I’m heading to Baltimore to attend and present at How Colleges Can Obtain National and Regional Publicity, an annual conference put on by Keith Moore Associates. On Monday, I’ll be co-presenting with Dan Forbush, one of the pioneering PR-on-the-web guys, and I’m looking forward to it greatly. I’m also looking forward to sticking around for the entire conference. It’s been a while since I’ve been to a conference that focused mainly on PR. It’s also been a while since I’ve been to a conference where I wasn’t spending most of my time presenting or moderating.
This conference will include plenty of discussion about new media and media convergence. Dan and I will present on “New Media Promotion: Facebook, YouTube and Bogs,” and it should be an interesting discussion. As I mentioned, Dan is a veteran in online PR. He’s the founder of Profnet, a service that connects journalists with colleges and universities. He founded Profnet back in the early 1990s, when only a few journalists were online and they all had Compuserve accounts. Profnet later merged with PRNewswire, and Dan is now executive director of communications at Skidmore College.
I remember hearing Dan talk about the impact of the Internet at a CASE conference in Denver, circa 1994 (when the only web browser was Mosaic), and something he said back then has stuck with me and is still relevant all these years later. It went something like this:
We’re in the middle of a revolution, and in a revolution, kings lose their heads. Therefore, think like a peasant.
I don’t know if Dan remembers that quote but it made a big impression on me. The kings of marketing and promotion, with their institutional, top-down, command and control approach, are headed for the guillotine. The “peasants” are creating their own marketing, and the smarter of us will be working with them and thinking like them.
If you’re planning to attend the conference, give me a shout.
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Now playing: Los Campesinos! – Broken Heartbeats Sound Like Breakbeats
via FoxyTunes
Andrew Careaga 
Exciting stuff! I believe our Director of News Service, Laura Corbin, is heading to that same conference next week. (I know she’s going to a conference and Baltimore sounds right so I’m just putting the two together) So anyways maybe you will see someone from Wofford! :)
Kyle – I hope I get the chance to meet Laura.
Andrew, great quote! Dan is a visionary and I’m glad you remembered the statement. Good luck at the conference and keep us posted.
wow. thats a great quote.