The very best PR and organizational communications is, at its core, about building relationships. That should make it the ideal function to coordinate a company’s social media presence. But is the PR business at large ready to assume that kind of role?

Certainly there are people and agencies among the ranks of communicators who have paid attention to the shifts in the communication landscape, who have engaged and learned the requirements for engagement. You can probably rattle of the names of many of them because you read their blogs, listen to their podcasts, follow them in Facebook or on Twitter.

For every practitioner who has come to grips with the new ground rules for communication, there are hundreds, maybe thousands who aren’t there yet. Some of them are even leading agencies. You can find one of those examples on Mark Story’s blog. Mark teaches PR at Georgetown, works as a communicator for a federal government agency, and has a solid resume that includes a stint at Fleishman Hillard.

In his post, Mark registered his amazement at some remarks Lou Capozzi made on Eric Schwartzman’s excellent interview podcast, On the Record Online (OTRO). PRSA—the Public Relations Society of America—named OTRO the official podcast of its annual conference; Capozzi was one of 16 interviews Eric conducted. Capozzi, Chairman Emeritus of Publicis Public Relations and Corporate Communications Group, was at the conference in Detroit to deliver a talk.

Read Mark’s post if you’re interested in his objections to Mr. Capozzi’s remarks. It’s what followed that pertains to this discussion.

The post didn’t attract a huge number of comments—nothing Broganesque—but Jason Falls and Geoff Livingston were among those who responded. Then, 11 days later, Mr. Capozzi himself left a comment. Evidently drawing a conclusion from the limited number of comments, he suggested that nobody ad read Mark’s post, then suggested that the report was on par with a right-wing talk radio host talking about a book he had never read.

It???s pretty clear you weren???t there to hear my talk, because if you had you would never have written this. And it sorrows me to see a fellow public relations professional so willing to shoot his mouth off without bothering to do the research first.

Mr. Capozzi concludes that next time, Mark should attend a talk before criticizing it, although he does so in somewhat less elegant language.

In a follow-up, Mark noted that the post had registered more page views than any other he had written; comments are no measure of readership. More to the point, Mark had stated in his original post that he had not heard the speech. Whether he had or not, though, is not a legitimate point. Mr. Capozzi agreed to the podcast interview and had to know that it would be heard by people—possibly thousands of people, who listen to OTRO but did not attend PRSA’s annual conference. That particular episode of OTRO is a separate entity and the words spoken on the podcast stand on their own. If Mr. Capozzi didn’t feel he could articulate his thoughts within the constraints of the podcast interview, he should have declined or selected a different topic.

Mr. Capozzi compounds his mistakes with an insulting comment that addresses none of the questions Mark raised.

Until the leaders of the communications world come to terms with the realities of social media—its potential impact and the means of engaging it—it won’t be surprising to hear that responsibility for guiding organizations’ social media presence is falling to others.

I was delighted, then, to see the latest step IABC—the International Association of Business Communicators—has taken.

IABC launched its leader blog—IABC Cafe—several years ago. The Cafe has had ups and downs, but was officially retired last week as IABC became the first professional association I’m aware of to introduce a portal to staff and leader blogs.

In fact, there aren’t a lot of companies with such gateways to employee-produced content. Sun Microsystems has one. Microsoft and IBM have them, as does Thomas Nelson Publishers. These pages generally list the most recent posts to the family of blogs, along with the most popular posts. That’s pretty much the approach the new IABC Cafe has taken. With a featured post on the opening tab, the last featured post on the second tab, and recent staff and board posts on the third. There’s also a list of blogs that have been updated most recently; 11 staff and board blogs were listed the last time I looked, including 2008-09 Chair Barbara Gibson’s excellent Connecting the I’s and the new blog from President Julie Freeman, Julie’s Corner.

I do wish there was a complete list of staff and board blogs, but this aggregation of leadership content is just the kind of effort professional associations should be making. It allows the voices of the board and staff to be heard, for members and others to connect directly with them, for members of IABC and members of the communications profession to conduct a conversation with the association’s leadership.

While the bulk of the communications world plays social media catch-up, it’s heartening to see one of the associations representing the interests of the profession leading by example.