When companies lay off employees, the work they performed doesn’t magically evaporate. Those left behind are expected to take up the slack. The stomach-turning phrase usually associated with assuming the work of your now-unemployed colleagues is “do more with less.”

Finding yourself in this position was bad enough 10 or 15 years ago. After all, few of us were strolling into the office at 9 a.m., leaving at 5 p.m., and taking no work home with us. The stress and pressure of having to assume even more responsibility when you’re already pedal-to-the-metal, jamming to get everything done in 14 hours a day, can be overwhelming.

But today, when communicators are also trying to figure out social media and integrate it into their work, the challenge seems even more daunting.

That was the message I got recently from several communicators when I gave a presentation on how social media fits into a corporate communications environment. The communications staff at this company had suffered a 25% reduction; those who remain are already stretched as thin as they can get. Where, they wondered, will they find the time to do the additional work associated with a social media effort?

Fortunately, I have good news. Adopting social media can actually make it easier to do more with less. If you take a strategic approach, you can reallocate to social media some of the work you have been doing using less efficient tools and channels.

In this regard, social media is like any other technology. Its adoption is spurred by the fact that it makes it easier to do things you’ve been doing all along with older, less nimble technologies. As Jared Spool put it when I interviewed him more than a decade ago, new technologies will succeed only if they can do one of three things: solve a problem, improve a process, or let you do something you’ve never dreamed possible before the technology was introduced.

If it can’t do one of these three things, why would anyone use it?

The first time I heard the case for reallocating old tasks to social media, it was from the CEO of computer company who had received a letter from his board of directors expressing their concern for the time he was spending on his blog. His reply to them: He was spending no more time communicating than he had before he began blogging. The blog had simply replaced some phone calls, speeches, meetings, letters, and other channels that he had been using before he discovered blogs.

John C. Havens (my co-author on Tactical Transparency) and I heard similar tales from other CEOs we interviewed for the book. Michael Hyatt, for example, the president and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, explained how he addressed an error about the publisher’s editorial policies that ran in Publisher’s Weekly. It would have taken hours to negotiate a correction, he said, which would have run deep in the paper, a week after the original error appeared, and would occupy about an inch next to some display ad. It took far less time to simply report the error on his blog. The correction reached all the right people and what could have been a reputational crisis evaporated in a matter of hours.

Here are some other ways you can embrace social media and spend less time than it took you to do things in the days before social media:

Monitoring

PR academics call it “environmental scanning,” the process of keeping your finger on the pulse of references to your organization, industry, products, people, and issues. Setting up a listening post using social media tools (with RSS serving as the infrastructure) will require a one-time investment of time, but after that keeping tabs on what they’re saying about you will take a few minutes a day. The scary-smart Marshall Kirkpatrick offers just one approach to achieving this kind of monitoring nirvana in a post on ReadWriteWeb.

Reach the press

Multiple studies support the fact that mainstream media has glommed onto social media. There are lists of journalists who are on Twitter (for example, here’s a list of journalists just from the Vancouver Sun. You can let reporters with whom you routinely work know you’re on Twitter, then link to the online version of any news you release. Since those journalists have opted in to follow you, the attention they’ll pay to your content will be better than normal (assuming you’re producing content that’s truly useful).

But you can still use older social media to reach reporters. At The Mayo Clinic, Syndication and Social Media Manager Lee Aase set up the Mayo Clinic Newsblog using the free WordPress.com hosted service. For a small fee, he’s able to map the site to the Clinic’s domain. Tweaking of the CSS code has let him skin the blog with the Mayo design scheme. He posts news items here, along with video—usually of doctors talking about new research—that he shoots with a Flip video camera and uploads to the Clinic’s channel on YouTube. The stories get picked up, since it’s easy to subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed, and the videos have been embedded on sites like The Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog.

Bypass the press

Michael Hyatt is hardly the only person to reach an audience directly. Organizations are no longer constrained to the press as a channel to reach publics, and any number of companies have figured this out. A New York Times column by Thomas Friedman provoked a response from General Motors, but the company’s communicators were unable to negotiate a letter to the editor with the paper’s op-ed editor. Instead, they published the letter—along with more detailed explanations—to their FYI blog, which received widespread coverage and succeeded in getting GM’s message out—probably more effectively than a traditional letter to the editor would have.

Get your thought leaders quoted

Most PR professionals are expected to get their companies or clients ink (real or virtual). One way to do this when the company or client has no news worth reporting is to ensure its thought leaders are go-to resources for reporters covering other stories.

