PR and the Social Web

Social PR 2011 is a one day conference taking place at the Cavendish Conference Centre in London this coming Monday 28th February and there’s a great line-up of speakers.

The conference will include presentations, panel discussions and Q&A sessions with some of the world’s leading social PR experts.

It will tackle some of the most pressing questions for PR and Communications professionals working with social media such as the convergence of Social PR and Marketing, how to identify influencers and how to measure and evaluate PR on the web.

Measurement and evaluation is perhaps the hottest topic in PR at the moment with the industry finally taking a stand on Advertising Value Equivalents and promoting the seven ‘ Barcelona Principles’:

1. Goal setting and measurement are fundamental aspects of any PR programmes.
2. Media measurement requires quantity and quality – cuttings in themselves are not enough.
3. Advertising Value Equivalents (AVEs) do not measure the value of PR and do not inform future activity.
4. Social media can and should be measured.
5. Measuring outcomes is preferred to measuring media results.
6. Business results can and should be measured where possible.
7. Transparency and Replicability are paramount to sound measurement.

The line-up for Social PR 2011 includes three of the world’s leading experts in PR measurement online.  New York based Marshall Sponder is the founder of webmetricsguru.com, an industry blog about Web analytics, social media and search marketing.  He will be joined at the conference by Philip Sheldrake who co-founded Fuse PR (which was acquired by W2 Group in 2006) and is now a Partner of Meanwhile, the venture marketers and author of the soon to be published ‘The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age’.   Joining by live video link will be Katie Delahaye Paine who heads up KDPaine & Partners, a leading communications research consultancy, and is the author of ‘Measuring Public Relationships, the data-driven communicators guide to measuring success’.

There will also be an Exhibition Area and the ticket price includes lunch, refreshments and a handbook for the day.  The conference will be streamed online, so if you can’t make it buy an online ticket and sit back.

News has arrived of the reinstatement of UberTwitter following the Twitter ban imposed on Friday.

“We’ve given the developers of twidroyd and UberSocial for Blackberry (formerly UberTwitter) access to the Twitter API again.  Our initial review indicates that steps have been taken to remedy the violations for these applications” said  the statement on Twitter Support.  In a statement they also said “We will review these applications on an ongoing basis for compliance”.

There has been speculation on this blog and elsewhere that the Twitter organisation sees UberMedia, the owner of both these applications as a commercial threat.  If so the suspension has done little to enhance the reputation of the official ‘Twitter for Blackberry’ app.   Thousands of users condemned the application over the weekend

On hearing the news about UberSocial, @ericvice tweeted; “Ahhh the sound of 2.5 million copies of Twitter for Blackberry being simultaneously deleted. The bird can sing!http://bit.ly/UberDL“.  It has been retweeted over 300 times in six hours.