BPRC/BGPRA Blog & RSS seminar a success.

I was invited to give a seminar on blogging and RSS to members of the Belgian PR Centre and the Belgian PR Consultants Association today .

This was again an interesting experience for me. I love to interact with peers and discuss new media. The purpose of the seminar - in French in the morning and Dutch in the afternoon - was to explain how blogging and technology like RSS is impacting our profession.

Most people in the room knew what a blog was of course but the majority admitted they didn't read blogs on a regular basis and only 3 people in the room used RSS feeds if I remember well. Monitoring the blogosphere in an integrated way through RSS feeds was for most of them a new concept.

That's why I am happy that these 2 Belgian PR associations decided to run the seminar... Our profession needs more of this I dare say. There is definitely a need for more awareness about all the new media tools that are at our disposal today.

During the break, Pieter from Leads United and myself gave short demos on how to set up a blog and how to subscribe to RSS feeds in different ways. I quickly covered reading feeds through a browser (Flock) and through feed reader applications (Feedreader and Klipfolio).

Very interesting questions came up about monitoring, copyright, transparency and internal blogging.

(To the people who attended; if you need links or information on what I have mentioned during the sessions and you do not find it on the slides, don't hesitate to mail me.)

As I said several times during this day... new media and the application of it in a corporate environment has much more to do with a culture change than with tools. Tools are the easy part but changing the way an organisation communicates and interacts with its public is another thing.

The feedback we received was overall positive and several attendees wrote that they would like to know more about podcasting and other new media. Several of them requested more hands on sessions.

Well... I do run hands on workshops so do not hesitate to get in touch with me (shameless self promo here..;-)

Technorati : PR, belgium, bgpra, blog, blogging, bprc, feedreader, flock, klipfolio, leads+united, public+relations, rss, seminar

Comments

[Audrey]

I attended this seminar, and I must say that I'm happy I did. I'm convinced that there are more ways to communicate in a corporate environment that the traditional ones. This seminare proved it! I hope that all of you PR colleagues agree with me!