PRiNZ 2008 - the right to advocate

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

Last week I spent a few days in the lovely city of Auckland, New Zealand, representing Melcrum at the annual conference for the Public Relations Institute (PRiNZ). It was an excellent couple of days and provided plenty of insight into another area of professional communications.

Presentations of note were from Patrick Ullman who delivered something of a life-coach session, the NetConcepts team who delivered some pretty fascinating tips on SEO, and an excellent young practitioners panel that included three very composed, mid-twenties practitioners that put many more experienced presenters to complete shame. (Update: one of those panelists was Thom James at Bullet PR, who has blogged about the session here.)

I was also pleased to meet Richard Watson, a Sydney-based futurist and colleague of Ross Dawson, and also Rod Drury, one of the first CEOs to blog.

The conference even kicked off with a spark of controversy from Matthew Horton, a print journalist who delivered an hour-long tirade on eroding freedoms, sick NZ politics and laws and how digital media is no guarantee of freedom of speech (advocacy being the main theme for the event).

"Defending the realm" was how one fellow delegate described Matthew's speech, but although it felt like a sermon at times and I question the validity of dismissing digital communication as he did when it has only really been around for 20 years ("blogs are just another communication interface"), it was a suitable start to the event and amazing to hear about the underbelly of NZ justice. It left me recalling a quote I read recently - "an unjust law is no law at all".

Presenting our research
On day two I was up for an hour to present some of Melcrum's social media research in one of the breakout sessions. I covered angles including the history and relative infancy of the web, information overload and some case studies. Two of these were from the social media report (World Bank and Sun Microsystems which have ongoing developments in their stories) and the last one which was the Heathrow T5 PR disaster and how it was covered on Twitter, creating a permanent record of woe for BA and one which their competitors monitored (see Neville Hobson's post on that here).

Inside/outside it doesn't really matter
It's pretty interesting that be it internal or external communication, many of the challenges faced are the same. I appreciate people such as Neville and Shel Holtz, Lee Hopkins, Lee Smith et al have covered this before, but this was the first time I've attended a more PR-focused event and to hear concerns of a loss of control, lost messages, splattergun approaches... well, I didn't feel too out of place.

For PRiNZ, their internal comms group within the organisation is growing pretty quickly. With 50 people signed up it's increasingly important, and there were many delegates at our stand who said internal comms was increasingly on their radar. "No surprise" I thought, as we know that the imaginary line between internal and external comms is rapidly disappearing, as are many of the other business structures dreamed up and put in place a long time ago.

Comments

[Jennifer Boyes]

Hi there,

Thank you for the comment you made on the Intermediary blog. It's encouraging to know that people are reading it!

I really enjoyed reading your account of the PRiNZ conference. Sadly, I wasn't able to get down there for the second day. Your breakout session sounded fascinating- especially the T5 case study! I would also have loved to have heard what Richard had to say.

Anyway, it was great to meet you last week. Keep up the good blogging work and drop me a line if you're ever in Auckland again! :)