This morning, the New York Times blog “You’re the boss” included an entry written by Jennifer Walzer, founder and chief executive of Backup My Info!. In the post, Jennifer offers her advice to other small business owners who want to get ink and suggests that it’s not necessary to hire a PR firm. She highlights some fantastic tips and I certainly don’t disagree with most of what she says. In fact, she even emphasizes some media relations best practices that I’ve seen some PR practitioners ignore. But in the comments section, a fellow PR professional makes an excellent point – many people in leadership positions at small companies need to focus on running their business and don’t have the time or bandwidth to add PR to their day-to-day responsibilities.

PR professionals (hopefully!) are strong writers and have a certain drive or personality that pushes us to think creatively, strategically and tactically in a way that helps us pursue a variety of angles…with a variety of reporters/editors/producers…for a variety of possible stories or coverage opportunities. In short, we’re good at what we do, or else we wouldn’t be doing it! Check out some of our case studies if you don’t believe me.

CEOs and other executives at small companies should be involved in PR, sure. Heck, they are usually the best when it comes to telling their company’s story with real passion. But saying that small companies should just handle their own PR programs completely is like saying that they should also forgo graphic designers as long as they have Photoshop. When you need to put together a basic flyer, by all means, try your hand at it and save on the expense. But for logo designs, website layouts, creative graphics…you hire the experts for a reason. The same concept applies to PR.

That’s just my take. What’s yours?

Last month, I read a post on Webware about two Australian girls who were trapped in a storm drain. Instead of dialing the Australian equivalent of 911, they asked for help by using their cell phones to update their Facebook profiles. Nearly a month later, I’m still floored by the absurdity of the situation. Thankfully, the girls were rescued, but I continue to wonder why, with a perfectly good cell phone in hand, they didn’t think to dial for help the conventional way.

I’m quite certain that in the case of an emergency, my first instinct would be to dial 911; but the post did get me thinking about my own reliance on Facebook and other social networking tools. Am I, like the two girls, becoming too dependent on social networking sites? Are we, as communications professionals, turning to Facebook, Twitter and the like too often for research and pitching?

Undoubtedly the integration of such tools into our work is necessary and valuable. More and more, I personally am using Facebook and Twitter to connect with writers and editors, to share news about my clients and to stay on top of industry happenings. These days, I even find myself reading most news headlines on Twitter, pulling me away some from the news outlets I used to frequent. I think this is a normal progression in keeping up with the times, but every once in a while, I also think it’s worthwhile to take a step back to look at the bigger picture and ask ourselves how our use of social networking tools is (or isn’t) making us better at our jobs and leading to results for our clients. The story of the girls in the drain reminded me of this.

TheElectricWaffle provided some additional food for thought on this topic a while back: if social media failed to exist tomorrow, what impact would it have on your work? I’m truly interested to hear your thoughts.

In the meantime, as social networking continues to be an integral part of our daily lives, I hope we won’t forget to use the many public relations tools we have in our arsenal; social networking sites constitute just one variety.

Oh, and if you find yourself in an emergency, please just call 911.