our core blog management and social media services which are focussed on creating inbound website traffic for clients in the technology & corporate sectors.

There’s such a close relationship between online pr, social media and SEO and each discipline ultimately has the same goal – raising brand profiles online. And while SEO companies are not experts in PR, neither are PR agents experts in SEO. We need each other.

We’re initially offering two products – an SEO audit which grades websites and blogs for SEO effectiveness and a reputation management service which measures brand sentiment and recommends ways to influence negative comments posted online.

Online pr helps unlock the IP lying dormant within corporations and SEO makes it discoverable to those you want to see it –  add in social media marketing and the combination has a powerful effect on website traffic.

On your wish list?

Miliband’s smoothly designed website is the only one to include a blog and the only one to employ all of the most powerful core social media channels – Twitter, Facebook, Flickr & YouTube along with an RSS feed.

Ed Balls’s site is the nearest competitor for social media leadership, with Twitter, Flickr & YouTube channels appended to what is a very badly designed site indeed.

Harriet Harman and Andy Burnham are the only other potential candidates to run a Twitter account from their sites while the only concession to online pr being displayed by Ed Miliband and Alan Johnson is the inclusion of an RSS feed.

While I wasn’t particularly surprised that Peter Mandelson & Jack Straw haven’t bothered with a personal website at all (bravo), Ed Mlliband’s site is a bit of an eyebrow raiser – functional yes, a work of design beauty it is not. In Chrome the minute text over-writes the pictures, though they are so small it hardly matters.

At least they have set out their camp online, www.davidcameron.com is currently being squatted by people who appear not to share his views..quite strongly, amply demonstrating that the lack of a strong online pr strategy is not only bad for your online pr but a threat to your brand, political or otherwise.

The grey haired leaders, who brought them to this point, are getting angry, like the DVD player at home, they can’t work out how to program it and are too damned long in the tooth to be bothered with these tricksy things now.

Somewhere at the back, a few youngsters have Foursquared their location and are now sending abuse to each other on Twitter. One of them says something derogatory about the MD’s lack of tech savvy and will get sacked later on.

All the while, behind the glass, in amongst the lights, cables and myriad computer screens,  the rock star techies are playing warcraft and eyeing up a big pile of cash with ‘online pr’ written on it.

One of them is on the phone, you can just about hear him saying – “certainly we can provide content for the organic SEO, keyword optimised, linked to product pages, yes no problem. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – oh yes we can do that too”.

Traditional PR is hammering on the glass now, “heh bozo, what about communication strategy, how’s that going to be interpreted by the media..what, you’re not going to tell them? Hey, this is our natural future, let us in”.

Gradually the hammering get’s fainter, a few have found a side door, many have given up and headed in a different direction. Only the wall remains.