Every now and then, someone digs up the dead who-should-own-social-media horse so we can all beat on it for a while more. While I question the notion of anyone “owning” social media in an organization, it’s worth considering where responsibility for coordination of a company’s social media efforts should reside. Yes, social media at its best is organic, but inconsistencies in its application can make a company look inept and at best; at worst, it can send dramatically different messages that could damage the company’s reputation.

I’ve always come down on the side of public relations assuming that responsibility. Building relationships is the bread and butter of a day’s work for good PR people. Only the tools of social media are new. Marketing and advertising have traditionally been one-way, top-down affairs.

But now somebody’s gone and put some numbers to where the function actually does reside. A survey conducted by email marketing organization StrongMail has found that PR is responsible for social media in only 9% of the organizations represented by study respondents. Nearly a third said it was a shared responsibility among mutliple departments but a shade more—35%—said direct marketing managed social media in their companies.

This perhaps isn’t much of a surprise considering the survey was aimed at direct marketing customers of StrongMail (about 500 direct marketing executives responded), but these are the numbers we’ve got until somebody undertakes a more comprehensive analysis.

Only 5% said their companies had dedicated social media departments.

I do like the cross-functional governance model, which works astoundingly well in intranet management, but these tend to be best for big-picture planning, not dealing with the day-to-day minutiae of a company’s presence in everything from Twitter and Facebook to company blogs and responses to posts and comments on other blogs. You also have to decide which department will chair the cross-functional team, an administrative task to be sure, but not an unimportant one.

I found it a bit troubling that direct marketers responding to the survey said they see social media as a direct marketing channel. They’re planning significant increases in their social media spending in the last half of the year. If you think getting an unwanted press release pushed at you through a social media channel is irritating, wait until you start getting the kind of crap send to you through other channels by direct marketers. Of course, some creative, savvy direct marketers will figure out that it’s all about conversation with customers about things they care about, but most, I fear, will just find ways to send via social media the same godawful fliers that show up in your analog mailbox.

That’s inevitable, since 66% of those responding to the survey say they’re going to integrate email marketing and social media; 48% have already set a strategy for doing so. Of marketers planning to increase budgets in 2009, 83% will increase their email marketing spend while 62% will boost their social media budgets. This tells me that email marketing isn’t nearly as dead as a lot of social media pundits believe it is; while they’re dancing on email’s grave, their inboxes will be continue to be flooded.

To its credit, StrongMail (which announced a new social media “framework” in tandem with the study results) sees direct email marketing as a means of driving engagement in social networks by “alerting members of new content and updates.” But the study results suggest more direct marketers are interested in figuring out how to measure the results of direct marketing campaigns using social media (55%) than in figuring out how to make sure their efforts actually achieve business goals (48%). There’s strategic thinking for you.

Of course, even though the best PR practitioners are focused on relationship-building—the key to effective social media engagement—not every PR department embraces that view of public relations. Ultimately, whoever in your organization is most attuned to building relationships, and best equipped to figure out how to tap into social media to build those relationships, is probably the best bet for coordinating the company’s online engagement efforts.