The Spring is the season of conferences, and over the past week, I have already attended conferences and given one teleconference for PRSA. I am fortunate that the Texas Public Relations Association 2007 Conference and the Innotech Conference were here in San Antonio, so I didn't have to travel. I am now preparing now to head out for SXSW in Austin to participate in a panel on Tuesday called the Future of Corporate Blogs moderated by Mack Collier with Lionel Menchaca from Dell and Mario Sundar from LinkedIn.
I always learn a great deal from the attendees when I present at these conferences. There are a lot of challenging questions and interactions that help to shape and energize my thinking. I am sure that teaching is one of the best ways to refine old ideas and develop new ones. In fact, I wonder if presenters don't learn more than attendees from these things.
The seminars I gave this week included one about Building Your Brand with Social Media, and another about how public relations practitioners can start to use social media in their practice. I post all of my presentations at My PR Pro using Slide Share.
Through both of these presentations runs a theme that I have always believed since I started messing around with what we now call social media in 2005, and that is that businesses and organizations should only consider social media if it makes strategic sense to their objectives. Additionally, they must consider how they can add to the user experience in a relevant way.
The more I talk to real world practitioners, the more these ideas make sense. It's great to get out and explore ideas. I keep up my speaking schedule on my company site. I hope to catch you at one or more of these events in the near future. One of the other great things about conferences is that you get to meet the real people behind the social media curtain. It is always insightful and never boring.
