Roll on PRWeek's Summer Forum

I'm heading up to Warwickshire next week for PRWeek's Summer Forum.

I went to the same event a couple of years ago, and it was a great conference - strong speakers and good networking opportunities. There was particularly heavy rain around Chepstow, where the event was being held, and the sewerage backed up and flooded into the hotel's foyer. You can imagine the musings of 50 PR-types in that scenario...eeeow.

Hopefully the only thing that'll be flowing this year, is great ideas and bubbles!

A new survey on influencing technology buyers

Hill and Knowlton released an interesting survey this week, entitled Influencing Technology Decision Makers.

Following a survey of 60 companies, the research found that PR can positively impact the purchasing decision.

The report highligts key trends including:

• The dominance of analyst research - and how effective analyst relations really can help to drive sales enquiries
• The power of the blog - and the growing importance of one-to-one dialogue
• The importance of the right media coverage - and which publications ranked highly in terms of IT audience credibility

It's a brief but worthwhile read.

The 50 best business blogs...according to the Times

Interesting story a few days ago on the Times Online, about the 50 best business blogs. They've categorised it by sector. Definitely worth checking out if your company is one of the companies for which there is a dedicated anti-blog.

There were a couple of amusing quotes in the line up - this from Weber Shandwick's Colin Byrne on the Olympic logo: "Of course if your initiative attracts reams of bad headlines and coverage, and thousands of people take to the blogosphere as ‘badvocates, fuelling yet more media coverage, it could be described as a PR disaster I suppose."