Kyle Flaherty, this week's Blogger of the Week, writes the Engage In PR blog using insight, lessons learned and horror stories from his nearly 12 years in high-tech public relations, communications and marketing at such well-known purveyors as the Horn Group and Porter Novelli, as well as in-house at BMC.
He started blogging in 2000 as the founder and head of Clipper Communications and he is currently Director of Marketing and Social Media at BreakingPoint Systems and, of course, you can find him on Twitter.  To say that he is bullish on social media in the corporate world in an understatement:

"It is 2008—almost 2009—you should be beyond debating about social media and whether you are actually going to implement any practices," he says. "Instead your business should be knee deep in activities, or at the very least have your plan completely ironed out on how to use social media...Stop thinking about social media as a tool, a program or a one-off activity. Instead you need to recognize that social media is an additional form of communication that must be wrapped into your current marketing and PR plan."

Kyle says he took the position at BreakingPoint and moved his family from Boston to Austin in order to prove the value of social media as a community engagement, lead generation and revenue capture strategy. In November of 2008 he started started to publish the results the BreakingPoint team has seen from social media including return on investment (ROI) and his own measurement of impact of relationships (IOR).

He believes that a good social media strategy is even more important in an economic downturn.  In one of the most-read posts of the last week on SMT--Social media marketers can - and must - prove ROI--he writes:

"The question is not whether you should or shouldn't deploy social media strategy during a recession, this simply isn't smart thinking. Instead, everyone needs to be creating and tracking proof that any and all of their job functions are leading to business and determining how much business they must win in 2009 to succeed. That includes social media. There is no better way to lose a job than to spend all your time telling your boss the company needs a Twitter account versus showing your boss how you directly helped bring in revenue last quarter. Not only can you measure social media against business benchmarks, more importantly you MUST in this economic environment."