Brussels, Belgium. June 29 2010 – The Worldcom Public Relations Group, the world’s leading partnership of independently owned communications counseling firms, today announced results of a survey of its partner offices around the world that projects a rise in social media and research and a decline in media relations and advertising services over the next three years. More than 70 of Worldcom’s 104 offices responded to the survey.

“The results of this survey clearly demonstrate that public relations has moved multi-channel,” said Stefan Pollack, chair of the Worldcom Americas Region and president of The Pollack PR Marketing Group, a Los Angeles-based firm. “From a trend perspective, clients are looking for firms that can deliver immediate impact with sustainable value. These results provide insight to our partner firms about how to gear their client programming and to determine how best to continue to grow services and in what areas.”

According to the survey, the services respondents expect the decrease to include: media relations (19 percent), advertising (17 percent), and direct mail and marketing (11 percent). In general, the majority of firms are optimistic about business increasing in the next three to five years.

Moreover, an increase in multichannel services is a critical indicator for firms to move beyond media relations as a major source of revenue. For example, more than half of the respondents expected social media, interactive/web development and search engine optimization services to increase – 93 percent, 73 percent and 61 percent, respectively. Yet obstacles still remain for firms to determine how to increase revenue from these services; particularly search engine optimization – for example, no agency reported more than 10 percent of revenue from SEO.

In addition, one-third of the Worldcom Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region and Asia Pacific region firms expect the percentage of work from their home countries to decrease. This represents an opportunity for global firms to acquire clients from beyond their home countries. Additional key findings included investor relations and influencer/stakeholder relations as other significant areas of revenue, and 37 percent of firms in the Americas targeting specific cultural demographics. The most commonly cited was Latino/Hispanic, with 10 percent.

Methodology
The online survey was sent to 104 Worldcom firms regarding services provided by their firms. Seventy-four firms responded, a response rate of 71 percent. Padilla Speer Beardsley’s research practice facilitated the survey.

About the Worldcom Public Relations Group
Worldcom Public Relations Group is the world’s leading partnership of independently owned public relations counseling firms, with 104 offices in 91 cities worldwide. Established in 1988, it was formed so that the strongest, most capable independent public relations firms could serve national, international and multi-national clients while retaining the flexibility and client-service focus inherent in independent firms. Through The Worldcom Group, clients have on-demand access to in-depth communications expertise from professionals who understand the language, culture and customs of the geographic arenas in which they operate. Visit www.worldcomgroup.com for more information.

Worldcom EMEA currently comprises 34 agencies with strong expertise in consumer, healthcare, travel & tourism, technology, energy & environment, financial services, investor relations, public affairs and crisis & issues management. Clients include Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Panasonic, Sony Ericson, LG Electronics, the EU Anti-Tobacco Campaign, Verbatim and Palm. Visit www.worldcomprgroupemea.com for more information.

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. When a topic is typed for search, nearly instantly, the search engine will sift through the millions of pages it has indexed about and present you with ones that match your topic. The searched matches are also ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.

Remember that a prospective customer will probably only look at the first 2-3 listings in the search results. So it does matter where your website appears in the search engine ranking.

Further, they all use one of the top 6-7 search engines and these search engines attract more visitors to websites than anything else. So finally it all depends on which search engines the customers use and how they rank your site.

It is the Keywords that play an important role than any expensive online or offline advertising of your website.

It is found by surveys that a when customers want to find a website for information or to buy a product or service, they find their site in one of the following ways:

• The first option is they find their site through a search engine.
• Secondly they find their site by clicking on a link from another website or page that relates to the topic in which they are interested.
• Occasionally, they find a site by hearing about it from a friend or reading in an article.

Thus it’s obvious the the most popular way to find a site, by search engine, represents more than 90% of online users. In other words, only 10% of the people looking for a website will use methods other than search engines.

All search engines employ a ranking algorithm and one of the main rules in a ranking algorithm is to check the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Don’t forget that algorithms also give weightage to link population (number of web pages linking to your site). When performed by a qualified, experienced search engine optimization consultant, your site for high search engine rankings really does work, unless you have a lot of money and can afford to pay the expert. With better knowledge of search engines and how they work, you can also do it on your own.

Lately you may have seen news story about the fast growth of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc… these are a few of the new Social Media networks that are changing who we all interact on the internet.

Many can tackle social media marketing, but few approach it like onlineLINK Marketing, a new business unit of carreñogroup.

onlineLINK Marketing can help you climb the social media mountain by first developing a SMO (Social Media Optimization) strategy. Next, we work with you to identify desired outcomes traffic/page views, sales, reputation, social responsibility, influence, credibility, and brand awareness.

Once we understand the desired objective, we choose tactics wisely, while cognizant of what actions will influence the desired outcome with the most impact.

Social Media Marketing is characterized by communities that allow users to do many or all of the following:

· Create profiles/accounts

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With the overabundance of social media options, onlineLINK Marketing ensures that you embark upon the right channels with the right content!

Recently the PEW Research Center ask this question and here are the results – http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/111.pdf

This is a very interesting report to read.

My adventure as President of carreñogroup Public Affairs has been exhilarating and is putting my spirit to the test.   My previous role at Continental Airlines was developing the management and leadership teams for their role in a global company.  I now use those best practices in business development, strategy and branding for small to medium size businesses.  I did not enter this venture hoping I would succeed, I approached this venture knowing I had a product and service that would sell.

I believe every life experience is part of a grooming process for something later in life.  In the introduction I used the term adventure, because I live my life as one.  Using the globe as my classroom for over 30 years and encounters with business owners of different genders, ethnicity’s and age groups has taught me lessons on becoming a successful entrepreneur.

These lessons helped me realize that the Right Stuff isn’t about gender or ethnicity, It is about the initial Dream, the strong Desire and the unwavering Dedication to succeed.

From left to right: Laura Lopez Cano, Liz Lara-Carreño, Marisol Graham and Anna Marie Guzman-Protz. Click image for full article (PDF)