I’m very much captivated by your attempt to understand individual relationships within a public to make up this idea of community. This goes beyond PR’s traditional attempt to go simply comprehend a publics relationship to the media. I think there is something completely ironic with the fact that society has a desire for the nostalgic. How much of PR’s previous school of thought should be completely abandoned? Or highly integrated? For example, how far should PR practitioners separate ourselves from the idea of a “target audience”?

I’m happy to hear that public relations agencies are using new tools to create and maintain relationships with clients. You asked, “How far can we push social media’s ability to transcend the limitations of geographic proximity and bring people together in one conversation, regardless of where they are in the world?”

I just wrote a blog post about the social network application called Foursquare, which enables users to “check in” via their mobile phones to venues all across the city. It uses geo-tagging abilities to suggest new restaurants and bars to try in the neighbourhood, and facilitates social networking on a new level. I’m intrigued by the idea of using social networking applications like Foursquare and Twitter to develop relationships with clients/useful contacts/strangers instead of more traditional methods of PR like you mentioned.

Aaron, I’m going to have to agree with Joe. I’m a huge fan of the Edelman team and the work they’re doing, approach they’re taking and individuals like Rick, David Armano, Steve, Salima, Rachel, Stephan, etc in Canada/US and UK.

Edelman looms large for me because of people like Steve Rubel, Rick Murray and Phil Gomes. On top of that, Richard Edelman strikes me as a kindred soul in having avoided being swallowed by one of the holding companies. He’s carved out his own path, which took his company into social media long before others took it seriously.

Congrats on getting Jeremy, though. Good land.