Last week, the first Global PR Summit took place in Miami, Florida. Organized by the Holmes Group (best known for its Holmes Report and the SABRE Awards), the summit was billed as “a high-level event designed for senior practitioners to address the critical issues facing the profession and to celebrate the best public relations work from around the world.”

The event certainly did have an impressive speaker roster and comprehensive programme spanning four days. A number of key themes emerged at the event, which should at least prompt further debate and discussion on the future of the profession.

Naturally, there was an event hashtag – #PRSummit – via which you could keep an eye on commentary, opinion, links, and more, tweeted by those at the event and afar.

Tracking everything relevant that people were talking about, referencing, linking to and more, right across the social web, was a task borne by a team from Lewis PR who also did considerable heavy lifting in proactive use of social media tools and channels:

[…] Thanks to an excellent cross-agency and multi-region global team we achieved quite a lot in the space of three days. To give you a sense of the scale of the operation, here’s some highlights:

• Teams working around the clock with handovers between the UK, Boston,San Francisco, Singapore and on-site in Miami
• Recorded, edited, produced & uploaded 20 vox pops interview
• Designed, developed and hosted on-site Tweetwalls
• Constant updates to Twitter, Pinterest, Storify, Instagram, Facebook & YouTube
• Tweeted live updates, prepared agenda tweets and supported delegates via an online concierge service
• Tracking and programme management via Sysomos Heartbeat, NetVibes, and a host of other online tools

While no doubt part of Lewis’ remit is providing Holmes and others with detailed interpreted analytics from all of that activity, they’ve also done a neat thing – produced an infographic that summarizes key metrics from their research, and published it in a very timely manner. See it on Lewis’ blog, or here after the break (it’s big).

It takes some effort to do this well. But if you make the effort and produce something people will see of interest and value to them, it is worthwhile to capture social engagement activity for an event and make it public this way: it’s almost guaranteed to get people sharing it and talking about it and the event (such as I’m doing) that otherwise might not have happened. And of course, it keeps your name, the event, etc, alive in connectable ways on the social web beyond the event timing.

Nice work, Lewis PR.

• In this weeks’ episode 676 of The Hobson and Holtz Report podcast, published on November 5, Shel and I discuss the speech delivered at the PR Summit by Huntsworth CEO Lord Peter Chadlington who argues that public relations professionals need to be guided by their “innate morality” and not “any code of professional ethics.”