This year’s CIPR Northern Conference took place last Thursday and was hosted by the North East region at St James’ Park, Newcastle United’s impressive city centre stadium. It’s a great venue and we were in good company too as an army of road crew were in the process of transforming the pitch into a stage for the arrival of Rod Stewart’s greatest hits tour at the weekend.

The conference featured keynotes from Frank PR founder Graham Goodkind and GMTV’s MD Paul Corley. Interestingly for me, Paul cut his teeth at Tyne Tees and was producer of the groundbreaking music series The Tube for which I was lucky enough to get tickets to in the early 80’s. Never one to miss an opportunity at a pre-conference dinner, it was fascinating listening to Paul’s anecdotes of the prevailing anarchy of the weekly production meetings and the who’s who of talent the show brought to our screens.

As usual there was an eclectic mix of workshops for delegates to attend including great presentations from Middlesbrough FC’s Dave Allan on the club’s excellent CSR programme and a joint glimpse at Arts PR from Claire Byers of the very cool BALTIC centre for contemporary art and Diane Green of NewcastleGateshead Initiative. Diane was responsible for staging the Battleship Potemkin concert which brought together pop duo Pet Shop Boys and Northern Sinfonia to perform a live soundtrack to Sergei Eisentein’s classic 1925 silent film at Tyneside’s Swan Hunter's Ship Yard.

Social media workshops proved really popular too with Simon Wakeman’s presentation on Medway Council’s youth podcast project and Stephen ‘PR Blogger’ Davies' trip through the blogosphere. You can read their accounts of the conference and view their presentations at their respective blogs.

Big thanks go out to all at Malmaison and The Silk Room for providing our accommodation and a wonderful speaker dinner. Both are highly recommended if you’re holding events in the city. As Rod’s 1971 breakthrough album said, every picture tells a story…

Now you'd be forgiven for thinking our local branch of printing.com was employing bouncers but the guys in the photo are actually Jon and Adam who own and run the place.

We're big believers in supporting good local businesses and so this post is a blatant plug for anyone living in our area to check out the great service at printing.com in Bury town centre. The shop's on Bolton Road close to the East Lancashire Railway station and we can say with hands on hearts that they're a dream to deal with.

Jon, Adam and new member of staff Tom are the guys responsible for producing all the bright and funky Don't Panic stationery along with a lot of the other printed stuff our events tend to generate. Thanks to their help our branding is getting absolutely everywhere with postcards adorning noticeboards and folders gracing boardrooms across the UK.

We've always been fans of printing.com's philosophy of providing high quality print at great prices not to mention their fantastic monthly offers and believe that good print and design says a lot about an organisation or business.

This got me thinking about the recent debacle of the 2012 Olympic logo and how different it could have been. I just don't buy the excuse that it's aimed at a younger generation - they're too busy shooting aliens in Manchester Cathedral - and surely the Olympics should be an event for all ages.

I particularly dislike the disgraceful lower case font they've used for 'London' although I have to confess the design's one saving grace has to be its choice of a pink version but then I would say that.

Anyway, there's a lot of design talent in printing.com franchises across the UK and I thought it'd be a real eye opener if the company tapped into that with a competition for the branches to come up with an alternative logo for 2012... Get Head Office on the phone!

Yesterday we were in London for the seventh in the University of Sunderland's Delivering the New PR series of social media conferences. The above photo is from the final Q&A session of the day and features our speakers Neville Hobson, Tom Murphy, Chris Rushton, Stuart Bruce, Simon Rogers and Philip Young.

The event also attracted a number of the Capital's blogging cognoscenti and you can read further accounts of the day at the blogs of Ian Delaney, Rob Skinner and Simon Wakeman.

For those of you with a taste for more social media knowledge we'd certainly recommend NMKFORUM07 which takes place in London on June 13.

Thanks to everyone who attended and as discussed at the conference, PDF versions of the following presentations are temporarily available to view or download by clicking these links -

Philip Young - Overview

Tom Murphy - Where the New PR is going

Neville Hobson - New Directions: PR in a virtual world

Philip Young - Staying Ahead: How your competitors are responding

Chris Rushton - Law and the New Media

Stuart Bruce - Blogs in Business: Integrating Social Media into Comms Strategy

Chris Rushton - Social Media in the Public and Voluntary Sectors

Simon Rogers - Measurement and ROI