PR meets the WWW / Constantin Basturea’s weblog

It’s official (almost): we’re starting to organize Global PR Blog Week 3.0.

It’s an event that will present the best articles, interviews, debates, case studies, and essays on how social media continues to change the Public Relations and Communications theory and practice, its relationships with other disciplines, and our roles as practitioners, students, and teachers.

It will run –like the other two previous editions– for one week.

It will happen online, at globalprblogweek.com.

It’s going to be a free event.

It will continue to be a community-supported, volunteers-driven, unaffiliated event. At least two prestigious research organizations will support the event, and any (non-financial) support that will raise the industry’s participation to it will be welcome.

It will encourage new voices and fresh perspectives, it will value experience and real-world case studies, and it will have (I hope) a robust international participation.

What’s new this year:

• 2 or 3 keynote/invited contributions
• digg-style voting mechanism to choose the top 3 entries
• live events (example: a daily live BlogTalk Radio show)
• a daily event in Second Life
• video, in addition to podcasting
• daily summaries of the most discussed topics
• real-time updates for the number/titles/authors of entries submitted for each category

Also, we’re going to have:

• a more effective communication about the rules
• clear guidelines for accepting/rejecting the entries
• strict enforcement of deadlines for submitting entries.

Now, before discussing more about the nitty-gritty of the event, I’d like to ask you:

How do you see this event?
What do you expect from it?
What would you like to read/ see/ listen to?
What it will make it most valuable for you, and for the industry?

Please share –via comments, blog posts, or email– any ideas or suggestions on how to make this event a great one.

Thank you. We’re going to have a blast :)

My web host has completed a server transfer during the weekend. As a result, the entries for the Global PR Blog Week are not showing on the blog, and the NewPR Wiki can’t be edited.

I’m working on getting the two websites back to full functionality. Thank you for your patience.

And thanks to Neville for alerting me to the sites’ problems.

Update:

• The NewPR wiki is back now (May 22, 2006, 12.52 EST).
• Thanks to Robert French’s efforts, the Global PR Blog Week is back online (June 8, 2006).

• August 29 - September 6: starting the Katrina Help Wiki (about)
• September 6 - 23: organizing the Global PR Blog Week 2.0.

WHAT: The Global PR Blog Week 2.0 is an online conference on how new media technologies are changing the practice of Public Relations and corporate communications. We’re talking weblogs and participatory journalism, wikis, podcasting, and RSS - but the list of topics is open.

WHEN: Sometime between May and October 2005.

WHERE: The conference planning is hosted by the NewPR Wiki. The conference will take place at www.globalprblogweek.com

WHO: People interested in the subject of the conference. You don’t have to be a blogger in order to participate.

1. You can be an organizer. We need a small, result-oriented, consensus-driven group of people that will take care of all the aspects of the conference: hosting, web design, press release writing, editing, communicating with participants, etc. All organizers are volunteers, and they will receive credit for their contribution.
2. You can be a participant, if you are interested in posting an original, consistent article, or an audio interview/debate (podcast) on the conference’s weblog.

The number of people blogging on PR-related issues has grown since July 2004, from about 30 to more than 180. We’ll have to find a way to:

• have great quality content
• accommodate as many participants as possible
• encourage new voices to join the conversation
• organize the content in a way that makes sense for readers.

Strongly encouraged:

• original content. No republishing or refactoring of old articles.
• fresh content. Not yet another “blogging is good for businessâ€? type of article.
• research. Quantitative research, case studies, best practices.
• collaboration. Articles written by two or more authors.
• group discussions. Podcasts featuring more than one interviewee. Round tables. Debates.
• a non-commercial, non-partisan approach. Don’t pimp your company, services, or expertize; put everything in a larger context.

HOW: There are many decisions to be made: what topics should be excluded, if the numbers of postings/participant should be limited, how to select postings/authors, who will make the selection and on what criteria, and so on.

1. If you want to participate in the decision making process, subscribe to the discussion list available at finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/prblogweek2/ (send an e-mail to prblogweek2-subscribe@yahoogroups.com - your subscription will be approved in the next 12 hours). Please note that, for transparency purposes, this is a public list, so all messages and archives are public. No other data (like e-mail addresses) are public.
2. If you don’t want to participate in the decision process, but you want to participate to the event, then please send an e-mail to Constantin Basturea (cbasturea at gmail.com) or Elizabeth Albrycht (ealb at ampcomm.com) with the title of the article/ posting/ podcast you want to contribute, and we’ll add it to a special page on the NewPR Wiki. Later, you might have to send a half-page summary of your contribution.

The weblog’s content will be licensed under a Creative Commons license (its type will be determined later).

GET UPDATES: If you want to get updates about the event, you can:

• watch this page on the NewPR Wiki
• subscribe to the RSS feed of the discussion groups (excerpts only — that’s what Yahoo! Groups provides)
• read the messages on the discussion list
• subscribe to the RSS feed for Global PR Blog Week’s weblog

SPREAD THE WORD: Feel free to post this announcement on your weblog, or to e-mail it to someone who might be interested in participating.