This past Wednesday evening, Dec. 1^st, Bateman Group along with fellow Silicon Valley PR agencies Mindshare PR and PageOne Public Relations hosted a panel discussion on the current state of venture capital and M&A activity within the tech industry and Silicon Valley.  Moderated by our very own Bill Bourdon, the panel was comprised of a number of veteran reporters from the area including J. Bonasia of Investor’s Business Daily (IBD), Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher, Alastair Goldfisher of Reuters and Ben Parr from Mashable.

Surrounded by the backdrop of the sun setting on San Francisco in the penthouse suite of our office building at 1550 Bryant Street, (yes, it’s a gorgeous view and you should all be jealous!), the panel offered up their views on a number of interesting trends they feel will shape both the tech industry and the climate for funding over the next few years.  Here’s a quick summary:

2010 Retrospective: The majority of the panel (J., Tom and Alastair) agreed that 2010 has been defined primarily by the Cloud.  Not only did the companies selling product and services for the Cloud dominate funding news (as well as enterprise M&As), but this was the year it went mainstream (Witness Microsoft’s recent TV commercial with a couple in an airport trying to cure their layover boredom with the rescue mantra “To the Cloud” and the woman exclaiming “Yay, Cloud!” when she connects to their home network. Seriously?!?).

Ben chose to break with the crowd to declare 2010 the year of Apple and Facebook. Between the iPhone and the introduction of the iPad this year, Apple’s stock has skyrocketed and briefly overtook PetroChina as the second-biggest company in the world by market value after Exxon. Facebook, on the other hand, has grown from a place where college students went to vent into a force that even Google now has to reckon with.

Disruption/Convergence: J. (who early in the evening declared “enterprise IT is not dead” — you heard it here first, folks!) later on posed a very interesting theory about how the industry is going through a period of simultaneous disruption and convergence. Cloud, mobile and social media are all disrupting the industry in some way, but they are all also leading to greater convergence at the same time. Cloud provides the infrastructure on the backend, while the user drives the function of the mobile device. Social media is driving real-time collaboration and new ways of organizational functioning, with traditional, hierarchical management structures breaking down. Or, as Flannery O’Connor once put it: “Everything that rises must converge.”

Devices/Platforms: All of the aforementioned discussion trends are leading to another intersection– one where devices and platforms merge. As Tom put it, “Mobile is just the fashion of the day — it’s not about mobile, it’s about the platform and the device.” Connected devices are proliferating rapidly (it’s no longer just your desktop or laptop, but also the smart phone, the iPad, the netbook, etc. that are constantly with you) and, as J. implied, the common denominator between them is the user, who is quickly becoming the server for those client devices. In turn, companies are scrambling to build out the platforms to support those devices and the content/media to support them. Cloud is about platform as a service and, as Ben reminded us, so are players like Facebook and even “traditional” enterprise companies can disrupt the market, such as RedHat, Salesforce.com and VMware, according to J.

The State of the VC Community: Despite recent prognostications to the contrary, our panel agreed that the VC community is not dead. Alastair noted he’s been hearing that prediction for as long as he’s been writing about VCs (7 years) and it hasn’t happened yet. So, what seems to be happening within the sector right now?  The panel agreed that with trends like the cloud, it takes less money to fund start ups these days, so we’re not seeing some of the huge influxes of cash that it has taken to start a company in the past. Fundraising is down, as are IPO bids. Some angel firms are beginning to provide larger starting rounds. Well-known firms will continue to garner coverage for the companies they fund, but smaller firms are beginning to make a splash by doing things differently — such as opting not to take a board seat with the companies they fund or not to expect the high profile, quick turnaround exits and IPOs of the dot com heyday.

What to watch for in 2011: Lastly the panel offered up some insights on trends to watch for both within technology and the world of capital and M&As for 2011. Keep these things in mind over the coming months: Cloud. Curation on the web. The semantic web. Platforms. The rise of public companies and valuations in China.

BP is damned if they do, and doubly damned if they don’t.

According to Reuters, the company has apparently purchased “oil spill” and related search terms from Google and other search engine providers in an effort to drive traffic to its Gulf of Mexico response website. This SEO strategy is a clear attempt by the company to control communications around the worst oil spill in U.S. history and improve sentiment about its brand within the media.

While BP hasn’t disclosed how much it has paid for these search terms, President Obama has criticized the company for spending $50 million on TV ads in an attempt to turn around consumer perception about the company during the crisis. I agree with Obama that TV ads, an old school tactic used by tobacco and oil companies for years, are in really poor taste. Purchasing the search terms; however, is a very new crisis communications tactic worth a closer look.

A spokesman for BP explained to Reuters: “We know people are looking for those terms on our website and we’re just trying to make it easier for them to get directly to those terms.”

This case represents an interesting dilemma for crisis communication strategists. On the one hand, search term strategies like this will certainly help BP to drive traffic to their site, giving the company more control what’s being communicated. On the other, consumers of online news media today are much more sophisticated and many see right through excessive social media marketing. Moreover, they understand the power of broadcasting their distaste about a company virally across their networks when so inclined.

In a press release issued by BP on June 4th, the company’s Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg said:

“The Board of BP has been clear from the outset that all resources available to the company should be applied to meeting BP’s responsibilities in addressing these events.”

If this statement is true, then why not invest $50 million to support the response?

Okay, as a communications professional, I admit this question isn’t entirely fair. There are three crucial communication elements to addressing a crisis:

1) Be a resource to media as well to the public

2) Be transparent about the situation; and

3) Be responsive.

All of these things require an investment, although $50 million seems a bit excessive. The company has issued literally dozens of press releases and videos since news about the spill first broke last month: http://www.bp.com/extendedsectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=40&contentId=7061813.

I’ve not done a thorough audit of these communiqués, but upon a brief review, I can tell you they overwhelmingly focus on how much oil BP has collected, not how much has been lost, and how much money the company is donating to environmental project XYZ. Not surprisingly, this canned crisis communications statement is a thru-line among most of these announcements:

As part of its commitment to restore the environment and habitats in the Gulf Coast region…

My take: Try as they may, BP’s high volume of outbound communication and savvy social media marketing tactics aren’t the right band aid – nothing is. BP may be committed to fixing the problem now, but they were never 100 percent committed or prepared to prevent it from happening in the first place. If they can definitively prove that the problem could not have been prevented, that could be their silver bullet, but they can’t. As a result, the losses from brand damages alone, which I’d argue are far greater than the billions of dollars they are investing in environmental damages, will take years to recover.

So the question remains…in light of a disaster, when the conversation on the web reaches a fever pitch, should PR pros jump right in or sit back and wait? Personally, I don’t think we can sit back, but I also think that brands are still trying to navigate how to best handle mishaps and disasters in the social world. The one factor that has emerged as a constant, however, is authenticity. Social media allows brands to speak directly to all their various constituents. If they don’t do so honestly and authentically, they are doomed before they hit tweet.

Let us know what you think of the situation and how BP has handled it thus far?