It was an interesting session all round.  For starters, the format was different from the norm.  Rather than just let us sit and muse, uber-event organiser and NMK supremo Ian Delaney (@iandelaney) made his speakers sweat a little bit by structuring things as an Oxford-style debate.

My job, along with my co-debater @amayfield (of iCrossing fame) was to convince a full house of PRs that “the PR industry has lost its capability to lead clients in a New Media landscape.“  We were up against Stuart Bruce, MD of Wolfstar and James Warren, Head of Digital at Weber Shandwick.

Sadly, given the partisan nature of the audience, we lost.  But I wanted to share my thoughts on the matter here because – to the casual observer at least – we won by a country mile, swaying a number of PR votes in the process (i.e, we lost the vote but we enjoyed a John Snow, Swing-o-Meter-style victory.)

But I’m not bitter. Really.

Here’s what I think about Big PR’s ability to lead in the Online domain….

1:  Big PR ought to own Social Media and Online

A PR agency is the natural choice for most PR directors when it comes to Online.  They’re the experts who’ve been offering counsel, generating content and building relationships on behalf of their clients over the past 20 years – and these things really matter when it comes to the digital world right now.

But traditional PR agencies are definitely not best positioned to lead their clients forward in the Online world as things currently stand.

2: The Problem: the PR in PR is all about Press Relations and not much else

Say what you will, most PR agencies just do press relations.  They’re not Public Relations firms at all, they’re Media Relations outfits.

Media relations is a well established, well recognised field.  It works on an indirect, synchronous, command and control basis. Ideally this means: media > relationships > clients > stories > and hey presto some media coverage.

So the frame of the debate isn’t about whether or not PR agencies can lead clients in the Online World, but whether Media Relations agencies can do it….

3: Online requires a very different approach to Media Relations

The skills required in the Online world are very different to those practised in Media Relations.  What clients need in the Online domain is a set of direct service offerings.  They need direct management of reputations amongst communities and forums. They care for direct, bottom line events like sales and bookings conversions, and other direct, tangible outcomes like traffic acquisition.

This involves a specific set of direct Online skills:  Online people talking directly to lots of other Online people (customers, partners, influencers, stakeholders, etc), not people talking through people (the media).

These aren’t Media Relations activities and I don’t think that a traditional Media Relations agency can carry them with any level of assurance.  More to the point, most traditional PR firms aren’t comfortable with this kind of work.  This is most evident in the language they use to describe their services.  Traditional PR’s talk about ‘blogger outreach’ programmes and the like.  These terms betray a lack of conviction and confidence.  Clients don’t need speculative ‘outreach,’ they need direct conversations and conversions.

4: Online requires a totally different skill set to Media Relations

In order to influence conversations directly, drive conversions and acquire web traffic you need a dedicated Online tool kit.  SEO smarts matter (a lot!), as do things like network analysis, project and campaign management, measurement  and analysis.

In other words, to do this stuff well you need strong technology (your own tools or expert use of somebody else’s), strong commercial insight, strong processes and strong reporting …all the things that digital agencies have been busy developing over the past ten years.

Again, I don’t see many traditional PR agencies that have these kinds of capabilities.

5: Social Media hobbyists don’t deliver a robust service model for Online

That said, what I do see is a bunch of extremely smart PR Pros who live and breathe ‘Online.’  100 or so of them were in the audience last night.  In this respect, the future of PR is in good hands.

But for now there’s a world of difference between Tweeting and delivering a robust Online service offering. One is a hobby, the other is a business model.

Sadly it looks like too many PR firms are happy to hire in a handful of young, Social Media-savvy people, graft them onto a traditional account team and then tell their clients that they now do Online.  This is not good enough.

The fact is, not many traditional PR agencies are taking the time or the money to reinvent their service models for an Online world.  As Stephen Waddington of Speed mentioned yesterday, most agencies believe that Online is simply a bolt on activity to their normal PR business: they’re just doing Media Relations via a different channel. (For more great insight follow @wadds – recommended reading.)

6: Big PR needs to shed its past, fast

When all’s said and done, I think most PR Agencies are hampered by their past.

Today’s CEOs, Marketing VPs and PR Directors have mainly experienced PR agencies in ‘Media’ mode.  So even if an agency does have the right balance of skills, processes and tools, there’s still lots of work to be done to convince the right people that they’re now capable of delivering Online services. The ‘PR’ tag is a problem in this respect and agencies need to do some radical repositioning work.

7: Winners and Losers

Ultimately, I think the battle for initial Online PR service delivery will be won by traditional digital firms, specialist startups like ourselves, Social Media firms, planning departments in large ad agencies, and a rare breed of PR agency that takes risks.

Given today’s economic climate these are the only companies that are capable of creating all the new things that are necessary for an ‘Online PR’ service model.  It’s no surprise that most of these firms are startups and/or born on the web consultancies.  For us, change and invention are imperatives, not a rebranding exercise.  (Necessity is the mother of invention, no?)

And here’s the rub…

Nobody really has all the answers for Online right now. The service delivery model is yet to be fully built, and most clients are big enough and brave enough to understand this.

The people who will write the book, however, are those who make the first convincing moves and are happy to invest and invent.  We’ll be delivering best practises in beta mode whilst Big PR is watching on the sidelines, tuning in to events like the one last night.

(Aside: check out Measurement Camp for a great example of this in practice.  Social Media and Online PR specialists understand that measurement is a current weakness, and are doing something to address it in an innovative and very accessible way (led by the chaps at Nixon McInnes).  Anybody can join in if they have something to contribute to the cause, clients included. I’m not aware of any similar initiatives to address blind spots by the PR industry.)

So…. the threat to a traditional PR agency isn’t just in losing a slice of Online business, it’s in losing the right to learn about it.

Until PR agencies start investing in new skills, new tools and new service models, then the future is very bright for Social Media and Online PR upstarts like C&M, We Are Social, and Nixon McInnes; smart PR firms like HotWire, Weber Shandwick, Speed and Immediate Future; and pure digital outfits like iCrossing.

That’s the view from me and @amayfield anyway. What’s yours?? (Meantime, you can check out all the event chatter on Twitter at #PRdebate.)