Todd Defren of SHIFT communications and the PR Squared blog highlights an important issue for all agencies: Have one or two ‘specialists’ isn’t enough if your entire agency is involved in a discipline – in this case Digital & Emerging Media PR.

I’m a big believer that in order to really understand social media you have to be engaged in it. That doesn’t mean that everyone at your agency should have a blog, but several probably should. And they should all have profiles with LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook or other social media sites. Have everyone on your team at least try Twitter for a couple of weeks as well.

Some team members will go through the motions and then let their online presence die. But others, upon being exposed to this world, will hang in there and continue to explore, eventually becoming experts in their own right.

Whether a team member only gets a cursory understanding or develops into a true ‘digital native,’ the benefits for the agency, and the clients, will be evident.