Half a day down. Lunch has been served. And now I’m looking forward to the afternoon sessions.
The second half of the day promises to get off to a strong start with a presentation from Jeremiah Owyang, Community marketing: Turn executives into powerful evangelists for the company message.
I’ll close out the formal sessions with a workshop led by Charles Pizzo, who promises tips for Online PR to Improve your net newsroom.
I’m heading over to the conference in a few minutes. There are a number of sessions I hope to attend and post about.
Ragan has organized the sessions into four tracks. I plan to follow the Social Media track with a brief crossover into the media relations track for a session with blogging journalists.
First up this morning, Robert Scoble is delivering the keynote address. His topic: Naked conversations: How blogs are transforming your public relations—and your business.
Next, Jen McClure, Executive Director of the Society for New Communications Research, will tackle The new world of PR: Identify and engage the new influencers.
The morning will end with Shel Holtz’s presentation on Mixing podcasting and PR: How the audio revolution can support clients’ objectives.
If the Wi-Fi feed is good, I’ll live blog. Otherwise, I’ll post at the end of the day.
I’m heading to Chicago September 20 to 22 for the 10th annual Ragan Strategic Public Relations Conference.
I’m hoping to get together while I’m there with other public relations bloggers. If you plan to be in Chicago this week, please let me know and we can arrange to meet up.
See you Chicago.
Public relations practitioners in Toronto and Ottawa have a new monthly forum to discuss social media from a PR perspective.
The Ottawa meetup is called Third Monday. The Toronto group is called Third Tuesday. And, you guessed it, they’ll generally be held on Mondays or Tuesdays.
A great group of bloggers and social media enthusiasts have come together to get these meetups going. Joining me in organizing the groups are David Jones, Terry Fallis, Ed Lee and Chris Clarke in Toronto and Colin McKay, Brendan Hodgson and Ian Ketcheson in Ottawa.
We believe that public relations practitioners have a unique perspective on social media. We look at social media as an extension of the conversations we have always had with journalists and stakeholders to now include a much larger group of citizen journalists and interested people whose online conversations lead to the formation of communities of interest.
Others groups have different starting points and different perspectives on social media. Advertisers, for example, start from the perspective of disaggregating mass media and the need to find new advertising vehicles and strategies that will replace failing mass media campaigns.
Because we have this unique perspective, public relations folks have different conversations than do those people who are grounded in other disciplines. First Monday and First Tuesday will provide us with the opportunity to talk about social media framed as a public relations challenge. We will be able to focus on its potential for and impact on our profession. How we can extend our capablities by embracing social media. How we can enhance our careers. How we can better serve our clients. And how we can then take our best thoughts forward into the broader discussion with others. Ensuring that public relations is well represented. Ensuring that public relations is in a leadership position in exploring and applying social media.
We have a great first speaker to launch our meetups. Shel Israel, co-author of Naked Conversations, will kick off the gatherings with back to back sessions on September 25 in Ottawa and September 26 in Toronto. I can’t think of a better way to kick off the discussion than with a man who hails from PR and who wrote THE book on blogging.
So, if you are a public relations practitioner who wants to meet other PR folks to talk about practical applications of social media, join the conversation. Sign up for Third Monday (Ottawa) or Third Tuesday (Toronto).
And, for those who’ve spotted a similarity to the SF Bay Area Third Thursday group organized by Mike Manuel, Jeremy Pepper, Giovanni Rodriguez, and Phil Gomes, you’re right. In looking for a model, we thought that Third Thursday was exactly what we wanted to replicate in Canada. Mike gave us the go ahead to borrow from the Third Thursday and that’s what we’ve done. Thank you Mike!
I’m a “word” guy. And my photography skills are limited to point and click. That’s never really been a problem so long as my photography was limited to pictures of the family and pets.
But as I try to make ProPR visually appealing, I find myself taking photos of people both at events and in interviews. The results often are not flattering to my subjects.
So I was happy to see some practical tips at Digital Camera U to make my subjects more photogenic. These tips don’t involve playing with F stops and shutter speeds (what are these?) Instead, they focus on making the subject feel comfortable and appear natural in front of the lense through body posture, expression and dress. Even a technically challenged person like me can master these.
Thanks to Mike Yamamoto at Besoterica Blog for pointing to this site.
A hat tip to the Florida Public Relations Association for the very successful live blogging around the recent FPRA annual conference. To my mind, FPRA blog established a new standard that other PR organizations should study and emulate at their next meetings.
What did FPRA do right?
First, they publicized it in advance of the start of the conference through established blogs. I spotted lead up posts by Josh Hallett at hyku and Erin Caldwell at the Forward Blog. By having established bloggers post about the conference blog in advance of the conference, their established communities of readers were able to subscribe to the conference blog in time to catch all of the action.
Second, the bloggers actually blogged frequently. In my experience, this has been the most frequent failure of other organizations that established conference blogs that remained virtually empty (and unvisited?) throughout the conference. FPRA’s conference bloggers – Josh Hallett, Chris Gent, Jennifer Wakefield and Bob O’Malley – posted more than 70 times leading up to and during the conference. More than enough to attract attention.
