Local Review: UTC PR event on New Media

• Posted by Steve Spencer

Article posted on Jan 18

Okay, so as you guys have seen, I tend to give pretty darned good reviews to most UTC events.  Additionally, their attendance this year has really picked up, and I see that meaning even more of a reason to attend the events.  As to the PR event this week however, I think there were definitely some good parts, but I have a few nits to pick as well.

Let me start by saying that if you are wondering if the UTC is right for your company, I would say that the two events that I have been to thus far this year just show the UTC gaining momentum.  Attendance is up, and they always do a great job of pulling these together.  How anyone could not get sufficient value from these events to justify the meager annual fee is beyond me.  Definitely one worth joining.

Additionally, I have to say that the speakers knew their content.  And for the most part presented well.

My concern lies in the overall effectiveness of the event.  I’m not sure rather it was because there were three presentations, and they all needed to rush so fast that none of them could go deep enough, or what the reason was… But I feel like we walked into the room with a lot of PR people who were interested in, and concerned about New Media and how it affects their industry.  The presentations accomplished sending the message “Yes, New Media is cool, and is gaining power.  You should be scared if you don’t understand it.”

But that’s it… very little of that “understanding” was passed on.

I would have loved to have seen us go into enough detail on 3 or so New Media topics for people to have a take away.  Let’s just take twitter, blogs, and Stumble Upon as three examples:

While the meeting touched on the fact that blogs and bloggers are powerful and scary and you should be careful how you deal wit them, I would have liked to have seen something that imparted information more along the lines of:

If you have a client that you think should be blogging, or they think they should be blogging, do this first: Have them take a week and research blogs relevant to their area and value proposition.  Have them then take 60 days and actively read and intelligently comment on those blogs.  This serves a couple of key purposes: 1: you get comfortable with “blogging voice” and what people are responding well to, and 2: It actually turns your competition into your lead-gen.  Popular blogs that were drawing eyes of your potential customers are now actually driving traffic to you due to your comments that link back to your website.  Oh, and lest we forgive reason 3: you learn more about what people are thinking.  If at the end of the 60 days the company has not actively commented several times per week, and has not learned of a bunch more key blogs they were not even aware of due to their interaction over that time, then they should not start a blog.  Someone has to really be willing to be consistent to blog, and they need to understand that it is much more than just writing.  It includes a huge social component of link, and giving love to get love (link wise )

I won’t go so indepth in twitter or Stumble Upon, or this post will turn into a novel.  I would have like to have seen examples though.  Don’t just tell us twitter is cool…Give us an example of a sign that could be put up in a retail store, what it might say to get people to “follow” the merchant on twitter, and how it might be leveraged.  Perhaps use an example for a stadium, and how a solution like this could help fill seats at Jazz games or something similar.  Teach people rather than just hinting at it.

Okay, so enough ranting.  I want to wrap up in the positive here… There were about 40-50 people there.  Great crowd.  Great people to meet.  Sharp presenters.  I just think the format, or perhaps the goal asked to the presenters might have been tweaked a bit to add more value.

• Posted in Local Review