Significant results have emerged from a nationwide survey which concluded that the majority of journalists now use social media as an essential source for finding information. The survey, conducted by Cision and Don Bates of The George Washington University, stressed that although PR firms are still used to verify and expand on information, social media sites are the first point of call for journalists who are researching articles or uncovering stories.

These findings will have major implications for many companies’ current PR strategies. Of the journalists questioned, 65% use social media sites including Facebook and Linkedin as part of their research process with a further 89% using blogs to obtain information. Micro blogging sites were also found to be popular among journalists with 51% consulting twitter when conducting research.

The use of social media is widespread throughout the profession, the survey found that those journalists who had greater experience (20 or more years) relied on blogs almost as much as those with fewer years experience (under 9 years) with only a 2% difference between the two groups. Of the journalists questioned 71% claimed to use the web ‘far more’ than they did five years ago when writing an article.

If your business wants to be successful when engaging in public relations then you must ensure that your firm or your PR agency is effectively using social media marketing techniques and consider it an imperative part of all PR work.

A court of appeal in Paris has ruled against the search engine giant Google, in a case brought to it by the Centre National Prive de Formation a Distance (CNFDI). The long-distance learning institution filed the defamation suit last year when the Google “suggestion” feature linked the institution with the word “scam”.

The “suggestion” feature was implemented to make searching easier for users of Google, by offering the most common search queries based upon popular past searches. When a user typed “CNFDI” into Google.fr, the first result that showed in the “suggestion” drop-down was “CNFDI arnaque”, which translates as “CNFDI scam”.

The French court originally agreed with Google’s claim that these search terms are generated automatically, by an algorithm that is based on user search behaviour. However, after months of decreased interest in CNFDI and a drop in revenue, the court sided with the institution and told Google to remove the word.

Google hasn’t been having a great time in Europe lately. Last year a Dutch website was sued by a BMW dealer that is was showing as “bankrupt”, due to the Google algorithm linking the two together. Last month the French government suggested that Google be taxed every time a user clicks on one of their ads and last week a German minister accused Google of being too powerful and a “giant monopoly” that should either become more transparent or face legal action.