Earlier this week, I delivered a three-hour seminar to about 75 members of our U.S. leadership about social or otherwise new media. The event took place at the Alamo Drafthouse Theater and included an excellent, provocative, and entertaining panel featuring Terry Heaton, Kaye Sweetser, Korey Coleman, and our own Tiffany Fessler.

I ended the session with "Everything I (Now) Know About Edelman (and PR) I (Re)learned From My Students". I made several points, of which I'll share a few:

"Flexibility Of Purpose"

For me, one of the best things that came out of my brief experience at USC Annenberg was meeting Gary Dauphin, writer and online community-builder who had a key role in Black Planet, Africana.Com, and AOL Black Voices.

He once mentioned that, while helping to build these successful properties, it seemed that everything he tried turned into a dating site. Choosing not to fight this — and taking some inspirations from the book Built To Last — Gary and his colleagues decided that having the community be the guide and working to provide the experience they desired was the way to go, rather than remain slavish to whatever objectives were developed in isolation beforehand.

You can hear him talk about the value of flexibility when building online community in this episode of the earSHOT podcast. (Yeah... "Podfade..." I know...)

"Metcalf's Law — It Works"

Bob Metcalf stated that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users on that network. Metcalf's Law is glorious in its complete resistance to any kind of measurement (are we measuring... "networkiness?", for example?), but I've seen it work every day in our lab — not only in terms of the ideas we come up with but in terms of what happens when people from the far-flung reaches of our network come together.

"Digital Storytelling Is Essential"

My laptop bag has an Olympus audio recorder and a FlipTV digital camera, among other gadgets. There is no reason — especially with all of the great free editing software out there — why such devices shouldn't be standard issue.

"Digital Natives Must Manage Up"

A favorite topic of mine, as many of you know, which I won't belabor here.

"Success Online Has A Very Long Tail"

While there is a tendency in our industry to lionize the gajillion-dollar program (online or off), we also must never lose sight of how we operationalize digital thinking and online community philosophies into our day-to-day work. IMHO, that's where the public relations industry's success in social media will ultimately come from — building community thinking into everything we as practitioners do. (In some way, this thinking inspired this DIY "despair.com" graph I created.)

I ended with the following three quotes:

"Never be afraid to make new mistakes." - Esther Dyson

"Do things for the first time, all the time." - Dr. Don Nielson, SRI International

"Our call to action is to lead with humble confidence." - E. Neville Isdell, The Coca-Cola Company