What I Learned at PR Camp New York 2009
I had the privilge of participating in PR Camp New York this past Friday, November 20th. Organized by Dan Greenfield of Bernaise Source Media, the PR conference was structured in a unique way that fostered real conversations between participants. Far from the typical format of most conferences (high-powered panelists speaking and audience members passively listening), PR Camp was essentially organized to be a one-day color war for all sorts of PR and marketing professionals.
Participants were split into teams—red, blue, green, and yellow—to discuss four panel topics. For 30 minutes, teams were to discuss the assigned panel topic, and then group leaders were called to the stage to present and discuss their team’s ideas and recommendations.
The four panel topics focused on current tensions within the industry due to the impact of social media—tensions between client and agency (specifically getting clients to buy into social media programs), tensions between Generation Y and Generation X (specifically in relation to junior and senior staff being involved in building and managing social media programs), the balance between delivering ROI and building long-lasting online communities and customer relations through social media channels, and the tensions between marketing and PR in relation to social media programs.
I co-led a discussion about Generation Y and X with Dawn Bridges (SVP of Corporate Communications at Time Inc) for the blue team, and then was later involved in a heated debate on the stage about which generation should be running social media programs.
I’m going to provide a brief description of key takeaways from each panel discussion, drawing from some of the great #prcamp tweets that ran through Twitter that day, as well as some of my own additional insights.
1) Social Media Buy-In: Getting Clients + Management On Board for Your Social Media Programs
2) Talking about Generation Y: Tapping the Social Media Expertise of Young Professionals to Reach Your Audience
The session started with some adamant protest to this idea that Gen Y’ers hold the keys to social media. Many participants voiced that being on Facebook didn’t qualify Gen Y’ers to be running social media programs (“just because you’re on Facebook doesn’t mean you can run a social media program…the same way that reading a newspaper doesn’t make you a journalist”)…
Some Boomer participants reminded us Gen Y’ers that they had serious tech chops from using older devices in the 80s, while other Gen Xers reminded us that these technologies weren’t that hard to learn (really, Twitter isn’t hard to learn?!)
Ultimatelly, we were reminded to throw away the generational terms and stereotypes and ended up with this conclusion:
I also mentioned that it wasn’t impossible for junior and senior managers to work together on social media programs and cited the fact that I was working closely with my senior managers on two social media programs. I also mentioned that in one particular case, my manager approved every single one of the tweets I tweeted on behalf of the brand we were representing.
I also want to make one last point that I didn’t get a chance to address during the panel—junior staff have one more thing that senior staff lack that can be beneficial in the management of social media channels. That is the luxury of TIME. We have a lot more time to search for opportunities to enhance social media interactions and conduct general research of the industry sector within the social media sphere.
3) Show Me the Money: Delivering Strategies for Effective ROI and Achieving Success for your Social Media Programs
The blue team discussed the challenges of measuring success with social media campaigns since so much of the interaction on social media is “engagement” (developing deep relationships with customers so that they will become repeat-customers and recommend to friends), as opposed to direct and immediate “conversion.”
Ultimately, the blue team came to the decision that these two terms should not be separated (because they were connected and led to one another!), but instead lumped together. We made up a new metrics/ROI word—convergement!
Another important point made by our teammate, Paull Young, was the fact that we could very easily show ROI by showing our clients how much they were SAVING by doing social media campaigns (reduced paper, printing, mail, etc etc)…
However, at the end of this discussion, it was pretty evident that many participants were not really putting their energies on measuring. When Peter Shankman asked the audience what monitoring tools they were using, the audience was practically silent! They couldn’t mention many!
4) Why Can’t We Be Friends: Aligning Your Marketing and PR Social Media Departments and Agencies
Unfortunately, I had to leave early and was not able to catch this session :(
