Jeffrey Hayzlett’s groundbreaking social media work for Kodak made him into one of the biggest brands in marketing. Did Kodak stumble when the CMO left the company?

Similarly, the departure of Frank Eliason from Comcast and Paula Berg from Southwest Airlines made social media headlines and raised the question: Should the power of our company brand be shared with our community manager?

Best-selling author Charlene Li, CEO and co-founder of Altimeter Group, discusses how organizations should be thinking about structuring their social media engagement. She spoke with Dave Armon during the Public Relations Society of America International Conference in Washington, D.C.

“They shouldn’t be scared about somebody leaving,” said Li, using former Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble as an example.

“Goodness, Microsoft benefited so much from Robert’s involvement early on. He left, but Microsoft still really benefited from the time he was there,” she said.

In the video, Li also praised the work of Ford Motor Company social media chief Scott Monty, saying the automaker is well poised to thrive even if he moved to a different role.

She also addressed her departure from Forrester Research, saying the firm’s controversial blog policy was appropriate for its business model.

Budget season is in full swing inside organizations with calendar fiscal years.  Chances are a few new line items have made their way into the public relations spending plan for 2011.

More than any other corporate function, PR is leading their organizations into social media, says Charlene Li, founder of research firm Altimeter Group and author of the best-selling business books Groundswell and Open Leadership.

Li, a former journalist, was a keynoter at the Public Relations Society of America International Conference in Washington, DC, this week, telling 3,000 attendees that PR continues to outpace, by a good distance, the customer service function in the use of and spending on social media engagement.

Although Li maintained the dollars required for social engagement are modest, when contrasted to other corporate earmarks, I have noted four or five separate buckets that many organizations are now funding. The addition of staff for social media community management, a platform for monitoring and analysis, and publication tools for scheduling posts are routine investments for any company or agency trying to meet business objectives on the social web.  Many consumer-facing companies are going a step further, spending on technology to build Facebook applications or integrate social into CRM systems.

My interview with Li will continue next week, focusing on how companies cope with the departure of highly recognizable community managers, and the use of digital agencies versus social platform specialists.

Image credit: Tom Humbarger

There’s something special about a guy who isn’t a rock star yet has three times the Twitter followers of Bob Dylan.  He’s not a deep-pocketed electronics retailer, yet his social media presence dwarfs Best Buy.

Jeremiah Owyang is an influencer in Web strategy, a futurist, a gadfly and — most important of all — someone who listens, studies, engages and shares.  A partner in the newly formed consulting firm Altimeter Group, Owyang earned his nearly 60,000 followers the hard way.

Since I dived into the social web after leaving PR Newswire, I found that Owyang’s Forrester research reports provided a well-grounded reality check that validated fundamental shifts in consumer behavior, marketing methodologies and the demand for new PR and marcom tools.  He’s routinely quoted by CMOs during conferences and, unlike many celebrities, @jowyang almost always tweets back immediately.

During my recent visit to Altimeter Group’s new headquarters in San Mateo, California, Owyang showed no signs of being jet-lagged, despite returning less than a day earlier from one of his frequent overseas speeches.  He also demonstrated keen knowledge of an increasingly confusing vendor community supplying social media monitoring, analysis and curation tools.

To illustrate why the public relations industry should familiarize itself with social customer relationship management systems, Owyang shared an anecdote about how appliance maker Whirlpool  failed to appease a disgruntled customer, and the damage it caused due to that customer’s ability to influence millions through social media.

“Customers do not care what department you’re in,” said Owyang, predicting that some forward-thinking companies will take on the challenge of building smart systems that inform Support, PR, Marketing, Product Development and offer a single view of the customer no matter where they touch the company.

I am aware of one large food manufacturer whose PR department is heading into the new year with amped up monitoring capabilities and a plan to pipe real-time data into their customer service call centers.  If the readers of PounceNow are aware of organizations where PR is embracing the challenge, please comment on this post.