Short trip to UK amid client wins and launches

Am off next week to London to meet with agency heads from UK, Europe and AsiaPac, as well as catching up with my US management team. I’m taking the opportunity to talk about the impact RSS and blogging is having on the US media and on the practice of PR. While not all these trends are identical in Europe and Asia Pacific, I think it will be good to share experiences. For instance, I know that three months ago in Asia the team mainly used RSS to track news coming from the US since it would often filter into local publications, while in Germany, many publications still had not offered RSS feeds. Looking forward to seeing how that has changed in recent weeks.

I also hope to meet our new general manager for China face to face, who we recently hired, to lay out plans for growth in that market. As it happens, we won a venture capital firm client here this week which specializes in US-China deals, so are already discussing a campaign for the office, which we’ll open in July, legals permitting. China is a hot topic in the media at the moment, so I’m looking forward to working with the VC firm to contribute to that debate, as well as exploring campaigns on the ground.

I’m also now involved in the media planning for the AlwaysOn Innovation Summit coming up in July. One of the panels there is about China, and I know the team plans a somewhat contrarian perspective. Will certainly be a informative debate. (Incidentally, I’m hoping to see if I can get discount tickets to AO, so if you are interested, let me know).

Plus we’re press launching two freshly-minted, newly-funded companies on Monday – exciting times.