Social media has made the task a lot easier than it used to be. Several companies have provided a blogging platform to their thought leaders, like EDS’s “Next Big Thing blog, authored by the company’s fellows. As their observations get traction in the industry, the media covering the industry begins to follow the posts and then reach out to those individuals when they need to interview someone or get a good quote.

Even easier is subscribing to Peter Shankman’s Help a Reporter Out (HARO). Reporters, bloggers, and others seeking people to interview submit their queries to Peter, who blasts them out three times a day in a simple email. If your company or client has someone ideally suited to meet a reporter’s needs, just follow the instructions to reach out to that reporter.

Conduct research

Putting together most communications requires some research. Getting answers has gotten far easier thanks to social media. During a phone call with a client, I was asked if I knew internal communicators using Microsoft Sharepoint. I tweeted the question and got a dozen positive answers in less than a minute, which I was able to report back to my client.

It gets even better than that. You can put out questions on LinkedIn, which nearly always produces quality answers. And you can check the profile of those who reply in order to assess their qualifications before using their replies. Mahalo offers a similar feature that enables you to offer a monetary “tip” to the best answers, which could motivate the best resource to provide a detailed answer.

Inserting a poll into blog post can be a quick-and-dirty way to get information, while setting up an RSS-based listening post and conducting tag searches of blog search engines can reveal what others have already written about the subject.

Even the comments you get to in response to your blog posts and tweets can prove invaluable. GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz has noted that the comments car enthusiasts leave to his Fastlane blog have proven to be the best intelligence he’s seen in his decades in the auto industry.

Reach key stakeholders

Earlier, I noted that technology succeeds when it lets you improve on what you’re already doing. A recent Forrester report suggests that B2B organizations are poised to embrace social media that closely mirrors the more traditional channels they’re already accustomed to using, like online conferences, exhibitions, and buyer guides. According to the Forrester report, “Social media helps open participation to more people, and many don’t have to be physically present to be involved.”

But social media can help reduce the workload in more ways than those Forrester expects B2B companies to embrace. The Dutch computer executive I mentioned earlier was able to use his blog to reduce the amount of time he spent on individual phone calls, preparing and delivering speeches, attending trade shows, and crafting email. He didn’t completely stop these activities, but was able to reduce them dramatically because the blog served to achieve the goals that previously required the use of these older channels.

Generate leads

If your communication role requires you to produce sales leads, social media can help you, too.

Before it was acquired by Forrester, Jupiter Research produced a podcast associated with each of its reports. The principals involved in the research wold chat about the findings. Listeners subscribed to the podcast series would hear about reports that interested them, leading them to make a purchase decision.

Blogger and podcaster outreach can also grease the lead generation skids. Yesterday, for example, I spent about 10 minutes on “For Immediate Release talking about Forrester’s new study on social media in the business-to-business space. I was able to report on the study because a Forrester rep offered me a copy. While I can’t say how many listeners will order the report, I’ve heard from a few that they plan to.

Find new hires

The recruiting process can be expensive and time-consuming, but social media can reduce some of the pain.

Ernst & Young, for example, turned to Facebook to recruit interns and hew-hires based on the knowledge that 80% of college students in the U.S. have Facebook accounts. They were able to target their advertising to students at the three universities that produce the best accounting graduates. Employees in various types of jobs engaged with prospects in forums to talk about what it was like to be an auditor, for example, or an IT person at Ernst & Young. Students were able to get answers to general questions by interacting with recruiters on the recruiting page’s wall.

Scott Monty, Ford Motor Company’s social media manager, put out the word that he was seeking an employee on Twitter and his own personal blog. Sure beats display ads in newspapers.

Collaborate

Business collaborative efforts can also be improved through social media tools. I was working with one company where a communicator shared that her greatest pain was the review process for the annual report. Twenty executives and others received Word versions of the report text. Each one made revisions using the “track changes” and then sent the document back to her. She then had to reconcile 20 different sets of changes and produce a single document. In a number of instances, multiple reviewers made different changes to the same text, complicating this reconciliation process.

She then sent the revised document out to the same group and repeated the same process—multiple times.

To resolve this problem, she moved the text to a wiki, provided password access to the 20 reviewers, then sent them each an email notifying them of the document’s availability and giving them two weeks to have at it before she sent the finished document to the CEO for final input.

More reallocation

If you’re using social media to ease the burden of work that used to require the use of other, less effective tools, share it here. The more ways to use these tools to relieve work burdens rather than complicate them, the more likely communicators will be to embrace social media even if they face the time crunch so common to those working during this tough recessionary times.