Consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton's uber-professional booth awaiting shipping on the final day of PRSA.

For the entrepreneur founder of a startup, exhibiting at a trade show is like being a gum chewer in Singapore.

Rules are going to get broken.

At the just-concluded Public Relations Society of America conference in Orlando, a walk through the exhibition hall was a study of extremes – from deep-pocketed corporations with dedicated events staffers to tiny tech firm with products barely out of beta.

The legacy companies were resigned to the fact they had to pay hundreds of dollars a day to the on-site exposition management company to rent little things most of the conference attendees don’t even notice – items like tablecloths and skirts, booth carpeting and monitor stands.  Because the larger corporations had already invested five figures on construction of custom booths, shipping and sponsorship fees to PRSA, the added fees were little more than a nuisance.

For mid-sized companies like the fast-growing firm I just joined, Critical Mention, there’s a bit more fiscal scrutiny.  My colleague, Steve Shannon, did a quick calculation and determined we could save $1,100 by buying TVs at an Orlando Best Buy rather than renting.  Of course, shipping the TVs back to headquarters in New York would add to the bill and most likely damage the units, so Steve made a second smart decision and donated the brand new TVs to Give the Kids the World, a Florida charity for children with life-threatening illness.

At the extremely frugal end of the trade show spectrum, there are startups who are just starting to bill for their product but not yet making any profits.  In one case, the founder and CEO just about choked when he saw the ridiculous list of rental charges.

There was no way in hell this guy — who still pulls all nighters writing code and knows each of his accounts on a first-name basis – was going to pay a multimillion-dollar expositions company to drape his table with a $20 skirt that would cost him hundreds of dollars to rent for three days.  So he took the risk of getting busted by the trade show police and bought a black bed sheet at Target and used it to wrap his table.  Then he hit Lowe’s and picked up a gray carpet remnant to cover the hideous orange pattern of the ballroom carpeting.

Another decision would happen after PRSA ended, the CEO confided.  If he didn’t pick up any business at the show, he could always return the items for a refund.

I took an instant liking to the guy.

Budget season is in full swing inside organizations with calendar fiscal years.  Chances are a few new line items have made their way into the public relations spending plan for 2011.

More than any other corporate function, PR is leading their organizations into social media, says Charlene Li, founder of research firm Altimeter Group and author of the best-selling business books Groundswell and Open Leadership.

Li, a former journalist, was a keynoter at the Public Relations Society of America International Conference in Washington, DC, this week, telling 3,000 attendees that PR continues to outpace, by a good distance, the customer service function in the use of and spending on social media engagement.

Although Li maintained the dollars required for social engagement are modest, when contrasted to other corporate earmarks, I have noted four or five separate buckets that many organizations are now funding. The addition of staff for social media community management, a platform for monitoring and analysis, and publication tools for scheduling posts are routine investments for any company or agency trying to meet business objectives on the social web.  Many consumer-facing companies are going a step further, spending on technology to build Facebook applications or integrate social into CRM systems.

My interview with Li will continue next week, focusing on how companies cope with the departure of highly recognizable community managers, and the use of digital agencies versus social platform specialists.

Image credit: Tom Humbarger

For those who see the glass as half-empty, don’t worry.  Marketers and PR folks will start focusing on you in 2011.

Jonathan Evans, my longtime colleague and friend, attended the annual Public Relations Society of America International Conference in Washington, D.C., with me over the past few days.  Like Jon, I suffered social media overload.

Which brings me to Jon’s snarky prediction for the possible theme of the 2011 conference in Orlando:

“Anti-social media: How to reach those who are not interested in you, indifferent to your products and are quite frankly annoyed with human interaction.”

Jon had his tongue firmly planted in his cheek while prognosticating about the next big thing in PR.  But I don’t think we should be so quick to dismiss the concept that there’s a large group of constituencies who consciously choose not to engage.

These are the people who like phones that just make calls, proudly show off their small TVs without cable, and love New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die” mantra.

The first step to luring this crowd into social media is in Facebook’s hands.  Introduce the ”Don’t Like” button, Mr. Zuckerberg, and you’ve got ‘em.

OpenTable ended the unpleasant ritual of waiting on hold for a snooty hostess to  book your dinner reservation for a popular restaurant.

GPS devices from Garmin, TomTom and Magellin have made the concept of getting a TripTik from AAA seem almost quaint.

Calling a radio station DJ for help in identifying a song is no longer necessary, thanks to the Shazam iPhone app, which matches the digital fingerprint of a song and instantly displays the artist and title.

With all these technology advances, why is it so damn challenging for today’s time-constrained public relations professionals to shortcut the process of identifying and engaging with influential audiences, and  track the outcome?

My years with PR Newswire and subsequent board roles at Techrigy and dna13, taught me plenty about the never-ending software development process and the need to balance immediate code fixes with longer-term customer requests for new data and functionality.  Now that I’m enjoying a stint as an unbiased industry observer, I figured it was appropriate to ask the community using Cision, Dow Jones Media Relations Manager, VMS Insight and Vocus — and those who wish their budget could support such a luxury — to chime in with their wish list for the next generation of PR automation and software tools.

