I know I haven’t posted in a while, this is because I managed to take my family away on a holiday to Tenerife.

I got back at 4am on Wednesday morning and got back to work on Thursday morning albeit very tired.

All I can say is I was extremely busy almost immediately catching up and then heading straight down to London to attend Don’t Panic’s Guide to Social Media on Friday and then a new business meeting on Friday afternoon.

I attended the conference with my colleague Stuart Bruce and it proved to be very interesting with some useful insights being shared.

The event’s speakers included: Neville Hobson, Marshall Manson (Edelman), Meg Pickard (The Guardian), Kerry Bridge (Dell), Stephen Davies (Webitpr), Graham Goodkind (Frank PR), Simon Wakeman (Medway Council), Sam Barrett (Oxfam) and Robin Goad (Hitwise).

One comment which interested me was from Kerry Bridge when she said: “If you blog in the top ten languages you can cover off 95% of the online community on the planet.” This is quite interesting for me as I may be engaging in a huge global blogger relations campaign pretty soon.

I also found Marshall’s comments very refreshing as he held his hand up to a few social media mistakes with Walmart. They have used those mistakes to improve their campaign and it is now working really well.

Marshall had a very similar view to my own in that he said there are no experts and there is no handbook to implementing social media. This is so true – any one of us who work in this space can only try to do their best by trying to make sure everything is as transparent as possible.

I mainly went to catch up with a few guys and I really enjoyed meeting some of the people that I regularly speak with in the virtual/digital world. Stephen Davies (a big toon fan) and I were amused by how different people are when you actually meet them in the flesh as you always seem to think people will look different to what they actually do.

I am not going to go through the entire conference but if you are interested in what was covered at it Stuart was typing away furiously and live blogged it using coveritlive.

About Chris Norton

Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.