My notes from PR, Social Networking And Blogging In Practice

Yesterday I spoke at and Nixon McInnes had a stand at PR Week's 'PR, Social Networking And Blogging' event.

The speaking line up was unusually good - it's normal at an event like this to have 2 or 3 corkers, and then some middling talks and some downright death by powerpoint and lack of passion-ers. From where I sat there was a much better split there yesterday.

I also met two twitterers, both client side, which in itself is a great thing - the Twitter-fam grows: Jenny Bee and Kerryatdell.

I took particular heart from what the many client speakers were saying and how bang on and Cluetrained up it all was. Woo hoo - the client community is well and truly on board now.

Here are the few factoids I noted:

• Telegraph online gets 1,000 - 2,000 comments per day coming in
• Blogflux - mentioned as blog tools to investigate
• Timesonline spend £70k per week on advertising the website (whoah)
• Evidence to show the change from our media consumption as 6 am - 9 am and then 7 pm - 10 pm to all day through with 60% of social networking happening during the day, so it's not about a few key windows of consumption but a more even spread of 'always on'-ness
• 'Flat Earth News' was recommended as a book
• 40% of senior decision makers want 'consumer insight' from the blogosphere

Some other observations:

• Most social media talks have too many massive numbers in them "300 million blogs are added EVERY SINGLE DAY" (sigh). These are shitty, irresponsible fear-inducing tactics from the industry community and clients deserve a little more respect than that.
• Most social media talks gloss over things that most clients don't yet have a decent handle on - e.g. 'all of this is powered by RSS..and yada yada'. In my mid-afternoon slot I asked the 200 attendees 'how many of you use RSS and understand how it works in principle?' - about 15 hands went up. I asked 'who knows what a widget is'. Same. This is not patronising, these are real people who know *other stuff*. Our job is to teach them the new. Don't assume, Mrs/Mr Speaker...
• Bloggers are not Martians - some of the clients to or about 'bloggers' were hilarious, as if they were aliens, an entirely different species. LOL. A blog post on this alone will follow :)

If you were there and we didn't get to meet, drop me an email (email address below my pic).

If you did and hope to never see me again, I understand. I'm sorry about the '3 pairs of pants' remark.

Comments

[Jenny Brown]

I liked your talk/presentation/workshop thing. So, thanks for that.

I wrote up some notes from the day here.

[Flemming Madsen]

Great notes,

Thanks Will

[Rob]

I was there too, wasn't a bad day at all. I could really have done with everyone above me in the organisation being there too, so I could avoid all these 'but what if someone writes something bad about us' questions. Interestingly, I did a search this morning and found a post on a blog about our company, that our press team had (quite obviously) tried to counter by being 'fake people'. Unfortunately 2 apparently different people, but with the same IP address. Ooops.

Re: bloggers - the general opinion here is that message boards and blogs are for weirdos and geeks with no social life. Obviously these opinions are from people who've never bothered to have a look around at what's out there.

[Will McInnes]

Hey Jenny, thanks for your notes too.
Flemming, yo.
Rob, I know what you mean old chum. Tis often the way with these kinda things. This is why people keep writing about innovation starting at the edges and edge competitions and grassroots innovation etc etc. Essentially because the hierarchy and centreground of an organisation is usually so committed to the status quo that pushing through change is nigh on impossible. So where does this leave us?

1. It is better to beg forgiveness than ask permission - wanky i know, but i think you should just start making changes, start doing small pilots and tests

2. Get me to brainwash your seniors. I can hypnotise them with my webby ways and say everything you have been saying, but irritatingly because i am an outside 'expert' they will believe it. Gah!!@! ;-)

[Rob]

Cheers Will - I'm trying. I work in internal comms so we're going to implement a lot of this stuff internally anyway. I've also passed on my thoughts to my manager from yesterday, along with a big note at the end saying how crap we are about things, and how we should be doing this stuff NOW. And yes, if I can get you a booking out of it I'll shout...;)

[Will McInnes]

Hey Rob - I'm sure you have, but have you seen the Melcrum stuff, and also (not sure if as relevant) the Ragan Communications stuff. There's loads of 'social media for internal communications' bits floating around. Good luck.

[Rob]

Yep - some good stuff by Ark Group too, if slightly dry.

[Carrie]

Hi,
I was there too. Thought the day was brilliant and inspiring - really opened my eyes to lots of stuff I hadn't even thought of and now my brain is buzzing with how best to start doing stuff and getting a particular company I do work for to buy into it. I think your so right about people's levels of knowledge - most of the people I know, including me (most of us in the 30+ bracket)know we are just scratching at the surface and frankly are a bit frightened by it all. It's probably the same as how my mum feels when she tries to text....
Anyway, enough rambling - great day, great presentations, great food for thought. Thanks.

[Helen Aspell]

I love the cluetrain stuff. If only people inside our org, both those upstairs and everyone else, would try and get it; ho hum. To see what happens when you try and open up for comments and all hell break loose take a look here www.southampton.wordpress.com. And yes we didn't do this blind!