If your favorite PR consultant was a little hard to reach over a recent Friday lunch time, rest assured that he or she hadn't knocked off early and wasn't having a cheeky one down the pub. In fact, a good-sized group from the Windsor office gathered in the boardroom to meet and discuss public relations in a digital world with Michael Pranikoff, PR Newswire's director of emerging media. It was a wide-ranging and lively discussion that would take pages and pages of this blog (and hours and hours of your valuable time) to recount.

But here are a few of the key points:

- Never forget that everything on the internet lives forever. So it's important to think about longevity, the so-called "long tail of PR." This means that a PR hit that attracts an initial audience in the millions could, over time through posting, re-posting, blogging, forwarding and copying, go on to attract billions.

- The long tail can produce a series of audience peaks -- first when a communication comes out in the mainstream media, then another when it gets picked up by the blogosphere and twitterati, then a third peak when other mainstream media pick it up because the net is buzzing about it.

- More than ever, brevity is vital. Far better to send out three or four short releases each covering one point than to send out one huge release covering multiple themes. In an ideal world, no release would be more than 400 words long.

- Anything you send out needs to offer accessibility (easy to get), viewability (easy to read) and usability (easy to do something with).

- It's time to look beyond job titles and start re-thinking what a journalist is. Someone with 40,000 Twitter followers can actually be far more influential than a reporter at a small publication.

- Stats and data from internet analysis back up much of what communications professionals have been saying for years - keep it brief, keep it relevant, keep it clear.

- Anything you release with photos and/or video will normally get 35% more engagement.

Mark