Totally agree with you about media relations experts who can lack a big-picture mentality, in fact that's why I use it as an example in the article. You'd have to build on their media relations expertise before they could hope to be a public relations professional. That's no different to someone that came from social media, marketing or any other discipline.
Indeed and the best strategists will recognise their limitations and hire experts to help develop and implement the different tactics such as media relations, public speaking, paid for advertising etc including the various specialist elements of social media. Even within social you'll want specialists as paid social is very different to owned or earned social.
Traci, I'd agree lots of social media people "get both the strategy of social media and tactics", but I wasn't talking about social media strategy, I was talking about public relations strategy and social's place within it. In fact that helps highlight the point I was trying to make as you could never sensibly reverse that last sentence and talk about social media strategy and PR's role within it as it simply wouldn't make sense.
It depends on what the social media expert thinks public relations is. Many confuse it with media relations or just communications, but that's not just social media people it also includes some marketing professionals.
Hi, Barbara. I'm not sure senior PR practitioners are being passed over. Also to put the article in the context of the original conference discussion we were probably talking more about management level people rather than really senior ones.
Ouch! But I still want one more than I'd ever want an iPad.
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Stuart Bruce 
Contraption