During the past week, I’ve been in San Diego for the PRSSA National Conference. It was an incredible week of catching up with my fellow students, learning and professional development. One of the great pieces out there that include a recap from both the PRSSA and PRSA Conference is from the San Diego News Network, and it gives an overview of the Conference as well as select sessions, including Arianna Huffington‘s keynote.

Part of the PRSSA Conference is attending the PRSA general sessions; the first of which featured a keynote from Huffington. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect from her. She has a particularly interesting background and her site is among the most popular on the Internet.

Her messages were simple, relatable and highly intriguing. Even though Huffington is not a public relations executive at a huge company or the CEO of an agency, I found her perspective to be just as valuable as anyone who has been in the profession for some time. Outside perspectives are helpful and usually very practical; Huffington’s perspective is no different.

Some other interesting thoughts from Huffington (collected from my Twitter stream and the Proactive Report):

• Promiscuity is very good for online content. Make sure it’s worth sharing around online.
• Facts and stats are good, but tell the human story behind them. Who is affected by these numbers? What does it mean to different groups of people? How is it affecting them?
• Transparency, honesty, ethics, openness, etc. Huffington threw these words out there repeatedly.
• “Touching peoples’ hearts is so much more important than touching peoples’ minds.” Public relations is a way for a company to communicate to it’s stakeholders and tell stories, and Huffington reminded the professionals in the audience just that.

After Huffington spoke, Wendell Potter, a former communications executive for an insurance company, came on stage for an interview. In case you don’t know who Potter is, he is a former communications executive who had been working in the insurance industry for years before he testified against the industry to Congress this summer.

In the interview with Huffington, Potter described how he lost his “moral compass.” It was ironic that the next day, Michael Hermann, APR, Fellow PRSA gave a wise piece of advice: “Value people and use things, don’t value things and use people.” It seems as though the practice of public relations needs to incorporate morals and values more than anything else.

Time wrote a great piece with more information on Potter and I highly recommend checking out the piece.

What did you learn from this session? Do you think Huffington and Potter gave sound advice?