Recapping the Minnesota PRSA Professional Practices Conference
Category: Blog - December 15, 2008
The Minnesota PRSA Annual conference last week went very well. To summarize:
- Peter Shankman - the founder of Help A Reporter Out - keynoted, sharing great examples of how companies and brands should be involved in social media and Twitter. (Speaking of which, here are some good examples.) Check out an impromptu interview with Peter from the event (video courtesy of Arik Hanson). For companies/brands not sure where to start with Twitter, listening is a great place to start. See what customers are saying and learn from them. Peter's key takeaways for today's businesses: transparency, relevancy and brevity.
- Paula Prahl from Best Buy also presented in the morning, emphasizing the importance of companies "knowing thyself," staying grounded, (really) understanding your audiences and being real and patient. I enjoyed the section on being accountable to employees and earning your reputation.
- Beehive CEO Lisa Hannum was part of the agency panel and discussed how to help organizations understand and explore the changing media world. Panel consensus: companies need to be engaged because the marketplace expects involvement in new media. However, it can't happen just because the tools/technologies are available - social media and communication strategies must tie to business objectives and resources. Also, patience is required to launch and sustain the effort, and ROE (return on engagement) considerations must be in place.
- On the media panel, representatives from MinnPost, WCCO-TV and Star Tribune talked about the changing traditional media landscape (including the shrinking newsrooms we're unfortunately hearing about locally) and the growing importance for communicators to share information with reporters that is clear, readily available and relevant.
- The media/journalism panelists also discussed how Twitter is providing their news followers another way to stay connected, and how reporters are using the service to get feedback from audiences on ways to pursue stories. As communicators and media contacts for many of our clients at Beehive, we're excited to hear from journalists as they develop their stories and share their experiences and preferences.
Several folks were twittering from the event. Search #mnprsa or check out @minnesotaprsa or Beehive's Twitter account (it's new!) - @beehivepr - to track some of the conversations. You can also check out the MN PR Blog or the Minnesota PRSA Web site for more information/visuals.
And that's a wrap!
Katharine Mudra
Account Supervisor
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