Ironically, it’s free software from Google, Moderator, that allows me to query the public relations industry and to tally votes on what questions should be asked of PR services providers.  With many of us gathering in October at the Public Relations Society of America international conference in Washington, DC, we should have a timely, specific and crowd-supported list of features to hand over to the development community.

Please take part in this exercise.  Sales professionals have Salesforce.com.  Finance people have their Oracle systems.  It’s only fair that PR officers push software suppliers to stay current and provide tools that will enable you to do your job as it evolves in 2011 and beyond.

A link to the Google Moderator survey on PR services is here:  http://goo.gl/mod/Cry4

My former boss had a funny line to describe how often the owner of a mid-sized New York investor relations agency showed up at free media breakfasts:  “He’d show up to the opening of an envelope.”

These days, any exec who attended the plethora of events aimed at professional communicators would be hard pressed to get their work done — assuming their job wasn’t eating rubber chicken lunches in hotel ballrooms and attending tweet-ups.

Barely a day has passed since I finished reading tweets from those attending the annual research symposium of the Society for New Communications Research (whose SNCR acronym is pronounced like the caramel-nougat-peanut candy bar) outside Boston.  Now, some of those very same techie flacks are heading to San Diego for the big Public Relations Society of America conference.

But wait, we’re not through yet. Thursday marks PR Week’s NEXT event in New York City.  On Nov. 12, 18 and 19, Steve Etzler’s  Business Development Institute is holding three separate forums.  Before the month’s out, there’s even a PR Camp in New York, the brainchild of Atlanta comms veteran Dan Greenfield.

I’m pretty sure the above list doesn’t come close to scratching the surface of autumn events designed to provide professional development — and a nice revenue stream for organizers.   Other organizers who do a quality job with educational events include  Women in Communications, the International Association of Business Communciators, National Investor Relations Institute, Mediabistro and Infocom Group.

The unprecedented fragmentation taking place among publishers, industry associations,  entrepreneurs and ad hoc groups involved in PR means there’s plenty of idea sharing and peer conversations taking place at these events.  The sad reality, though, is that many would-be attendees have to hold down the fort because of a lack of adequate staffing and a downhold on corporate travel expenses.

Anyone who wishes to see the PRSA action in real-time should keep their eyes on Twitter posts with the #prsa09 hash tag as well as a live video stream from dna13 on Monday, November 9 starting around 9:30 a.m. Pacific Time.   This free access to the conference can be found at http://blog.dna13.com

I don’t expect diversity in the New York supermarket business.  Rightly or wrongly, I have long associated chains like D’Agostino and Gristede’s as places managed by brawny Italian-American men.

In the public relations professions, the spotlight has been shining on the lack of adequate representation by non-male, non-white personnel for quite some time.  Similar criticism — and in some cases, litigation — has been lodged against the advertising and financial services industries.

But the world has changed since Don Draper types ruled on Madison Avenue, right?  Surely, the next generation of technology-driven marketing services would be led by people who more closely resemble those who live in our global communities where our clients sell their wares.

If the speakers and attendees at last week’s Inbound Marketing Summit in suburban Boston were an accurate sampling of who’s guiding us through the transformation from command-and-control “push” marketing to online and offline consumer “engagement” by brands, the answer is no.  The vast majority of those behind the books, speeches, opinions, videos and business models showcased at #IMS09 were  white males, mainly in their 30s and 40s.

One exception was Candace Fleming, CEO of the social media analytics platform Crimson Hexagon.  Another was Tina Hoang, whose Palo Alto, Calif., venture capital firm was trolling the event for companies to back.

While at PR Newswire,  where I worked from 1989 until recently, one of our overarching goals was building a healthy corporate culture and products that represented the needs of our communities.  Key to our success was attracting and retaining talent of all shapes, sizes, colors, orientations, religions and ethnicities.  The many postage stamp-sized images of my former PRN colleagues I see on Facebook each day confirms that we made plenty of progress.

Why is this important?

Census data from 2008 shows 54% of the U.S. population will be 54 percent minority groups — that is “everyone except non-Hispanic, single-race whites” — by the mid-21st century.  Professions that continue to rely on pale, male and stale people, practices and ideas are much more likely to be irrelevant.

One recent research paper on the topic, Elizabeth L. Toth’s  “Diversity and Public Relations Practice,” outlined the challenge for our profession.  Organizations like the Public Relations Society of America and the Institute for Public Relations have dedicated resources to address the issue.  But traditional PR agencies and corporate communications functions are morphing into new entities so quickly, it’s questionable how much impact the longtime industry standard bearers will have influencing the fledgling inbound marketing field.

There is  plenty of wildly successful marketing work being done in Africa, Asia, Europe and in the Americas using digital tools and creative  ideas from people who have never written a book or proclaimed themselves social media experts.  Events like the the trends-and-technologies Pop!Tech conference, in Camden, Maine, Oct. 21-24, have a broad roster of philanthropic doers who are glad to share their successes and failures with PR and marketing pros who want to learn new skills.

For people without thousands of dollars to spend on conferences like Pop!Tech and TED, last week’s Inbound Marketing Summit was well worth the time and investment.  I’d love to see next year’s event held in Indonesia, Argentina or Tunisia.  If not there, at least invite some of their digital marketing superstars to visit Boston.