On 1 and 2 August, I attended the PR 2.0  conference cum workshops organised by the Institute of Public Relations of Singapore (IPRS). 

Many people, including colleagues and blogger friends asked me what i thought about the conference, so here're some general thoughts...

Great Speakers
There were a couple of really great speakers including Mitch Joel , Christopher Graves and Dr Jim Macnamara. 
Mitch was so inspiring, I came back and raved about him to every and anyone I have been speaking with today. Dr Jim's workshop about measuring success on new media was rather insightful. I have already shared some of his notes with a couple of friends who are either researching or trying to figure out the topic. 

General Content
There were many speakers and some panel discussions but generally, except for a few outstanding and inspiring ones, I must say some others were rather disappointing. Perhaps the aim was to start introducing the Web 2.0 to the PR folks, thus the content was what i called "general". To be fair, each speaker was given rather short time to present their topics. I had wished there were more indepth discussion and sharing of more details about various topics that we don't already know.

Networking
Being a PR event, the organiser had expected the need for a social networking evening on the first night. Though the group was rather small, it was great opportunity to meet some fellow industry folks and a couple of interesting bloggers. Met Walter Lim who shared an interesting case study on the National Heritage Board and of course, my dear old friend, Melvin Yuan who was the moderator of one of the panel discussions. 

After thoughts ...
I am currently very blessed to be surrounded by some highly savvy tech experts and bloggers who are extremely forward looking in the whole Web 2.0 space. This afternoon, I had lunch with one of the young and very intelligent bloggers, Bjorn Lee who shared alot of insightful information about the new / social media and how it'll affect various
businesses.

I realised that the cheaper alternative to attending expensive conferences to learn about the new media is to the simply start reading! Read the blogs, trend-spotting sites, monitor them, start discussing, start communicating with relevant bloggers/ experts, start listening and start trying out some of the new tools!

But I am not putting down what IPRS is doing. I think it's a great effort.