It's been an interesting week - one that has questioned my assumptions and led me to question the role of an events professional.

This week, I had my first Linkedin originated meeting ie I didn’t know the person before we met on Linkedin. I met up with another person heavily involved in the events industry and inevitably our talk turned to the future and how events would fare in the new Social Media world.  I've always been keen to promote the benefits of events to companies large and small and compared the ascendancy of our services to that of PR agencies.  My position being that many, if not all, companies now recognise the need for someone to help them write and manage PR - it is seen as a profession.  Events, unfortunately are still considered a “nice to have”, an expense and not a must have.  My vision was for Events to evolve and become the third essential hand to marketing managers.

Hence I was interested to hear at this meeting that he felt that PR was a dying industry!  If they were dying where did events now stand?  It was a fascinating conversation, more so as it was the third time in 7 days that I’d heard this.

No, I don’t think PR is dying, I think it just needs to evolve and evolve quickly.  Do PR consultancies merge with Social Media agencies or do they just switch focus from printed releases to including a plan for social media?  Printed PR has it’s place, particularly in specialist industry magazines but surely PR consultancies now need to prove that they can manage a social media campaign effectively and that they can use their skills to best use on this media.  In this new world many companies will think that their staff can manage the Twitter feed but wouldn’t it be so much better to use a professional who can write effective, focused copy?

I do believe the same can be said for events.  Anyone can organize events but a professional can really focus on the essentials and get you further quicker and with less stress.  However we also need to evolve and whilst events will not be replaced by online meetings and virtual exhibitions we need to work out how they can be combined effectively into the promotional plan for the event.

I firmly believe that we'll be much worse off if we don't meet face to face, if we don't explore new products with all senses and not just eyes and ears.

So maybe PR is evolving and so are Events - we just need to keep focused on our clients and what their clients need.