Mediaphyter – A Communications Cocktail

A few weeks ago I was invited by Susan Etlinger of the Horn Group to speak on a panel at her agency’s off site planning meeting. The subject? Social media and public relations best practices. Perfect.

On Friday, I joined Susan, Joe Ciarallo of PRNewswer and Adriana Gascoigne of Hi5 to discuss the social media landscape and even the recent “PR is dead” meme. It was nothing short of an awesome experience — so great that I couldn’t stop yapping about it for the rest of the afternoon (much to some of my coworkers’ chagrin). We tackled a lot of issues on both the media and PR sides of the fence, including:

• Evolution of social media as a consumer/business tool
• Emerging best practices for social media
• Our favorite social networking tools (mine was Twitter – shocked?)
• The challenges of social media for the enterprise
• SEC’s recognition of blogs for meeting Reg FD requirements
• How journalists are using social media
• Our predictions for top headlines six months from now
• The funniest (or most disastrous) pitches we’ve ever received
• Mistakes and succeses among PR practictioners
• Trying to move the social media needle in a conservative company

And so on…

I walked away with a lot of new information that I learned from my incredibly talented co-panelists — much of which will make it into this blog and my ZDNet blog in the coming weeks. But while the panel was a great experience my drive back from San Francisco to Sunnyvale was full of musings about how I learned all of this in the first place.

It started with the Horn Group.

In December, after getting approval to start pushing through some social media programs at my company, I attended a Horn Group webinar that taught the fundamentals of social media — and the focus was around microblogging via Twitter. Kyle Flaherty, then on the Horn Group team, was adding new people to his network there on the spot. I joined. I tweeted.

My world completely opened up.

Now, I already knew the basics of social media so I wasn’t totally green when I attended this event (I’ve been a Web tool nerd since I was in college). But I’d never heard of Twitter and I didn’t even have a blog. I could go on for pages about my experiences over the last nine months but I’ll keep it short and sweet — if it hadn’t been for Kyle’s passion for the craft I might not have joined Twitter, formed the network I have now nor would have this cool platform or my ZDNet gig. Nor would I have been able to help SOURCE Boston, RSA Conference or Black Hat with their social media projects. Nor would I have been able to as effectively done my current day job. And I wouldn’t have made some of the incredibly amazing friends who pushed me to do more.

I said at the panel on Friday that Kyle is a mentor to me. I meant that. I followed his lead. I watched the way he engaged with his network on Twitter and his blog readership. Through him I found others who had the right perspective for engaging (i.e. “be yourself”) and everything grew from there.

Kyle’s since left the Horn Group and is now the director of marketing over at BreakingPoint Systems, running interactive marketing programs from the inside. Now I’m working with him as a blogger, having had him successfully pitch me for a ZDNet story (no favoritism; it was a good pitch). I emailed him in the middle of it all and said how funny I thought it was that I’m now writing about the topic he’d taught me so much about just by doing his thing. I said that I likely would still be clueless if we hadn’t crossed paths. His response? Something along the line of “Nah, you’d still be the prolific blogger you are today if we hadn’t connected.”

I don’t think so. Though I do not want to diminish my own blood, sweat and tears that went into my social media education and the countless hours of conversations and experiences that helped me gain perspective, I know that the stars were aligned when I stumbled upon Kyle’s webinar.

Thanks Kyle, for everything.