Just finished a few days of PR-related conferencing in the Motor City. Couple of quick thoughts.
- Bringing about 3000 PR peeps to a city with an image problem is simply brilliant
- Attending a PR-specific conference when you spend a lot of time at tech events is a refreshing change of pace (except for the enormous line at the ladies room)
- PR folks across all industries are catching onto social media and the importance of TRANSPARENCY - beyond just the high tech ones
- PR people are eager to share experiences, introduce themselves to strangers, network, ask questions, and speak up in sessions where they disagree with the speaker - all making for a highly interactive conference
- Only about 1% of conference attendees came to sessions with their laptops (I did the first day but soon discovered there was no wifi)
- Many of the proprietary PR internet applications in the expo center only run on IE
- Most of the PR professionals had not heard of Mozilla but were familiar with Firefox
- All of the PR students I met both knew of, used, and evangelized Firefox (hello 2009 intern pool!)
More to come when I've had time to digest my notes.
