Debrief: The Edelman Academic Summit

Having spoke at Edelman and PR Week's New Media Academic Summit '08, I truly have a better appreciation for Edelman's investment and support of the academic space.

Key takeaways:
- Edelman's philosophy and structure creates hard workers, solid corporate culture and builds a "do the right thing"  ethos
- Professors (or at least the ones at the conference) are earnest in wanting to provide their students with the best and most progressive education and have adopted a much more collaborative. less elitist approach to achieving this with their students
- Jesse Jackson is a passionate and well-spoken advocate for the underpriviledged  even after more than 40 years of crusading - my up close, living room session with him made me walkaway more impressed
- Robert French from Auburn and others are using the tools of collaboration to get PR professors to work together and build and share best practices
- founder of Edelman and patriarch Dan Edelman is a wisened soul with more than 50 years of experience in the PR space - a straight shooter and wonderful host for the conference participants

My colleague in crime and fellow Canuck Marcel Lebrun from Radian6 and myself representing Agent Wildfire spoke about Monitoring and Measuring Conversations, moderated by Edelman's Deputy Managing Director StrategyOne Natasha Fogel. The highlights were:
- approaches to 10 types of conversations
- control of medium has ceded to participation
- there are four types of conversation media benefits
- a list of 10 somewhat immutable laws of conversation measurement
    1) it's imperfect, 2) it has a valuable long tail, 3) it's intimate, 4) it's in the eye of the beholder, 5) it measures outcomes not inputs, 6)those who measure are those who manage, 7) conversation don't happen in one place, 8) you need to roll your own, 9)  there are 27 types of conversation, 10) faith goes a long way
- answers to: where does social media fit in?, what's the future hold? how to prep your classrooms for this coming wave?  influencers VS. crowds?

Quote of the conference goes to Walter Carl - "the new resume is 140 characters long"

Some great content and conversation was exchanged - I regret having to miss a number of the sessions, our session was expertly summarized by Edelman's Mary Metcalf and other sessions were summarized here.