Seminar Success

The room is packed and there’s a real buzz here. People from a variety of SMEs are crowded into a seminar room at Aston Science Park, Birmingham to learn all about ‘PR and the Media’ as part of their Seminars for Success series.

At a time when people are ‘streamlining’ the general realisation of the important role PR plays in business development and reputation management is heartening. From the variety of questions asked you could not fault the desire to learn.

For me, presenting along side Marc Reeves, the editor of the Birmingham Post, I am taken with his ability to adapt to the times. Newspapers, as we all know have had to ‘streamline’ too – and never more so than the Birmingham Post...

A traditional daily business broadsheet it has relaunched into a compact, commuter friendly, forward looking and contemporary paper backed up by a fantastic standalone website. Not only can you subscribe and link to read the actual paper, turning the pages as you go – but you have a site that is separate, informative and relevant and supports the paper without replicating. But it’s not just the comments and the blogs available; it’s the grasp by the Birmingham Post of the need to move with the times. All reporters have the new phones so that they can take and send in instant pictures, they have developed a group of industry experts to provide some very thought provoking blogs and they infiltrate the social media scene – sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn providing useful stories.

And so, as PR professionals we need to continue to move with the times too, embracing the changes that the regional papers are, at last, providing us.