mediations

EuroBlog Ghent: The Movie

EuroBlog 2007 was held in the splendid city of Ghent, Belgium. Here are some impressions, including exhibits from the Design Museum. The music is by the Esbjorn Svensson Trio, which I happened to listen on the trip.

EuroBlog Symposium, Ghent

Back from Ghent and what I hope was a very successful EuroBlog Symposium. Keynote speaker Neville Hobson, and roundtable members Guillaume du Gardier and Philippe Borremans have already blogged some impressions. Philippe has also posted a video interview he did with EuroBlog lead researchers Ansgar Zerfass, Swaran Sandhu and myself, which you can also find on You Tube.

The Symposium was part of a longer conference at Artevelde Hogeschool marking the contribution to PR education made by Jos Willems and it was very enjoyable occassion - thanks in no small measure to the efforts of Anne-Marie Cotton and Serge (No Copy) Cornelus. Many thanks to you and all your colleagues.

The line-up featured a stimulating mix of academics and practitioners, with Ansgar setting social software into a broad theoretical farmework, Neville opening people's eyes to the potential of Second Life and other virtual worlds, with practitioners including Marieke van Zuien and Mark van der Wolf from Lewis.

There was an interesting range of nationalities in the line-up, including speakers from Belgium, Germany, Switzerland Italy, Netherlands, Lithuania and the UK. My Euprera colleague Toni Muzi Falconi was among those blogging about the conference; I'll add links from other bloggers as I find them.

My contribution included a presentation which tried to argue that the New PR is sufficiently different to existing models to require new theory to explain its workings. Others, including roundtable chairman Jon White, regard social softwares as a technological innovation that may become part of PR routine but which doesn't change the nature of the discipline.

I am prepared to stick with the view that the evolution we are seeing is cultural as well as technological, and they are bringing fundamental changes to the way society operates. Interestingly, several speakers, including Ansgar but also Peter Mechant of the University of Ghent, saw merit in looking to sociology for insights into what is happening.

I'll go back to my own contribution later, not least because it marked my first serious engagement with Facebook as a PR phenomenon. Facebook has swept like wildfire through Sunderland with the majority of my PR students now hooked.

EuroBlog!!!!

At last! We have just posted a news release and a synopsis of findings from the EuroBlog2007 survey into the impact of social media on PR practice, prior to the Euprera Symposium in Ghent, Begium, from Friday.

It makes for fascinating reading, and clearly shows social media moving into the mainstream for comms practitioners across Europe.

Yes, some people are still sceptical but for me the results suggest that a significant number of practitioners are going beyond the 'it's new so it must be good' response of EuroBlog 2006 to a more mature and sophisticated understanding of social media which recognises the potential for listening as being at least as important as the opportunity blogs and vlogs offer for shouting out messages in trendy new ways.

I am very much looking forward to hearing what heavyweight thinkers like Neville Hobson, Jon White, Guillaume du Gardier, Philippe Borremans and my EuroBlog colleague Ansgar Zerfass have to say about it... More posts to follow.

EuroBlog2007 starts today

The EuroBlog2007 survey into the impact of social media on Public Relations practice in Europe begins today. If you are a European practitioner please complete the questionnaire at www.euroblog2007.org/survey (it will take about ten minutes) and please do all you can to encourage colleagues to do so, too.

Clearly, the more people who respond the more useful the results will be so please link to the survey from your blog, and link and comment on the EuroBlog 2007 blog.

As last year, we are working with partners in each Europeran country and there still opportunities for people to act as country co-ordinators, organising a range of publicity activities to reach as many people as possible. This is particularly important in countries where professional associations are less well represented.

If you would like to be involved in EuroBlog 2007, email me!

EuroBlog 2007: How you can help

The next EuroBlog survey will go online in November and the research team is looking for partners to help with publicity across Europe.

We are looking for people to help us attract as many responses as possible from European PR and communications practitioners by using a full range of publicity techniques. And we are also keen from anyone who wants to contribute case studies, or edit or contribute to a country-specific page on the EuroBlog wiki, or to contribute papers to a symposium we will hold in Ghent, Belgium, in March 2007.   

EuroBlog 2006 was a great success and gave researchers and practitioners the first clear picture of how weblogs and other social media is impacting on PR/comms practice in Europe. The research team believes there has been significant change over the last year and it is important that we track, record and interpret that change.

