About T3 PR:

“The T3 PR Conference will take place in NY on 9/11/08 and will be devoted to issues facing today’s practitioners who specialize in public relations for organizations in technology industries. The Conference will also feature the annual Awards for Excellence in Technology Journalism.”

To download an application and view additional information including application instructions and rules please visit:

http://www.prsa.org/networking/sections/technology/callforpresentations.html

A few conference speakers and attendees have already blogged about their experiences:

• Tony Sapienza, Topaz Partners co-founder and principal and Blogs, Vlogs & iPods panelist
• David Parmet, CEO, Marketing Begins At Home and Blogs, Vlogs & iPods panelist
• Tonja Deegan, Airfoil PR, conference attendee
• Chip Griffin, CEO, CustomScoop and Blogs, Vlogs & iPods panelist
• Simon Heseltine, Director of Search, RedBoots and Boosting PR Results with SEO, SEM & RSS panelist
• Matt McLernon, Bite Communications, conference attendee (and PR Idol winner!)

Updated 6/22:

• Greg Jarboe, co-founder and CEO, SEO-PR, Writer, SearchEngineWatch.com and SEO, SEM & RSS panelist

We also created a T3 PR Conference Set in Flickr. However, most of our pictures pale in comparison to the ones David Parmet took on a Nikon d80 that drew its share of envious looks (at least from me).

Special props to Katie Safrey from the Affect marketing department who truly went above and beyond the call of duty in helping to plan and execute the event. If anyone from Fresh Direct is reading this, how about introducing gift certificates to your product line? I’d like to “gift” Katie a shopping spree. This is a potentially huge untapped market for you guys. Call me!

It was a cross between a PR smack down and a love fest. If you don’t know the gregarious personalities involved, meet Richard the rabble rouser, Steve the cool geek and Constantin the intellectual. Besides the entertaining repartee between Steve and Richard, this session gave participants a taste of what’s next for our industry. Steve talked about participating in the realm of social media. As practitioners, in order for us to advise clients and get bloggers or journalists to pay attention, we must get in the game and play. We need to know the rules, we need to blog ourselves, we need to comment, we need to have Flickr accounts and MySpace pages.

Constantin pointed out that this is a time of ‘distributed PR’. That the true character of a company is expressed by its people. The tools are there for the public to have a direct channel of communication with the people within the organization. “This is not about losing the control of the PR department over the company. This is about having a cacophony of voices, having more spokespeople, having multiple touch points with the public.” In the next five years, Constantin predicts, that there will be much more emphasis on internal communications to train all employees as spokespeople.

Richard asked some pointed questions about guiding the shift within the organization, while Steve compared the current situation to the last days of communism – that the people under communist rule saw on their TV that the people over on the other side of the wall are free – and they wanted to be part of it. Companies that don’t want to let go of the reins and let new technologies and new media in are going to fall. The change is coming and they can’t avoid it.

As Constantin pointed out, the revolution and change is great. But it is always followed by a long period of turmoil. “In many countries, it took more than 10 years for the countries to stabilize. There will be major legal problems and the law will have to adjust to the new realities.”

There were other great tidbits and moments of sage advice. Podcasts should be available in the near future. Check back here or on the Tech Section’s site.