March 2009 saw Speed created from the five PR agencies owned by Loewy. The headline number of the sum of the parts is more than 30 per cent down as a result of less than a handful of client decisions to cut budgets.

But we remain adamant that it was the right year to pursue the strategy we did to build Speed around a fragmented media proposition. The new business has scale, is strong and fit for purpose – and crucially is attracting good people and clients.

We thought long and hard about whether or not we should participate in the league table. I’d rather not reveal our underwear to the rest of the industry but that’s not sport and it would have been gutless for a business that prides itself on transparency.

Last year the Top 150 list was characterised by no-shows presumably because agency bosses felt that their results were less than impressive. Is PR Week giving us early notice that the situation will be worse for 2009 by dropping ‘150’ from the title of the league tables and extending the filing deadline? I hope not.

There has been lots of talk over the last 12-months of the industry benefiting from the downturn in 2009. Folklaw says that public sector spending, digital and a shift in budgets from other areas of marketing have all worked to benefit the industry.

At the PRCA and CorpComms Conference in October PRCA chairman and Ketchum boss David Gallagher was upbeat. “Although there is still a quarter to go, member agencies are reporting anecdotally that 2009 will either be flat or slightly up,” he said.

If you are an agency leader please submit your numbers whatever your outcome for 2009 so that PR Week is able to produce an accurate picture of the state of the industry and we can scrutinise and plan the long term future of the industry.

The podcast resulted from personal privacy concerns that have had FourSquare on the offensive in the last week following the launch of PleaseRobMe.com a mash-up that tracks the movement of individuals on FourSquare and overlays images and Google Maps.

Issues of personal privacy have arisen with almost every new generation of personal technology: voicemail advertises that you aren’t at home; away-from-email auto-messages advertise that you’re on holiday. If a criminal wants to rob you there are very easy ways of tracking down whether or you’re at home.

FourSquare is currently a niche social network (300 brands and 300,000 users worldwide). It’s the first generation of a platform that combines a mechanism for brand promotion with physical location and social networking. Whether it succeeds or fails alternatives will almost certain arise.

Here are the five the promotion and reputation opportunities that we spotlighted during the podcast for brands on FourSquare:

• Presence – if you have a physical presence (retail premise, office location etc) share it with FourSquare to ensure that you are correctly represented on the network
• Reputation – Monitor your locations on FourSquare for tips left by visitors (good and bad reviews) and your Mayor
• Engagement – If you’re a retail operator that uses price promotion or loyalty schemes as a means of marketing consider extending your offers to FourSquare
• Promotion – If one your brand values is innovation consider the PR benefits of being one of the first brands to use FourSquare as a marketing platform for bespoke campaign
• Measurement – track usage to determine return on investment and determine the value of engagement and promotion

The irony could not be more delicious. The campaign has utilised a well worn PR tactic, namely powerful content, to get attention. It’s pulled in opinion from across the industry and is now an open platform for discussion.

There have been lots of positive comments. Conversations are taking place on the campaign site itself, blogs, Twitter and an article on the PR Week site. There has been lots of positive input.

But the campaign’s language has also been the target of criticism. It stands accused of opportunism and dramatising the issue, yet much of the content is collated, or crowdsourced to use digital parlance, from articles and blogs where PR spam has been debated over the past two to three years.

Realwire and the campaign in general have been called “arrogant” for its approach to raising the issue. I caught up with its CEO Adam Parker for breakfast this morning. He has strong opinions which he is forthright in sharing but he certainly isn’t arrogant. Engage on the issue and you’ll find out for yourself.

Parker’s objective was to create a discussion around the issue across the PR and media industries and work towards some solutions.

Yes of course it would be great if a PR or media industry organisation or publication was campaigning on this issue – but they aren’t and none have picked it up until now. In his latest blog on the campaign site Parker goes as far as offering to start-over and calls on the CIPR or the PRCA to take up the issue.

Final thought: maybe PR spam isn’t really the issue that it is claimed to be by bloggers and journalists, in which case the campaign will die a natural death. But I doubt it.

Rob Brown’s ‘Public relations and the Social Web’ is incredibly well-timed. It’s also incredibly well written. But it is a book for the converted or those willing to be converted and probably not for those uninterested in social media. If I have a criticism, and it’s a very minor grumble, it is that not enough space is devoted to explaining why “the communications upheaval [we are living through] is more significant than the introduction of the printing press.”

For those wanting to make sense of the profound change affecting our industry, I really do recommend you read Rob’s book. Not just a well-argued text on why we need to think differently but also a probably near comprehensive catalogue of what we need to consider when planning a campaign.

PR Week’s digital editor Peter Hay interviewed Rob live this morning on Twitter. You can follow the interview by searching for the tag #PRWInterview.

Backbench MPs earn £60,000 a year which is less than a communications director or a director in the PR industry according to PR Week’s 2008 salary survey. But, it’s still a damn sight more than the average salary of £25,000 in the UK. Which I guess is why no politician of any party will ever tackle the issue.

You wonder what kind of educated person chooses to be a politician when it pays – financially and in terms of work life balance – to pursue a more conventional career. Should we be surprised that we end up with so many apparently dysfunctional individuals as politicians?

Paying politicians properly rather than a dubious cocktail of salary and expenses might even attract some new talent and raise standards. But, in politics, like most other areas of life, it seems that you get what you pay for.

At Speed we’ve been tracking the size of the market and the emergence of digital for more than 18 months. Outside the public groups, commentary on the industry is hard to come by even from the trade associations. Probably because no-one has had the balls to do it and reveal their own weakspots. We should wise-up and be honest though – no-one has got this right yet, because we don’t know exactly what the future holds.

What is certain is that conventional PR is having a battle. Redundancy and agency closure news is almost a weekly occurrence in PR Week. In the last two quarters it has reported on almost a 100 positions that have been made redundant at 23 agencies. An undisclosed (so, probably, high) number of redundancies have been made at three agencies and three agencies have closed.

Today’s news of Next Fifteen’s consolidation of Bite and Inferno is further evidence that the traditional PR market is contracting.

In 2007 the top 150 agencies grew by 22 per cent. The comparative figure for 2008 is due from PR Week any day. The latest number from the IMF predicts that the economy will shrink by 2.8 per cent in 2009.

It’s a tough time for the industry. But it undoubtedly has a strong future which is why I remain resolutely upbeat. Now more than ever companies need guidance to manage the conversations around their brands and modern PR has a lot – much of it tangible – more to offer.

The question is whether the industry has been quick enough to adapt. PR consultancies fall into three distinct camps: consultancies that are embracing and actively creating the digital PR future, consultancies that believe digital is blogger and Twitter relations, and those that have stood still.

The real threat is not the contraction of the industry but the army of new digital agencies that is capitalising on the disruption in the market.

Good luck tonight to Wolfstar’s Stuart Bruce, iCrossing’s Antony Mayfield, Weber Shandwick’s James Warren and Content and Motion’s Roger Warner, as they grapple with the issues.

And perhaps a few slugs.