If you are interested in contributing in anyway to our work please contact Philip Young straight away. 

Euprera Congress 2006: Theory, Practice and Myth

Just back from the Euprera Congress, held in Carlisle, and run by Julia Jahansoozi and colleagues at the University of Central Lancashire. There was a lot of good stuff, but the PR presentation that caught my eye was outside the body of the conference. On Friday night delegates were taken by coach to the Rheged Discovery Centre for a gala dinner, preceded by a big screen showing of a film, Rheged: The Movie.

Projected on a screen said to be the size of six double-decker buses, it was pretty spectacular stuff, lots of swooping helicopter shots of the Lake District, held together by a narrative that featured a boy searching for his roots with the help of a book and talisman handed down by his grandfather, and guided by a gypsy girl.

Hence lots of flashbacks to epic battles between club wielding Angles and Saxons, a bit of pillage, and rather curious intervention from William Wordsworth. Maybe my education is lacking but I had never heard of the Kingdom of Rheged or King Urien (pictured), and nor, for fairly obvious reasons, had most of the delegates who had gathered from all over Europe.

The trouble was, by the end, they had even less idea of the history of the region than beforehand. Brendan Quayle's script veered from pseudo-documentary to children's drama, and I spent quite a portion of the evening struggling to answer questions about its historical accuracy.

The film was intended as PR for the Lake District, and with so many images of spectacular countryside to draw on, it could hardly fail to impress. So why, then, create a narrative and myth that willfully blurred truth and fiction? Presumably the feeling was that for today's audiences history needs to be interpreted and amplified - and anyway it was good, escapist entertainment...

The Congress focused on various aspects of strategic communications but, for me, the movie offered some interesting insights into PR effects.

IAOC Brussels

Here's an unusual picture of star presenter Neville Hobson; he's wearing a tie and he is not saying anything.

The tie was in deferrence to the host, IBM, Brussels. More importantly, he was listening not talking because his co-presenter Shel Holtz was in full flow - Skyping in from the USA. That this was straightforward, effective and do-able provides just another reminder of how quickly things are changing...

FIR duo Hobson and Holtz were the keynote speakers at the International Association of Online Communicators conference, Where Content Meets Technology, hosted by IBM PR manager IAOC founding member Philippe Borremans (left).  I was there to talk about the results of the EuroBlog2006 survey into the impact of weblogs on PR practice, on behalf of fellow researchers Ansgar Zerfass and Swaran Sandhu.

One of the challenges for the IAOC is to how to stay focused and carve out a clear identity; put simply, who isn't an online communicator these days? As Guillaume Du Gardier argued in a useful roundtable, in 2006 'there is no such thing as offline PR...'.  Anyway, Philippe and his team put together an eclectic mix of commercial, academic and practitioner presenters that took the conversation in a wide range of different directions. Their speed-dating format (see earlier post) meant delegates got a little bit of a lot of ideas; it was a bit like a buffet where you fill yourself with taster starters and may not quite have room for the main course. Like most delegates I suspect, I learnt most from speakers touching on areas I know little about, including Romina Rosada, vice president of client and media relations for the newsmarket, a company which sells on video content for an impressive range of clients, to 7,800 newsrooms in 140 countries . Apparently the UN is Newsmarket's biggest customer and Romina gave an example of how Unicef used Newsmarket to push video that helped refocus media attention on the plight of children caught up in the Asian tsunami.

Philippe made a good case the view that videoblogs are the next big thing - especially when they become searchable, using RocketBoom as an example.

As ever, networking at the bar was hugely valuable. It was good to meet Guillaume du Gardier, of Edelman and PR Thoughts, (pictured multi-tasking) who passed on some fascinating insights into the French blogosphere, and a new(ish) entrant into the PR blogging fraternity, Pieter De Wit.

UK academics will be pleased to hear that Alison Theaker was there, picking up ideas for the next edition of her excellent PR Handbook (see essential reads, right).

One of the drawbacks of the conference formula was that I didn't hear the other Friday morning presenters, but I did catch Rod Nicolson from PR Newswire, explaining the changing role of the press release, and Andrew Muir making an impassioned sales pitch for Vocus evaluation software, under the title PR Measurement to make your CEO smile. I think there is a whole conference to be devoted to measuring PR in the new world of social software; impressive as Vocus appeared to be as a measuring device, I left still not sure how it - or any other package - can deliver effective qualitative evaluation in such a diffuse and subjective area.

