There is a great digital PR conference lined up at the CIPR in London next week which I’m thrilled to be taking part in. It takes place next Monday 24th May at the CIPR HQ in Russell Square, WC1.
Understanding and using digital channels should be part of what all of in public relations do, every day. This one-day conference provides an opportunity to discuss ideas, hear the thoughts of some of the industry’s leading practitioners in digital PR and will show practical examples of how companies have successfully embraced social media.
The eminent list of speakers is as follows:
Paul Armstrong – Director of Social Media, Kindred
Drew Benvie – Managing Director, 33 Digital
Daljit Bhurji – Managing Director, Diffusion
Amanda Brown – Head of PR, First Direct
Rob Brown – Managing Director, Staniforth
Steve Earl – Managing Director, Speed Communications
Russell Goldsmith – Digital Media Director, markettiers4dc
Katy Howell – Managing Director, Immediate Future
Marshall Manson – Director of Digital Strategy, Edelman
Kieron Matthews – Director of Marketing, Internet Advertising, Bureau
Julio Romo – Communications and Social Media Consultant, twofourseven
Philip Sheldrake – Chartered Engineer, Founder and Partner of Influence Crowd.
There are still a few places so if you think you might be interested don’t hesitate and book now.
The bulk of the PR profession needs a wake up call and fast. We have seen what is happening to print media at a regional level in the UK and US and the UK national newspaper heartland will be the next sector to feel the squeeze. Never mind the quality of the Sunday papers, feel the width. Not as bulky as they used to be are they?
It seems that meta tags are no longer worth the paper they are printed on. Google does not actually use the tags that we add to our posts for search. 
In the rush to populate web copy with keywords the most important thing is sometimes forgotten. The copy needs to well written, lively, interesting and relevant. It is astonishing how often this is forgotten in the charge to upload text that will rank highly in Google. 
As PR communicators we need to be very careful about content. PR people have a tendency to feel that if something is published then our goals have been achieved. The ease with which things can now be published undermines that presumption. The sheer volume of web content means that a lot of the stuff that appears on the net is of little interest to anyone other than the publisher. That which has no interest will have no impact.
For twenty years or more the marketing industry has been obsessed with the idea of integration. The nature of the internet is such that if we don’t integrate our online communications may for ever languish in some digital backwater. 
Last night I got involved in a heated debate about PR and search engine optimisation (SEO) . Partly because the debate was on twitter and it was late into the evening (I think most of us were on UK time) it was fast moving, free flowing and it also involved many of the people who know most about the emerging roles of digital PR.
”Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system, and that’s one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before.” These were the sage like words of Clive Thompson in a piece called the ‘The See-Through CEO’ in Wired. March 2007. He identified a major new challenge for the PR industry; the need to consider and deliver against the results of relevant search.
