As to the organizational confluence of marketing and PR, we can look at the integrated marketing communications movement as exhibit A for the prosecution. I used to work with a company where all communication functions (save Investor Relations) reported to Marketing. As a consequence, all our communications were (wait for it) MARKETING. Features and Benefits.

This is backward. All marketing is a form of communications, but not all communication can be marketing. This is especially true in an age of increasing skepticism of marketing in general. PR’s move to product publicity (let alone mid-20th Century press agentry), the source of good billing hours and excellent corporate jobs, can generate revenue at much lower cost than advertising. Marketing, however, cannot produce the reputational improvement that PR can, at virtually any cost. Brand advertising simply leverages reputation; it cannot rebuild it.

Employees can use social media to share information amongst themselves, interact with clients and prospects, and otherwise act as reputational warriors. Clients can interact with each other and employees to deepen their understanding of the company and its products, and buy product. B2B interactions can uncover improvement opportunities, share best practices, etc. All of this is true, provided all of these people trust one another to be smart, authentic, factual and free of hidden agendas.

In which facet of human interaction are we all four of those things?

I think that the division of roles and responsibilities between people in PR, Marketing, and Communications has been fading since the last recession forced downsizing and the combining of duties. The rise of online tools has simply finished it off completely.
It isn’t simply a devaluing of PR objectives as you suggest, but rather a complete blurring of the roles, and hence of the organization itself. Once we stopped hugging each other over the joy of social media and we had finished singing Kumbaya, reality set in. No one will pay me to play online unless I can show a tangible benefit that somehow supports the business model. Throw in another recession and I’m sorry kids, but either produce results, or find another branch to tweet from.
Caveat emptor has always been part of the media equation AND of the marketing equation. We just happen to have tools that can helps us come to a conclusion much faster now.
Being a journalist or owning a media outlet comes with responsibilities, rules, regulations, and the realization that you do it for a living (disclosure: I’m a seasoned journalist and media manager turned communication director ).
Firing up social media has few responsibilities, rules or regulations, requires no business licence, communications department approval, or committment to any standards in advertising. There is always the risk of reputation damage admittedly, but for the most part if it doesn’t work out you can make it disappear with minimal fuss.
Media for all its failings has some requirement to be objective. It is what makes it media. Social media is inherently subjective – that’s what makes it social media. People who read anything, from anyone, anywhere, have to make a judgement call. Problem is so many don’t bother.

Finally a tidbit from many, years ago when the web was only just developing a graphical interface. A group of us spread around
North America saw a great social value in the ‘net and a great commercial value. We proposed Web 1 and Web 2. W 1 for our group hugs and open exchange of ideas, and W 2 for coporate involvement. That was 16 or so years ago.
Look how far we’ve come.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by CommAMMO: New Post — Ethics in PR: The social media question http://bit.ly/1S5SjW...