Third, the quality of the posts was high – a good mix of informative longer posts with quick hits. This sustained attention.
Fourth, the posts prompted a real discussion. Some posts had as many as 14 comments – which is a lot compared to other PR conference blogs I’ve visited.
Finally, they used multimedia to give visitors that “being there” feeling. A nod to Josh Hallett for introducing hallway interview MP3s to his posts in addition to Flickr photos. A nice touch.
The complete conference postings can be viewed under the Annual Conference category on the FPRA blog.
Congratulations to the FPRA, especially their hardworking bloggers, Josh, Chris, Jennifer and Bob!
Sean Moffitt has posted a list of his twenty favourite Word of Mouth blogs. And he’s looking for more.
If you are a Canadian who writes a blog that deals with “word of mouth, buzz, brand experience, social media, viral or related subjects” let Sean know by leaving a comment on his post.
Mark Evans has an interesting summertime post. Writing from lakeside at the cottage, he ponders the value that he derives from blogging.
As for the blogging community, it’s getting bigger but I’m not convinced it’s getting better. There’s what I would describe as a lot of piling on going on – people blogging for the sake of blogging rather doing it because they something to say. … [B]logging should be adding to the conversation. I come across too many posts that are simply cut and paste jobs of other peoples’ posts or press releases with no value-add. Where’s the value in that?
…
Truth be told, blogging is a labour of love. To do it well takes a lot of time and work, which probably explains why many blogs are left wanting. It’s the search for quality that makes me so interested in tools that can separate the wheat from the chaff. I want something that brings me the well-written, thoughtful, insightful blogs – perhaps some kind of recommendation engine that uses my blogroll or RSS feeds as a guide. That’s not a lot to ask is it?
Mark is bang on in his observation that blogging does take a lot of time. Not just the time to write, but even more importantly, the time required to explore and participate in the conversation initiated by others. I probably read 3 to 4 hours for every hour I spend posting. Does that make me a prolific poster? Not by a long shot. But it enables me to listen, consider and learn before I initiate my own posts.
I’ve heard many people express the desire for a “recommendation engine.” And I’ll be honest, I use the New PR peer recommendation site to check in with what other PR practitioners are reading. However, I think there is no substitute for reading extensively myself. It is in the act of exploration of new blogs, reading not only the most recent post but looking back at previous posts, that I gain a real sense for each new blogger I discover. And it is this critical reading that enables me to separate the chaff from the wheat.
I remember in high school that we all longed for the magic shortcut. For many people that was “Coles Notes.” Of course, we quickly learned that while Coles Notes would let us fake it on an exam, providing the basic plot and a superficial sheen of analysis, there was no substitute for reading the original book. Only by immersing ourselves in the full text could we truly be transported to the alternate world that the author had created and truly appreciate what he or she was trying to convey beyond the mere storyline.
I believe that the same is true with the blogosphere. Beware shortcuts. They may create the illusion of engagement in the conversation. But that’s all it is – an illusion. To properly participate in the conversation, we must spend much more time listening than we do talking. Listening as much as writing. Only then will we derive the full benefit of communication and community that this medium offers us.
In the wake of David Sifry’s latest State of the Blogosphere post, a number of thoughtful commentators are challenging Sifry’s estimate of 
50 million blogs. A principal line of argument revolves around whether the Technorati numbers create a distorted, inflated picture by including inactive blogs. Some argue that the actual size of the active blogosphere is much smaller, perhaps closer to 1.6 million blogs.
It is important to gain a better understanding of the actual participation in the blogosphere by developing a more sophisticated, refined data on the distribution and actual behaviour of bloggers.
Having said that, some of the discussion reminds me of the debate that political pollsters often engage in. They focus on differences in the results between their competing polls and argue at length about whose methodology is superior.
On the other hand, political pros – the people who actually use the polls – assume from the start that methodology will vary between pollsters and that these different methodologies will yield different results at any given time. What they focus on is the trends over time between polls with known and consistent methodology. This analysis enables them to understand what is really going on and to look for the drivers of behaviour, not simply the manifestation of that behaviour.
When I look at David Sifry’s (or anybody’s) stats, I look for consistency of methodology and trends over time. The ongoing addition of new bloggers. The accelaration of the discussion through both new posts and comments. And the understanding that many bloggers post rarely or abandon their blogs altogether. That’s the real value for me.
And of course, once I’ve drawn everything I can from his results, I will look for other data sets that will show me other things (e.g. active blogs.)
So, I hope the conversation continues. I will be an active follower of it (and occasional participant.) But let’s remember, there is real value in following Sifry’s results over time, regardless of whether we agree with the details of the snapshot at any particular time.
50 million blogs and doubling in size every six months.
David Sifry has updated his State of the Blogosphere profile using current data from Technorati.
Essential reading.