Primary Research Group has published Corporate Public Relations Benchmarks, 2013 Edition, ISBN 978-1-57440-212-4.

This 100+ page report looks closely at spending patterns and management practices in public relations of American and Canadian corporations. The report gives detailed data on public relations staffing, budgets, spending on outside public relations firms and consultants, use of press release services, and many other facets of public relations. It gives hard data on how public relations personnel use their staff time, and how they use social media, video, and other emerging technologies. Data is broken out by industry and type of company, as well as for companies with public relations directors and those that handle public relations through a general marketing department. Mean annual revenues for the organizations in the sample was $967 million, and data is broken out for six revenue size categories ranging from less than $10 million to more than $2 billion.

Just a few of the many findings from this report are:

• For the 2011-12 fiscal year, companies in the sample upped their public relations budget to a mean of $387,929, constituting more than a 33 percent increase from the previous year
• 62.26 percent of companies in the sample employ a public relations director or czar to oversee public relations programs and policies
• On average, public relations personnel in companies in the sample devote a mean of 763 hours per year to social media
• 90 percent of companies in the sample have a Facebook account
• Companies in the sample spent a mean of $50,281 in the 2011-12 fiscal year on outside press release services, an 8.7 percent increase from the year before
• Publishing and media companies have, on average, the largest public relations staffs in the sample, employing a mean of 5 PR staff in 2012, nearly double the overall sample mean of 2.76
• Nearly 71 percent of companies in the sample maintain one or more repositories or databases of videos, podcasts, and/or webcasts about the company's products that can be used for marketing purposes

The study is available in print and PDF format for $259.00. Site licenses cost $459.00. To view a table of contents, list of questions, and sample data, or to order a copy of the report, please visit our website at www.PrimaryResearch.com.