Richard Edelman is onstage now @ Syndicate.  Eric Norlin (subbing for Scoble) starts out with a question about why some PR people are still pitching Scoble even though he’s very publicly writing a series of heartbreaking posts about his mother right now.

Says Edelman:  we have to change the way we are doing things.  We need to have fewer conversations.  Better, more richer conversations.  There’s a better way.

Amen.

Other Edelman snippets:  you can’t try to control the conversation anymore.   What we’re doing in this room is deconstructing that old ad-based model.  It’s a peer to peer conversation now.  And that can turn bad for you, but you’ll learn something if you listen. That’s evolutionary for brand guys, who have been taught message discipline all this time.

We’re getting rid the of the message triangle at Edelman.  That’s old stuff.  You can’t appear to be overtrained.  You have to be spontaneous & evolving.  It’s a great opportunity for PR, but if we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re in trouble.

The world of making :30 films is exploding, and they don’t have a model for how to make money in this new environment.  Crispin Porter is one of the form neutral agencies that is doing something more flexible.

I think the ad guys are terrified of this development.  It’s ruining their revenue model.