The Wardman Wire

This year’s “New Media” conference organised by PR Week magazine has Derek Draper as one of its advertised speakers. The cost of the conference is £500 to £650, depending on how early you book.

He is trailed as a speaker about this:

Gain An Insight Into The Mindset And Activities Of Bloggers And Citizen Journalists And Get The Tone Right To Achieve Maximum Coverage For Your Brand

* Perfect your blogger outreach strategy: how can you find and engage with relevant independent and non-independent bloggers online and build relationships with the organisations publishing the blogs

* How do you best communicate with bloggers, what information do they need and in what format?

* How can PR professionals facilitate positive public opinion of their product and encourage citizen journalists to advocate their brand? Tap into the increasing numbers of citizen journalists and interact with their online activity: do they signal the death of the ‘traditional journalist’?

Derek Draper, Editor of labourlist.org and Psychotherapist with diy-therapy.com

Hat-tip: Dizzy

This was still the plan when I phoned up the organiser to check yesterday.

There may be a talk next year about “recovering from taking one step forward and six steps back in your PR with bloggers”. In the traditional illustration of a frog crawling up out of a well and slipping back a brick for every two gained, this is the one that fell in.

There’s a lot more information at the website.

I have three serious points to make about this, apart from enjoying the irony of the whole thing.

Research Your Speakers Carefully

PR Week seem to have chosen a speaker who was widely on record as admitting to knowing very little about the subject he will be speaking about. Even without the whole scandal around smear campaigns, it was an unwise choice; if you include the 3-4 months spent researching Labour List and the 3 months since the blog started on January 15th that is less than 6 months of relevant experience for a speaker at a major conference.

This is not a hidden insight whispered in corners by Geeks, for example mentioned in a piece by Iain Dale in the Guardian back in January:

I had lunch with Draper in late October when LabourList was a mere twinkle in his eye. I’m sure he would concur that his knowledge of new media was mediocre to say the least. He wanted to pick my brains about how the left could “up” its game.

Research Your Conference Carefully

To understand blogging and new media, I’d recommend some initial research working out the things that are of interest to you, followed by spending the day listening carefully at JEECamp (Journalism and Enterprise) in Birmingham on May 9th. Don’t go to JEECamp and talk like a PR-Bot, though: go to listen.

That costs a voluntary donation of £20, rather than £600.

And then you can spend the rest of your company’s money on the PR Conference, if you need to do so.

Spend Your Money Wisely

And for the record, for a budget of 600 ukp you could get between one and three days of 1 on 1 training from almost any blogger in the country. Yes, that includes me.