Social Media site for PR practitioners

Oné of the pod­casts I listen to is For Imme­di­ate Release, an awe­some resource of import­ant news in social media. In edi­tion 237, there’s a brief men­tion of a new social media site for PR prac­tic­tion­ers — Ragan Communication’s ‘myragan.com’.

Myragan.com is in ‘beta’, and in some places it shows. The Fire­fox imple­ment­a­tion seems a bit funky, with fonts chan­ging as edit posts, and page widths chan­ging as you jump between sections.

That being said, it’s also an awe­some resource!

First and fore­most, it’s a social media site for com­mu­nic­at­ors, so there’re lots of ways to com­mu­nic­ate: Chat, Mes­sages, For­ums, Groups, Bul­letin Boards.

There’s also a Face­book like com­pon­ent where you can invite ‘friends’ and develop your own loose social net­work. Though LinkedIn and Face­book do a bet­ter job of this.

What I find really cool, is the con­fig­ur­able pro­file page. This is where you can tell your story, pro­mote your­self and your organ­iz­a­tion, and really add your own per­son­al­ity to the site, includ­ing RSS feeds from your own sites and blogs.

Ok, so why would you add your­self to yet another social media site? Good ques­tion, and I’m not sure I really have a good answer yet. Face­book is the 500lb gor­illa with a lot of pol­ish on the bells and whistles — Myragan is a bit rough around the edges yet, as a beta can be.

But what may make this a bit dif­fer­ent, is that it’s a social media site for a par­tic­u­larly nar­row audi­ence — PR types.

To use the walled garden ana­logy, this is a nice safe place where PR types can hang out with their own, and speak their own lan­guage. And that may be enough to keep me here, engaged in yet another social media site.

UPDATE: and do check out the Can­Comm  group to con­nect with Cana­dian PR practitioners.

Tech­nor­ati Tags: Social Media, PR, Com­mu­nic­a­tions, blog, face­book