Digipalooza reflected on

If I could find a way to summarise last week's conference with a short pair of sentences they might be...Thank heavens for the Canadians and The Chinese are coming.

Oh, and now that WWW has stepped down as our global practice head it looks like 'Katy' from Helsinki is the new Queen of the irreducibly complex process diagram.

Everyone worked hard to contribute, but a special mention has to go to Julie and her team for organising the first of several practice gatherings over the years that really felt as if it should lead to the formation of new dendrites between our isolated local consultants.

It was good to see old, relocated acquaintances from the London office again like Nicola and Nina. It was also good for me to jabber away in Spanish with Christian from the Latin American regional marketing team and Iñigo from Madrid. (Why do Guatemalans and Mexicans hate each other so much, Christian asked me!)

And thanks to HS for taking us on a wallet-sapping mall cruise and then helping us celebrate our purchases and the end of the conference by ordering that unforgetable Stag's Leap Napa Valley Cabernet and the Four Graces Oregon Pinot Noir.

There were times in Phoenix when my sardonic European soul was weighing rather heavily on me, especially when I was sitting amongst a group of (very) young American Mavens on their send-off dinner. I found the freshness of one or two individuals in particular rather humbling.

Having said that, sorry to any of the locals that we might have offended over the course of the trip, but both Gaylene and I are used to bitching away openly in another language with our spouses and it's a mighty dificult habit to break.

Digipalosers

Gaylene managed to miss her US Airlines flight back to LA this afternoon, largely because she thought she was on a United flight, and the slowness of the latter carrier's check-in service contributed to the mishap.

In the end it may have been a blessing in disguise, because it seems that her original flight was seriously delayed and she ended up leaving Phoenix before it did. Although she will miss her LA connection, there's a later one, so it should work out OK.

Meanwhile we saw Lisa from Canada at Terminal 2 with the now familiar wild-eyed look of someone who has recently misplaced their passport. So perhaps I wasn't the only loskop at the conference after all!

Shit happens: pooponaplane.com.

Our crisis comms expert Brendan is relating the sad tale of Continental Airlines Flight 1669Y, where a citizen journalist was on hand to file the story of "poop running down the aisles."

Most bad news gets onto social media sites now before the mainstream media get their act together, Brendan notes, and it will usually be updated far more regularly there too and of course, has the potential to remain available for viewing for a much longer period.

And yet it remains the case that "the reputation of the media is made during crises," so the way journalists interact with so-called gotcha stories emerging online is very relevant to us.

I was once a Continental Flight with a bust bog too. The steward eventually solved the problem by pouring about twenty coffee jugs-worth of water down the hole. Fortunately, no cerotes became mobile.

The day's programme is almost done and I have survived the challenge posed by that big tray of chocolate brownies. It's a real shame we missed the presentation from author David M. Scott during our airport excursion, but he has kindly given a copy of his book on The New Rules of PR to every delegate and Niall blogged about it on Collective Conversation.

Consumer Marketing meets Web 2-dotology

Right now I'm trying to eat a little plate of nachos without making high decibel munchy noises. Some of the tostadas are red! I've seen black corn, but red...

Gaylene and I had a dash to the aiport at lunchtime to report the loss of our passports to the United Express baggage handling office run by a pair of Mary-Sue types with low concentration levels, who might even have been endearing in a situation other than this. Gaylene's had been handed in; mine hadn't. There's probably some Chicano at Heathrow's Terminal 3 this evening: "Orale compadres! Me llamo Gooi Oward, dejenme entrar porfa!"

Deportation may be my best option for getting out of the US within a week now as the GB Consulate isn't answering its emergency line (even citizens reporting deaths need to leave voicemail and wait by their stiff). Just getting back to LA will present difficulties as I have no other government-issued ID with me.

Anyway, there are a lot more bullet points in this afternoon's presentations. I'm feeling a bit acribillado already. Right now a colleague from the LA office (also a history graduate/major) is talking about the attitudes and behaviours we all need to adopt in order to fully integrate digital communications into the offering. In a slide headed Web 2-dotology she recommends that, where relevant, we harness some of the structured understandings gathered by other disciplines such as sociology and pyschology.

Aha, another amusing video to watch. This one from Windward Reports:

Social Media 101

My colleague Niall has been live-blogging the conference all morning, but now it's his turn to stand up (along with James Gregson and Peter Imbres) and give us all an update on our collectively-agreed social media principles, which have now been approved without changes by our legal counsel. Thanks largely to his approach to this matter, H&K is recognised as a leader in the field.

