By the end of the afternoon I was having a hard time paying attention to the last panels of On The Top conference in Davos; maybe that was partly due to debating the legendary Paul Holmes this morning for 90 minutes and presenting a Social Media Monitoring Case Study later this afternoon.

It was all streamed live and I expect videos and interviews I gave will be available in a few days; a press release also appeared today complementing our debate and the conference.

I figured the odds were stacked heavily in my favor, and maybe my original opponent felt the same way, since he withdrew at the last moment.

As it turned out, he was replaced by Marshall Sponder, a Brooklynite, author of the upcoming book Social Media Analytics and an expert in the same subject. What transpired was probably not what the event organizers envisaged: I was there to advocate for a PR “takeover” of marketing, or at least for the merger of public relations and marketing into an all-encompassing function that I like to call public relations; Marshall was certainly not advocating the opposite.

But he was convinced that the PR business is doomed in the social media age, because the majority of its practitioners do not understand analytics and are unwilling to grapple with the metrics and analytics challenges posed by social media. He made a couple of interesting predictions: that PR firms would either wither and die because of their inability to prove their relevance, or that they would end up being led by people like him, who understand and embrace analytics.

We talked about management consultants providing new requirements that greatly complicate the level and breadth of  social media listening and measurement – Paul said that was nothing new and McKinsey and it’s like  were doing much the same thing 25 years ago when he started in PR.   That’s true, but the difference for me is “what” is being layered, mainly social media, search and web analytics data along with inhouse databases.

I argued PR is out of it’s league here – and i think Paul more or less agreed.   We didn’t agree on everything but we actually had more in common than I thought, and I’m hoping for more debates and discussions building on what happened today in Davos.

As far as the rest of the conference – I liked the presentation on CERN (by Dr. James Gillies (Head of Communication Group at CERN, Switzerland) and it got me thinking that if Dr Gillies had to convey the CERN particle generator was  safe in order to educate a public that was forming it’s own opinions and needed his, then I need to do the same thing with the Analytics and Metrics work I do here in the states.