In the symposium Adrian retold another one of his famous anecdotes, this time coming to the conclusion that a database can be a company’s most valuable asset (giving the example of Coles/Myer). I thought this was a pretty accurate, going on my own knowledge and experience of the media industry. Many job descriptions in the field of PR (my primary field of interest) require candidates to bring a number of key contacts (i.e. their own personal database) to the job. In short, you are in part being hired for your ability to grow the company’s network and database. The PR company I currently work for has thousands of contacts in a master database, which we add to this daily. It requires constant maintenance but is worth its weight in gold. The database allows for a greater spread of our message, in turn growing support for our brand and increasing our credibility in the field. We often find websites like Medianet (an external contact database) prove to be invaluable. However, if we can employ people that are a “hub”, with many connections, this personal touch makes our database and the contacts in it even more valuable.