Thanks to Philippe and colleagues for the invite - and good luck for next year. Here's a final pic of Alison Theaker and Suzanne Fitzgerald of Rowan University with IAOC president Don Dunnington.   

Speed-dating at IAOC Brussels

I'm in Brussels for the IAOC conference. Some interesting stuff, not least the format. Instead of presenting papers in the usual way, speakers have 20 minutes to talk to a table of delegates, then everyone swaps to the next attraction. You don't necessarily get a great deal of detail but you do get a useful taster of a lot of stuff to spark follow up chats.

Organiser Philippe Borremans is blogging live (and Serge Cornelus is explaining to me the mysteries of the azerty keyboard)....

Blogging in Bucharest

Just back fom Romania and presenting the EuroBlog 2006 findings at the University of Bucharest Faculty of Letters conference, Identity, crosscultural communication, globalism: Contemporary trends in public relations, advertising and the media.

Organised by Adela Rogojinaru it brought together some fascinating papers, from the distinguished semiotics expert Solomon Marcus (pictured here with Adela), insights into the developing practice of PR in a country very much in transition, to strong contributions from fellow UK speakers Sue Wolstenholme and Jon White, and Arlette Bouzon, from the University of Toulouse. 

For me, one of the highlights was a presentation by Dr. Sabina Ispas, of Institutul de Etnologie şi Folclor “C. Brăiloiu” whose paper Dracula - Instrument de manipulare a identitatii nationale looked at the conflicts and tensions for Romanian national identity surrounding the Dracula myth (more on this shortly).

My contribution included a presentation of EuroBlog findings, on behalf of Ansgar Zerfass and Swaran Sandhu. In a later session I gave some interpretations of our work, and was joined by a PhD student who has made a study of the Romanian blogosphere which deserves wide circulation.

As ever I asked delegates whether they had heard of blogs, whether they wrote blogs, listened to podcasts or shared pictures through social software. In each case the proportion who had was lower than in the UK, with podcasting in particular still to make much impression, but I suspect the picture will change pretty quickly.

Thanks to Adela and her team for a wonderful few days. I was particularly impressed by the students we met, as assistants, as discussion participants and as translators.

And on a personal note it was great to meet a Romanian blogger who certainly is well up there with the big names of PR blogging; thank you for a great evening, Constantin Basturea!      

IAOC Brussels

I am looking forward to contributing to the first European Conference on Online Communications organized by the International Association of Online Communicators in Brussels on June 15 and 16.

Keynote speakers will be Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz, co-hosts of For Immediate Release, and it will include a panel debate on "Public Relations, Bloggers and the Media" with Guillaume Du Gardier, Director Online Communications Europe from Edelman PR and a representative from Reporters Sans Frontieres.

Here's the line-up:

• An analysis of the Usability of Corporate Online Media Rooms by Dr. Lynn Zoch, Associate Professor, School of Communication, University of Miami
• Managing the Online Crisis: How Public Relations Practitioners Target Web Logs and Wikis by Ms. Marcia Watson, Ph.D. Student, University of Miami, School of Communication
• An Assessment of Factors Affecting Dropout of Students Enrolled in the Online New College Bachelor's Degree Program by Dr. Jeff Hoyer, Associate Professor, Department of Communications, The University of Tennessee
• Opportunities and Limitations of Web Logs: Views of PR and Journalism by Dr. Serra Gorpe, Ebru Ulusoy, Istanbul University, School of Communication
• International Distance Courses with Videoconferencing: Designs, Benefits and Challenges by Dr. Kevin C. Lee, Western Carolina University
• World - class PR Measurement That Will Make Your CFO smile by By Andrew Muir, Managing Director, Vocus Europe Ltd
• The Changing Role of the Press Release by Rod Nicolson, VP of Online Services, PR Newswire
• The Business Case for RSS - Online Content Syndication by Rok Hrastnik, International Internet Director at Studio Moderna
• EuroBlog 2006 Study, Blogging in Europe - major findings by Philip Young, Senior Lecturer in Journalism and Public Relations at the University of Sunderland

More details on Philippe Borremans' Conversation Blog