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Michael Allison rocked the CPRS Victoria Social Media session

by Tris Hussey on January 10th, 2008

Michael Allison invited me to cover the CPRS Victoria coffee talk since the topic he was covering was PR and Social Media (sort of a Social Media 101).

The turn out wasn’t huge–it was a dark, windy, rainy night–but those who were there were very interested and engaged.  Michael covered all the aspects you’d expect–blogs, Facebook, Second Life, Twitter, blogger relations–and did so very well, especially considering the WiFi in the place was spotty at best.

What I took away from the this session was that PR and Communications folks are just starving for information on social media.  Lots of horror stories about blogger backlash, concerns about new technologies (is it a fad) and such creates a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt).  You couple this with the old guard in the industry who would just prefer to keep things the way they were and stick to "proven" techniques (print ads, print journalists, etc), you have a real situation where education and proving your mettle are paramount.

One of the interesting points someone made was that print journalists aren’t all that different than bloggers when pitched something that doesn’t fit what they cover.  That might be true, however a print journalist might just not return your calls and such, whereas a blogger might do that and tell the world that they think you’re a doofus.  Yeah that would make be a bit wary.

The discussion after Michael’s talk was interesting.  Very interesting.  I did my best to keep my mouth shut and listen (since as a pro blogger I am often pitched by PR companies).  I wanted to understand their perspective better, not just sit and pontificate as the "professional blogger" in the room.  Dave Traynor did point me out eventually towards the end and that was okay.  I answered a few questions and chatted with folks about  using Google Blog Search for reputation management and such.

If you’d like to see more pictures from the event (I left my laptop at home on purpose, but brought my camera of course), you can check out the Flickr photo set CPRS Victoria.

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