Delivering the New PR: thoughts

According to Technorati, the blogosphere has doubled in size since we held our Making the News Conference in Sunderland last November, and yes, I trotted out that graph for Delivering the New PR in London yesterday. Interestingly, the size of our audience had doubled over the same period, with over 150 delegates there to hear Tom Murphy, Neville Hobson, Elizabeth Albrycht, Chris Rushton (above)  and me... 

As before I began by asking a series of questions to see who was using various forms of social softwares, and there was a clear increase in those using podcasts, photosharing and RSS from Manchester in February. At the same time, we had a significant number of delegates from major organisations and big name agencies who were still finding their bearings in what they recognised as a challenging new environment. Interestingly, we put on a blogging basics session before the conference proper and at least half the delegates were there an hour early to watch Tom and Neville give a practical demonstration.   

What struck me most about the presentations was they way everyone's thinking had moved forward, that concepts that seemed a little tenuous in November are demonstrably coming together into a more coherent framing. From the outset we have billed the conferences as explaining the New PR and then, one by one, explained why it is not a 'new' PR after all, but a way of expressing traditional PR values and techniques in a changing environment.

I began by asking delegates to listen to the presentations from a perspective that accepted markets as conversations and suggested this should be seen in terms of the fading of 'command and control' PR, and to continually relate what they heard to both external and internal communications. The changes we talked about were, in part, driven by technology, but more about the implications of sharing information, of peer recommendation and what a Stuttgart speaker termed 'branding by stars' - that today organisational reputation is increasingly expressed through star ratings driven by customers on sites ranging from Amazon to eBay. A high proportion of delegates agreed some of their purchasing decisions were based on customer recommendations, often from like-minded peers they had never met.

At the same time, when the panel was asked if launching a blog was still in itself newsworthy, although most of the team instinctively felt the answer was no, that the way to get noticed was to have exciting content, we still agreed that in some parts of the UK media, yes, just beginning to blog was indeed newsworthy.

To emphasise the point Stephen Davies and I were both interviewed about the conference for BBC Radio Newcastle, and a vox pop on the streets of Sunderland found no difficulty in finding a stream of people who hadn't a clue what a blog was...