As president of the Silicon Valley chapter of PRSA, I got the opportunity to attend a two-day district conference in Seattle this past weekend.  Many disparate, yet linkable topics were discussed, but for brevity I’ll just highlight a couple.

The first is the perception of the PR industry for those on the outside.  We can debate whether or not the reputation for PR is getting better or worse for eons, but there was one point that PRSA national president Judy Phair brought up I found particularly interesting.  She cited a recent study showing that the general public views PR practioners and publicists as “the same profession.”  This puts us in the same league as the Lizzie Grubmans (http://www.ruminatethis.com/archives/000648.html) of the world.  Scary thought.  The real danger however (for PR firms especially) is that marketing, advertising, and even some law firms are now expanding the definitions of what they do, confusing clients and pigeonholing PR even further. 

The following day, longtime Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble gave a Blogging 101 preso. (SIDE NOTE: I spoke with him briefly beforehand and he said he regularly reads our own Mike Manuel’s blog).  His preso was extremely basic and I was again surprised at how little most PR people know about this stuff.  Many attendees still didn’t even know what blogs look like, let alone understand aggregators and RSS feeds. 

Scoble opened with a pretty cool Mark Twain quote that I’m going to steal.  “A lie can make it around the world in the time it takes for the truth to put its shoes on.”  He then went into a recent occurrence at Microsoft that validates this Twainism.  A blogger with a very small readership posted a note on Scoble’s blog last Wednesday claiming that he had inside knowledge of “bigotry at Microsoft.”  By Friday am, the story was in the NY Times and this blogger was quoted throughout. By Saturday, Google had 137 separate news postings of the story and the noise drove 130,000 readers to this “unknown” blogger’s site. 

Scoble’s point was that in the corporate blog world, you have to work on the “four hour rule.”  If you see a lie in the blogosphere, you have four hours to respond before it’s everywhere. Silence is deadly.

He concluded with Microsoft’s philosophy on blogging, which the company seems to share with our clients, including Yahoo: “To be a part of the conversation, you have to first join the conversation.”  Well said.

– Dave Black