Which expert would you someday love to spend an entire day working together with?

By Uwe Schmidt, CEO of Industrie-Contact AG, our PRGN partner in Germany

I was recently interviewed by an online media editor. One of the questions read as follows: Which expert would you someday love to spend an entire day working together with and why? For an entire week, I racked my brain trying to answer this question and still couldn’t find a suitable answer – until I flew to Dubai for our Public Relations Global Network’s (PRGN) half-yearly conference.

For three days, I sat together with close to 30 experts and realized that this “swarm mentality” was presently the best thing that could have happened to me in terms of gathering expert knowledge. I know our PR colleagues personally, we have for many years come together from all over the world, but this time in Dubai the exchange was especially productive. What were my key findings?

• Through our presentations and discussions, we could discover which new trends were popular in PR and could immediately swap ideas.
• We learned about new applications such as Wunderlist and could, for example, compare this with Basecamp.
• We exchanged our best practices with each other and as a result, learned about the most successful campaigns from all parts of the world.
• We also discussed the campaigns which had not succeeded in order for us to learn from these experiences.
• We explored ways to jointly acquire clients.
• The PRGN directory (our intranet) gives us access to over 1,000 client cases, which are sorted according to sectors and services. When I need to develop a concept for a new client, I first search here to discover what our partner agencies have already accomplished in these fields. Moreover, our most successful cases, thanks to our yearly awards, are highlighted in this directory.
• In the evenings when we finished the day’s sessions, we could continue to discuss business and private matters in a relaxed atmosphere and as a result, came to highly appreciate each other.
• I know for a fact then when I experience problems and challenges in my own agency that I can always reach out to all these great people and ask them to brainstorm.

For me, the question raised by the online media editor has been absolutely satisfactorily answered. And the beauty of it all: I have access to these experts not only for one day but 24/7 for 365 days a year. The ultimate achievement!

About Industrie-Contact AG

Industrie-Contact AG (IC AG) is a full-service Public Relations Agency with notable clients (b2c and b2b) in Germany and abroad. They are globally present on all continents due to the Public Relations Global Network (PRGN).
This blog was originally posted on the IC AG website.