The paparazzi were out in force at last Friday’s London date for the ‘Delivering the New PR’ conference which took place at the city’s Regents Park Marriott Hotel.

Maybe the long-lensed snappers were hoping to catch the cream of Europe’s PR bloggers in action with their ever attentive audience. Thankfully the tabloids didn’t feature candid shots of Tom Murphy using ‘that other company’s’ search engine or Neville ‘I thought you wanted to make a pod cast’ Hobson getting into a terrible mix up with Cynthia Plaster Caster.

Actually the media fuss was due to the fact we were sharing the hotel with Freddie Flintoff & Co who were at Lords for the first test against Sri Lanka. Now I’m not much of a fan of the batting and bowling game but for any non aficionados, cricket is a bit like football but nowhere near as popular.

Old hand Ian Botham was spotted in the bar but unfortunately I didn’t get the opportunity to say ‘high?’ or ask his opinion on lunchtime’s beef goulash.

Talking of food, the catering and refreshments throughout our event were excellent and many delegates commented on the quality and choice of the Marriott’s lunchtime buffet menu. We were also pleased we’d chosen to provide bottled water for our audience throughout the day as it was a sweltering 23 degrees outside.

As for the conference, almost half of our 170 delegates opted to attend the newly added Beginners Blogging session which provided a practical overview of the new technology we were discussing in depth throughout the day. This additional session was introduced following feedback from previous events and demonstrates the importance of filling in evaluation forms and our desire to act upon comments and make sure our audience get the most out of their day.

Many of the delegates I spoke to were positively fired up by the possibilities of the ‘New PR’ and their minds were working overtime on the potential benefits of using social media tools to improve and increase communication with their customers, clients and supporters.

Bryan Bland, Corporate PR Manager of the RSPB was certainly full of ideas on how to use the applications to communicate with the Society’s members and a wider audience. Perhaps it won’t be too long before we can download seasonal Bill Oddie podcast guides to all things feathery.

Likewise, Press & PR Officer Jack Mundy of the National Society for Epilepsy was keen to begin setting up a blog co-authored across their thirteen centres to provide news, support and insight into a condition which affects an estimated 40 million people worldwide including the mighty Max Clifford, actor Danny Glover and rugby player Dean Ryan.

I was also pleased to see Oxfam, a charity close to my heart, represented for a second time at a New PR conference. Their Interactive Media Strategist Maria Padget is about to embrace blogging and podcasting as additional channels to further their campaign activity and encourage more of us to take a stand against poverty. It’s very easy to help out and I’d urge anyone looking for unusual birthday, Christmas, wedding or corporate gifts to check out Oxfam Unwrapped for a huge choice of brilliant ideas.

As we had to fly in most of our speakers from Europe, Don’t Panic are making use of Oxfam Unwrapped to plant a tree for every delegate who attended ‘Delivering the New PR’ in London to go some way towards offsetting our carbon footprint.

Anyway, time for some event management stuff. The conference took place in the hotel’s Adelaide Suite, which has a maximum capacity of 300 delegates. With a back projected stage it looked comfortably full with the 200 delegates and guests the conference attracted.

Despite a few small confusions over a double booking on one of our speakers rooms and when settling the final bill we’d definitely recommend the Marriott Regents Park as a conference venue.

The area is extremely leafy and more importantly lies outside the capital’s congestion charging zone. Day delegate rates were also extremely competitive for London and the hotel’s staff were superb. Special mention must go to Jennifer and Laura for looking after our party and delegates so well. Our only disappointment was that we didn’t get to use the indoor heated swimming pool but as we’d gladly use the venue again there’s always next time.

Thanks as always must go to our sponsors whose support is invaluable and ensures we continue to offer such great value on our ticket prices.

It was great to finally meet the inspirational Lawrence Jones and his team from our headline sponsors UKFast. The company offers complete web hosting services for businesses and organisations and second to none technical support which has seen them voted UK’s best hosting provider for the past two years running.

MD Lawrence and his Communications Manager Jonathan Bowers took the opportunity to demonstrate some very impressive professional podcasting production kit to our delegates and I’m sure this will be yet another service area where UKFast will excel. If you visit their website you can also check out Lawrence’s extremely useful podcast on maximising your organisation's online presence.

Media Measurement also kindly sponsored the event and provide specialised monitoring and research tools to optimise clients media coverage and improve the focus and direction of your media activity. They also offer total evaluation of all types of communications channels and PR activity to help manage reputations and support and inform your media strategy.

Our media sponsors PR Business have received some very favourable accolades from the PR world for such a young publication and it was great to have them on board. The good news from PRB’s Danny Henderson is that their website will go live in the next week or so.

It was also good to meet David Ding from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations HQ who were also supporting our event. We’d always recommend the benefits of membership and are looking forward to the 6th of July when we’re managing the CIPR Northern Conference in Leeds. The event is open to non-members so please have a look at the website for a flavour of what is set to be a fantastic day.

Extra special gratitude must go to Chris and Marco from LAS event production company. The guys drove through the night from Manchester to get to our event and were up at the break of dawn to build our stage and then seamlessly manage all technical issues throughout the day. It was much appreciated.

I also got to meet heavyweight PR Blogger David Phillips of leverwealth fame and discuss his partiality for using B movie stills to illustrate his posts!

So thanks once again to absolutely everyone involved in making the conference such a success. We hope you all enjoyed the day and I think the quality and enthusiasm of our audience is proof that the new PR is going to have a sizeable impact on how we all communicate in the future. We’re currently planning to take Delivering the New PR to Scotland in June and our first overseas date is also under discussion for September. It’ll be the closest thing we get to a holiday this year!

I’d like to remind delegates that you can access the post conference blog to download presentations and post any additional thoughts on the event and the issues we covered. You can also leave questions for individual speakers and hopefully let everyone know about your new blogs and podcasts.

The site is password protected and the details are in your delegate pack at the end of the speaker biographies. You will also be receiving an e-mail reminder of the password details.

Finally, don’t forget to check out our speakers blogs for more comment and opinions on the conference. Neville Hobson has an excellent podcast in which he interviews delegates on why they chose to attend and how they will be using the ‘New PR' and Philip Young’s Mediations offers a short movie featuring some of the podcast’s audio with visuals from the conference. You’ll find links to all our speakers blogs in our sidebar.