“Do it Wrong Quickly: What Corporations Need from PR in Today’s Transforming Marketplace”Mike Moran begins the afternoon keynote with what is perhaps the most salient point of the whole conference. We don’t need to be the expert in new media or blogs. We need to be the expert in how to solve our client’s problems. Otherwise, we might as well give up. We’ll never be the blog expert because the blog experts exist, and they’re not getting any dumber.

Moran’s tone is optimistic, and not at all condescending, which is a refreshing change from many speakers on this topic, who seem to want to tsk-tsk us for not having discovered social networking years ago. Oh, and they are eager to inform you that whichever social media platform you have succeeded in engaging was obsolete in 1999. Moran eschews alarmism to good effect.

PR types tend to view new media as a sort of death knell for Public Relations. Moran sees them as an opportunity. The new model allows Public Relations to deliver hard results where we know we are making an impact on behalf of our clients. We can target more closely, measure results more accurately, and respond more quickly to customer feedback.