jennybee.net

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I was at the PRWeek PR, Social Networking & Blogging in Practice conference yesterday.

To be honest, I was sceptical beforehand and my scepticism was at first confirmed by being one of only about 5 people with a laptop, and there being no free wi-fi. Am I too ‘un-conferenced’ these days?

Anyway, in actual fact the day turned out to be extremely useful with a consistently high calibre of speaker and a few genuinely interesting case studies.

Abbreviated notes and comments:

• The established media clearly don’t ‘get it’ if they think (according to Shane Richmond) that bloggers are official spokespeople for the brand. But hey, it’s something we need to be aware of
• Applying a persona to your programme may help focus and inform the nature of engagement
• Apparently the mobile internet isn’t worth talking about
• Some established media giants might actually think people will always read print newspapers
• I like what Kodak are doing with 1000 words & 1000 nerds. After all, experience IS the product
• Oh how I love stats
• Penguin are doing some really exciting things with social media - engaging interest groups and facilitating user-generated content, merging on- and off-line
  (Wondering how they’ll respond when faced with the same challenges the music industry are currently facing. Hoping book publishers will learn from music publishers mistakes)
• Will McInnes twitters, and said some interesting things like:
  • Negative reviews generate conversions AND reduce product returns (because expectations are lower)
  • You demonstrate confidence by linking to competitors
  • Fake people are so much better than real people ;)

  And he also wrote up his thoughts from the day here.

• 12-14 year olds trust unknown peers more than experts and they are source agnostic. And deys de future, man
• Authority is now with the ‘louder voice’ rather than seniority

…the means of production and dissemination are shifting, and the cacophony of internet voices means we all feel lost in the woods.

bbc.co.uk

Really?

This implies that online audiences are in a permanent state of confusion over what is trustworthy, accurate, expert, authoritative, etc.

In this increasingly media-savvy generation, are people really that confused about the nature of user-generated content?