PR Week

Last week I spoke at the PR Week Social Networking & Blogging in Practice conference at the Thistle Marble Arch. Unusually, I managed to get to the whole event. Which was quite interesting. Here are some rambling notes to self.

First off, I was surprised at how many people there were attending. It was certainly one of the larger conferences I’ve spoken at in recent years. This seems to have caught the organisers by surprise as the room was very full – not enough tables for everyone – and with low ceilings and no stage it was difficult to both hear and see.

Then there was the audience profile. I seemed to be the only person talking about how this impacts inside an organisation – all the other slots were about the external impact, which seemed to make the event unbalanced. At the start of my session I asked for a show of hands on who was interested or working in employee communications. Only about a quarter of the room put their hands up. I think that in itself is quite interesting as I’ve blogged before about blending and how it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between inside and outside.

I picked up some nice quotes from some of the speakers…
“Happy customers blog, angry customers blog louder.”
“Blogs are powered by emotion.”
“Bloggers aren’t shy.”
“Conversation is king – content is just the stuff people talk about”
“The conversation is happening without our permission.”

There was quite a lot of discussion about corporate blogs. I’m not convinced there can be such a thing as a corporate blog. By their very nature, blogs are personality driven. Without the personality, it becomes just a publishing channel with Forum type functionality. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it is substantially different in nature to a true blog.

The most interesting part of the day was the panel session – interesting because the panel members were all representing ‘old media’ – and had very old media views. For example, newspapers using blogs just as an outlet for content that doesn’t make the daily printed version and so on (that’s a niche channel, not a blog). The panel could have been much more lively if there’d been a blogger who wasn’t a journalist, or an ex-journalist with a stake in the traditional.

Having said that, one of the panelists - Sara Lloyd from Pan MacMillan talked about “digital natives” and “digital immigrants”. I found that a great way of thinking about Generation Y and the rest of it.

And there were a lot of references to ‘mainstream’, when people were actually talking about traditional media. I wonder when the number of people reading and writing blogs becomes such that the blogosphere becomes the mainstream?

The afternoon included a great session by Will McInnes on the practicalities of blogging. It was great fun, and perfectly illustrated the point that many people in our industry talk about the new social media world, but few really understand it. Will does.

All in all, whilst I think we’ve come a long way I the UK, we’ve a very long way to go before we understand that the old notions of control are breaking down and the PR people have to forget about spinning stories, but joining conversations.