Some ammunition for PR pros to suggest social media campaigns to clients

David Wilson has blogged about a Social Media expirement where someone was paid $10 an hour to undertake social media work for an entire year. This person brought in 93,207 hits over the course of a year, whereas Google Adwords brought in 2,057 visitors.

In summary, Social Media Optimisation visitors cost $0.04 each, compared with the $61 from Adwords.

Pretty nice figures huh?

So why is this important?

This is important because it gives PR agencies some ammunition to suggest social media campaigns to clients. Rather asking for retainer fees in exchange for press releases, fire-fighting, feature pitches, it could instead be a retainer for engaging with communities to bring traffic to a website. That's even a measurable result, something that most PR isn't.

It also demonstrates that there is a growing market for people who know to get engage in online communities. Is this a market for PR? For marketers? For a new breed of community managers?

Read David's post, it's important.