The use of social media within the organisation remains a fundamentally political issue and it is my own view that any set of collective principles should, as far as possible, permit the basic polarities to survive, just as within our democracies we allow lefties and righties to sit in the same chamber, provided that they continue to pay heed to some fundamental code of conduct.

Niall went on to explain how we, as paid communications professionals, ought to approach perceived inaccuracies on Wikipedia. Rather than immediately proceeding to make edits ourselves, we should try instead to interact with the article-in-question's editors, pointing them to references which back up our complaint, and maybe also suggesting a time-frame for them to make changes to the article. After this we might feel we had permission to make the edits, but he added that one of the problems that we still face is that the guidelines on article mods published by Wikipedia are themselves subject to community-based editing.

Niall pinpointed the three most common, and invariably tricky, questions that our clients ask us about blogs:

• Should our CEO write one?
• Who are the most influential bloggers on topic X?
• One of these blogger people has said something negative about us; how should we respond?

Our own presentation tomorrow will return to the clearly recurring topic of why engaging with bloggers is fundamentally different to traditional media relations. Paul Gillin mentioned the less predictable motivations of bloggers this morning. Niall has just added that bloggers are far more likely than mainstream journalists to tell the world when you misjudge your pitch to them. The key learning here is that, on a campaign by campaign basis, communications professionals need to invest the time to establish whether a particular blogger is an appropriate subject for outreach.

Paul Taaffe

In the first afternoon session our global CEO challenged us to think about the ways that Digital communications could take our profession to entirely new places. One could think of the practice of public relations as broadly about managing the interface between the different publics within a society, yet even in some of the most developed nations it has often really involved little more than media relations, leaving the advertising industry to take the overall lead in terms of creative initiative and content generation. Digital, Taaffe argued, gives us a real opportunity to snatch this initiative back.

After all, where there is real communication - a relationship rather than a set of discreet transactions - our approach should be more effective in the long run. As David Muir told us this morning, a lot of the negativity online seems to stem from the fact that the trust-based conversations between consumers and the people that sell them stuff are not taking place to the extent that the technology would now appear to allow.

Over lunch Niall had also made the point that advertising has always been about buying into things, and that their approach to social media properties is little different. We on the other hand, really do have to change our ways.

Paul Gillin

Author of The New Influencers and a blogger since June '05.

Spoke about how social networks have harnessed the power of personal publishing, transforming me comms into us comms and how innovation in this sphere has been galvanised by cheaper open source software.

A few other factlets and interesting observations from his speech:

• 65% of Facebook users need a daily fix
• The average age of US network evening news viewers is now 60
• It is now cheaper to keep information than to delete it
• Influencers "dwell at all levels" as blog authority becomes more diffuse
  
• The economics of mainstream media is rooted in a dying form of scarcity: "the economic model of newspapers is unsustainable" (discuss..?)
• Negativity has the greatest impact when it amplifies a common problem
  
• Bloggers respond to different motivations and often actively seek out engagement
  
• Peer trust is now crucial, but some peers are more equal than others!
  

There are many different ways to measure the impact of social media on the market, he concluded, yet "what's the ROI?" isn't always the right first question to ask.

He finished up with a Kodak moment...



This was one of those internal productions that 'somehow got out'.

The new marketing environment (2)

A few more points from David Muir's preso which I didn't blog about at the time:

• There is still a major misalignment between media usage and ad-spend (in favour of traditional media of course)
• Broadcast skills will become more important as the barriers to entry to providing TV-like services come crashing. In this environment more and more firms (such as Boeing) are experimenting with formal co-creation schemes.
• People's online behaviours have changed significantly with broadband, but regulators have also played an active role in fostering the rise of social (and controllable) media.

The new marketing environment

Our first keynote speaker is David Muir is CEO of The Channel, one of WPP's knowledge centres.

He made the telling point that customer rage online is more often than not driven by a sense that organisations simply aren't listening...when the technology for doing so is seemingly at its most prevalent ever.

Here are some great YouTube clips that he showed us in illustration of the permanent changes sweeping the comms industry:










See the selection of remixes for this last one!

FireSky

Unas fotos del hotel en Scottsdale...que ayer en la noche se parecia a un poco a un sim en Second Life. Ayer estuvo mas de 90 grados aqui, pero parece que se quita el calor bastante en la noche. La conferencia empieza en 15. Voy a tratar de escribir el blog en vivo...

Hay mucho Mexicano aqui. Orale!

Arrival in Arizona

Have arrived, exhausted, in Arizona. 21 hours door to door. Here are some pics from the windows of both flights.