CPRS 08 - Social Media takes over
Halifax — This is the third national CPRS conference I’ve attended and it’s clear that social media and user-generated content is taking over. Two years ago in Niagara Falls there was one short breakout session on blogging. Last year in Edmonton there was a keynote and a breakout. This year, the first morning of Day 1 has been taken over by it.
We had Max Valiquette, President of Youthography as keynote for breakfast. Joseph Thornley, of Thornley Fallis, joined Carman Pirie, of Colour, to discuss Best Practice in Social Media (hint: there aren’t any yet… thanks for being honest). And Leonard Brody, CEO of NowPublic, was keynote over lunch.
An observation: all of the presenters have been clear that the technology is changing as fast as people’s online habits. It’s great to hear solid presentations validate many of my own thoughts on where public relations is going as a business. Traditional media organizations are really becoming less and less important to governments, companies and non-profits who are seeking to communicate to their ‘publics.’ Newsrooms will likely survive the current revolution on the basis of providing insight and analysis, but their monopoly on that is broken (making them one of many players) and breaking news is now the domain of everyone with a camera phone.
Personally, I like the anarchy of the technology is creating.
June 12th, 2008 at 9:54 am
Thank you for the kind mention. On the topic of best practices, I must admit I’ve never quite liked the concept. I think far too many use best practices as a way of identifying the end goal – where they’d like to get to, etc. And, in that sense, best practices can be very limiting leaving very little room for the creativity and innovation that drives genuine progress. (That’s not to say we cannot learn a thing or two from what has already been done of course.)
On the social media front, this is still very early days. I’m hopeful that 99% of the innovation in this space is still in front of us…. we live in interesting times to be sure.
Cheers, cp
http://pirie.typepad.com