Last week at the Bulldog Reporter’s Media Relations Summit 2008, I had the pleasure of watching Voce’s own Dave Black deliver a presentation with Jodi Baumann, the Director of Corporate PR at NetApp. The focus of this year’s summit was “The Power of Story: New media, New Technologies, A New Narrative for PR.” Speakers tackled topics ranging from “The Art of Story: Finding the Heart of Drama” to preparing an organization for crisis, to running attendees through a bootcamp on social media strategies for PR. Industry influencers such as Tom Foremski, Robert Scoble, and Don Clark were among the media present for the event.

All good stuff, but what if I’m an in house PR person and my budget has been slated only for “traditional PR” activities (media relations, press release distribution etc.). This is where Dave and Jodi’s presentation, How PR Can Get a Fair Share of the Marketing Budget in a Web 2.0 World, fit into the social media/PR in 2008 puzzle. The presentation focused on how to stop “thinking like PR person” start gaining mindshare in all areas of marketing, and how to use Web 2.0 as a beachhead to support various parts of the company. (Not to mention a brief foray into “what in the world does beachhead mean anyways?”)