Last Thursday, BusinessWire hosted a breakfast panel in Boston called “Making Sense of SEO, RSS, XBRL, XHTML and Beyond — What’s For Real and What’s a Passing Fad?”, moderated by Dana Gardner of InterArbor Solutions.

I was geared up for a little technical talk about this sometimes confounding alphabet soup. The actual panel devolved into a more basic discussion of social media and how to deal with it, should vendors produce their own blogs and podcasts, etc. Sounds remedial, but that’s just the point. When one of the questions from the PR-flaktabulous audience was, “what is Technorati?”, it becomes clear that not everybody gets it — not yet.

Basic education in social media is still necessary, and it benefits us all when those who are behind the curve catch up and start understanding and using social media, allowing us “early adopters” to then move on to the next step of evolution without leaving everyone else so far behind that we find ourselces without an audience or constituency.

Here are a few notes from what I gathered from the panelists as I milked my morning teabag for all the caffeine it contained:

Duncan Perry, Podcast.com: First off , the mention of the word “podcast” set off a noticeable ruffling of papers– telling me that the lay interst in the podcasting medium is well along, and will only get bigger– certainly withing the PR and coroporate communities. Duncan gave a good high-level overview of how podcasting is progressing from a strictly amateur medium to a more professionally produced one, due to the availablility of better production tools at cheaper cost. This excites me, as an old radio guy, because I am a big advocate of bringing good production values to the podcasting masses. Duncan also spelled out how RSS feeds can be used to build loyalty.

Russell Glass, ZoomInfo– As a proprietor of custom-tuned search engines for businesses, Russell talked about how the proliferation of good-quality cheap content will lean towards free vs. paid content, and gave an example (Bambi Francisco at Marketwatch) of how a traditional media column can translate successfully to new media.

Elizabeth Heichler, IDG News Service: Elizabeth stressed the need for gatekeepers to maintain standards for content. I agree that this is necessary in an organization like hers as it embraces the new media, but I would add that the community at large often acts as its own gatekeeper (to add my own examples– the cries for too-tardy comment from Edelman on its Wal-Mart blog fiasco or the self-correcting nature of the blogging and podcasting community on the nature of Apple’s trademark cease & desist letter to our client Podcast Ready). She also stressed that readers value vendor-created content– within the confines of a trusted environment (another lesson from the Edelman-Wal-Mart disaster).

Shar VonBoskirk, Forrester Research: She spoke about beginning a social media strategy by monitoring the conversation, and anlayzing the environment, before decising what — if anything– to produce in social media. New media produces qualified audiences (not the only time the personalization ideal was brought up in the conversation). One interesting point she brought up in the discussion was, when asked “what will not change,” she replied that consumer motivations will stay the same– it is the only the tools that are changing.

That last point is a big message to remember, and a recurring theme for me. Our approaches and goals are not changing, but the tools are. Good content remains the basic ingredient of any communications program. A new press release format, executive communications program, internal newsletter– all are dogfood if the writing and messaging are terrrible.

Remembering that makes learning about any new medium less intimidating.
So, a more detailed technical discussion of XBRL, XHTML, and RSS will have to wait– but I think it’s for the best.

UPDATE: Dana Gardner’s ZDNet blog has posted the audio of the panel.

Technorati Tags: social+media BusinessWire SEORSSXBRLXHTML

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