Archive for the ‘News’ Category
Social media from a PR’s perspective
November 21st, 2007
I stopped in at the NMK Beers and Innovation: ‘Clients in the wild’ event last night and it was certainly an enlightening evening for a number of reasons. Ian Delaney and the NMK team put on an interesting panel discussion, featuring: Will McInnes, co-founder Nixon McInnes, Sarah Ogden, MD Midnight Communications and Drew Benvie from Hotwire, who all waxed lyrical about social media, or blogging in the main.
There were some pressing questions put to the panel by the great and good of the PR industry that were in attendance, including asking how the panel would have handled the Northern Rock crisis and Facebook’s recent targeted ad launch.
Overall I felt the crowd were quite guarded, me included, either because they we not confident on the subject, or probably because they were surrounded by their competitors. This is an all too familiar problem in the PR industry and the issue seemed to surprise the non-PR panelist, Will McInnes, who had kicked-off by asking who among the PR attendees could measure the results of their campaigns, to which he was greeted by a deafening silence.
Will made a number of good points, but the one that stuck in my mind was his analogy relating PR to the web, confirming PR cannot continue operating in a web 2.0 environment with a web 1.0 approach. For me this encapsulated the most poignant issue that we as PRs face in a social web environment.
The PR profession as a whole is guilty, to some degree or other, of trying to place the social web into a nice little ‘channel’ box. We continue to apply traditional rules of control to a long since departed way of communicating. On last night’s evidence it seems we’re all still struggling with the concept that communications is going through its most rapid stage of development to date, let alone devising new strategies to cater for it.
Of course there are exceptions, and some of the leading lights that attended last night certainly added to the discussion with examples of their own insight. However, I noted that much of the discussion was based around tactics – I.e. blogging, rather than a strategic conversation based on communicating in the current environment, which would have been more revealing.
At the end of the day, I think NMK did a great job to pull the PR crowd together and this shows there is an appetite to learn, which was the main point of the event after all.
Technorati tags: NMK, PR, social+media, innovation
Liberate Media celebrates 1st year
October 29th, 2007
It’s been a busy but very rewarding year for Liberate Media, and an evening of shenanigans was definitely called for!
On Thursday we celebrated our first birthday at Bar Red in Soho with an eclectic mix of clients, industry contacts and journalists - all who’ve shown us incredible support from day one.
Guests included Arjo Ghosh from Spannerworks, Marty Carroll from Foviance, James Booth (founder of Tangozebra), Justin Pearse, Danielle Long and Alex Farber from NMA, Jane Wakefield from BBC Technology Online, Neil McGuiness from Creative, Paula Byrne and Eugene Lacey from Pushbutton.tv …and the list goes on.
With further business growth on the cards, we’re optimistic that 2008 will be just as exciting for us. We’re proud that our client portfolio has been built entirely through word-of-mouth, and pleased with the positive reaction that we’ve received to the small consultancy approach.
Throughout this week we’ll be sharing multimedia coverage of the party with you, and a videocast offering our insights into what the future holds for the UK PR industry as a whole. So please keep watching and reading!
Many thanks,
Wendy & Lloyd
Technorati tags: liberatemedia, anniversary, spannerworks, tangozebra, creative, bbc, nma, foviance