I was thinking the other day that if journalists write the first drafts of our his/herstories, social media is recording our social history in unprecedentedly rich detail (assuming we’re able to avoid a global holocaust scenario that returns us to pre-industrial times).

And a few months ago, in talking to Darren Frew of Nanotech BC, we discussed the need for nanotechnology to do better than both the nuclear and genetically modified foods sector in communicating the risks and benefits of the innovations on offer.

I’m glad to see Street Science is out there doing just that. So far I’ve listened to the nanotech and nuclear power segments. I was amazed to discover two-in-one shampoos contain nanotechnology – already knew about the sunscreens. And it was hard not to smile in sympathy with Dr. Ion when confronted by the sheer misinformation still held to be true by members of the great unwashed general public.

(For some odd reason I had to download RealAudio to listen to this; not sure why Windows MediaPlayer wasn’t up to the job.)

Update: I first read of this program on Richard Jones’ blog and shamelessly omitted to mention him till Andrew Maynard reminded me it wasn’t my own discovery. Mea maxima culpa.

I too, remember wondering at how few marcomms clients we had when I first joined the Toronto office of a full-service global PR firm. In fact we had more than I’d first realized, high tech clients were pretty exclusively marcomms clients. Their primary goal was to garner positive media coverage that supported marketing efforts and ultimately drove sales. The health practise was all about selling more drugs.

But corporate communications was about exciting, real things like corporate reputation management and issues management and community and stakeholder consultations and crisis communications. And then corporate social responsibility and now, about social media and the way citizens have been universally empowered through interactivity.

We worked closely with our public affairs colleagues, because they were the ultimate source of information about what was really going on. We got reports the instant they were transcribed. We’d sometimes get oral briefings that would guide us in our approach. It’s all about communicating persuasively, baby.

So many of these listening tools are now provided by social media, whether it’s live blogging or Twitter, news aggregator or citizen journalism sites – the opportunities to acquire information are now available at warp speed.

But back to the PR/PA debate: no one ever had better brainstormers, or more of them, or more varied formats for brainers, than the marcomms people. I was delighted to be invited to many of them, where we could eat candy, get silly, and come up with some amazing ideas.

Which is why I hope to build a PR practice that includes a variety of clients with a variety of needs.