In a special Sunday edition of Third Tuesday Montreal, Shel Israel, co-author of Naked Conversations, will be here Sunday, September 13th at 6:00 PM to speak about his new book, Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods.Shel Israel writes, speaks, advises and tweets on social media and was the very first speaker at Third Tuesday when it launched in Toronto in 2006. A former PR practitioner and an early adopter of Twitter, he has been participating in conversations and observing how social media is changing the way we approach communications.

Twitterville examines how businesses have been using Twitter to engage with their customers, build loyalty and increase sales. It is the natural extension of Naked Conversations, which Shel wrote with Robert Scoble in 2006, on how blogging brought new opportunities for companies to reach their customers. You can read the introduction to Twitterville on Shel’s blog, GlobalNeighbourhoods.net.

Since 2005, Shel Israel has interviewed more than 375 people in 38 countries on social media’s impact on culture and business. In 2008, he became the the first American to keynote at CNBloggercon, China’s largest social media conference. Shel is a senior fellow to the Society for New Media Research (SNCR) and serves on the advisory boards to the Social Media Club and SmartBrief on Social Media.

Date: Sunday, September 13

Time: 6:00 PM

Location: Daylight Factory, 1030 rue St Alexandre, Montreal

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R.S.V.P. via the 3e Mardi | Third Tuesday Montréal Facebook event page.

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Watching search.twitter.com (formerly Summize) in the minutes that followed the ABC report showed a flood of new Twitter users signing up with expectations of their customer service woes being heard. Here are some examples of first tweets, all of which used the tell-tale generic avatar of a newbie:

With expectations like those, it’s hard not to be disappointed. And if all of those concerns are not addressed, as Tracy Wilson Tracey Lee Wallace‘s were in the report, then in the eyes of those customers, the brands mentioned have failed them again.

I feel sorry for Comcast. Their ten “digital detectives” are going to be very busy keeping up with the new complaints channel. But, thankfully there is a (mostly) reliable search engine, because you can be almost certain these new Twitter users won’t know that they’ll be seen faster by using @comcastcares.

UPDATE 07/22/08: A manual search in search.twitter.com conducted 6 hours after the piece aired in the East, revealed more than 100 Tweets attributed to new users as a direct result of the ABC report. This does not account for new users who have signed up and not yet posted or have made their updates private (which, in itself presents a customer service issue for companies on Twitter who won’t see those tweets). In the search, I discovered a tweet from none other than Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter welcoming the new users. And to their credit, despite the reservations of users, Twitter did not go down as a result of the coverage.

UPDATE 07/23/08: There have been some interesting comments left on the ABC site about this story.

UPDATE 07/25/08: The New York Times ran a story today “Griping Online? Comcast Hears and Talks Back“, which also mentions Southwest Airlines, Whole Foods and Zappos using Twitter for customer outreach. As of 11 a.m. the story had received 60 comments. Hat tip Funny Business.

At the same time I was sitting with Shel and Joe, Brian Solis of FutureWorks had a lengthy guest post on TechCrunch on PR Secrets for Startups. This led Seesmic founder Loic LeMeur to take a stance that PR is overpriced, irrelevant and ineffectual for start-ups; instead, he feels getting involved in the community is all that’s really needed. This sparked a lively debate on whether there is even a need for PR with all the social media tools widely available. Everyone from Robert Scoble to Stowe Boyd were chiming in with their thoughts, generating hundreds of comments in the blogosphere, and detailed clarification by Solis.

It seemed everywhere I turned this week, someone was bashing PR and marketing, using the terms interchangeably with equal distaste. (Look here and here for the difference.) The general feelings were that PR and marketing folks have lied to people for so long, that they are no longer to be trusted. And that authenticity and transparency, the tenets of social media, could never possibly be adopted with any reliability by the flacks and hucksters in PR.

All of this negativity towards PR leaves me wondering if poor practices have irreparably injured public relations as a whole. If PR has truly changed with social media, perhaps they’ve done a really poor job of convincing people of that. Or maybe these are still early days and the changes have yet to be proven.

This period in the evolution of PR reminds of what was happening in the advertising industry in the early ’70′s. Back then, advertising as a profession was seen as “innately immoral”, where no standards of conduct were in place and a wild west mentality threatened to have the whole industry regulated by governments. Advertising took steps to become self-regulated. Is PR at the same stage now?

(Update: The Phreadz embedded player has changed since originally posted. Click on the green arrow to play the entire conversation in order, or, click the thumbnails to view individual responses.)

Additional resources mentioned in these videos:
Background on Truth in Advertising: The Robert A. McAlear Memorial Award
Will fake business blogs crash and burn?
The Worst Social Media Ad Campaigns of 2007

So, tell me: what do people really think of PR? I’d love to know.