PRSA has come in for much criticism over its lack of a session on blogging at its upcoming conference. Several voices, including Neville Hobson and B.L. Ochman have called on PRSA to add a session (even though the largest of the public relations associations did conduct a teleseminar on blogging that drew some 300 people—more that would be likely to attend a breakout session at a conference).

Pete Shinbach, though, doesn’t think it’s that big a deal. (I’d link directly to Pete’s piece, but his blog doesn’t seem to offer permalinks, so look for the item headlined, “Convincing the PR sceptics: Do as I do, not as I say.”)

Pete and I—who have worked together on several projects, co-wrote a monthly newsletter (with Tudor Williams) and co-founded a virtual consultancy—are going to disagree on this one. Frankly, as 27-year member of IABC and former member of IABC’s executive board, I don’t much care if PRSA holds a blogging session or not. Pete notes that PRSA has always been a follower and not a leader. But Pete also writes “Blogging, by nature, is unstructured.  So, unless you’re touting your blogging software or trying to sell some sort of blogging service, it doesn’t make much sense to wrap structure around blogging.”

You can argue this either way, but the notion of corporate blogs (e.g., Scobleizer) and company-sanctioned blogs (like those from Macromedia) present a unique opportunity for a company to present a human face to the public. In a piece in Australia Financial Review’s “Boss” magazine, Trevor Cook quotes Bob Scoble as saying that blogging builds more productive customer relationships because “people are far more likely to give great feedback if they know someone specific is listening.” Cook (still quoting Scoble) goes on, “The power of these feedback loops can generate big benefits. ‘Customers get listened to more effectively, product teams build better products and support them better. Influentials and evangelists get more information they can use to talk about the products with authority. Everyone wins.’”

And we haven’t even touched on the notion of building relationships with influential bloggers, the growing number of CEO blogs or the need for companies to establish policies regarding employee blogging. All of this is legitimate fodder for a session at the PRSA conference.

IABC staffer Chris Grossgart tells me IABC (whose conference is in June) always holds a few sessions open for hot topics that emerge after the rest of the schedule has been set. She indicated blogs could easily fill one of those slots.

Still, my slam on PRSA isn’t just that they’re not including a session on blogs. It’s that they’re doing it at a conference they’ve titled, “Architects of Change, Advocates of understanding: Advancing the Public Relations Profession.” Just drips with irony, doesn’t it?