Communications Insight

Today I was fortunate to attend a great panel discussion hosted by Churchill Club and PRSA Silicon Valley. The topic was “How PR Can Succeed in a Down Economy”.

There were about 150 attendees; mostly corporate communications folks with several of the major agencies represented and the typical smattering of vendor attendees.

 Panelists included Andy Lark from Dell, Peter Shankman of HARO,  Mark Hampton of Blanc & Otis, Steve Astle of FICO, Arati Shah of PR Week and Karen Kahn of Sun, or Snorkle as she put it.

The mood in the room was quite upbeat. Whenever a group of communications experts get together you can expect a noisy room and today was no different. There was a lot of excited jabbering going on before and after the program.  I talked to quite a few agency execs who noted that they are experiencing a slight uptick in new business activity; that’s a good thing and an indicator that marketing purse strings are loosening.

The panel itself was interesting with, as you would expect,a  substantial amount of airtime devoted to discussing social media—how to best manage it, who within the corporation should be involved (just PR or everyone or somewhere in-between), and how to measure (no good ideas for that).

The only complaint I heard was that the panel was too focused on large corporations with very large marketing budgets. The audience would have liked to have heard tips and techniques employed by the little guys. Also, heard comments that the panel was too enterprise -centric; would liked to have had a consumer tech player represented. All good ideas.

All in all another excellent program! Good times had by all.