Deirdre Breakenridge

I met Adam Vincenzini (@adamvincenzini) when he shared his newspaper experiment with me, which has been featured by international media including El Mundo. Adam decided to go 365 days without reading a newspaper and began to share his experience through his blog, The Comms Corner. I thought it was a creative and very difficult experiment (at least it would be for me at this point in my life). Then, Adam asked me to participate in another creative exercise called 140 Characters from 140 Comms Characters. He gathered 140 communications professionals and asked them to, in 140 characters (or less), give their definition or meaning of social media.

After the January #PRStudChat, I announced that we would have a February Valentine’s chat focused on relationships. Because public relations is focused on relationships and so is social media, for this session, @valeriesimon and I wanted to invite a special guest expert into the discussion. Our guest will really shed some light on relationships in the social sphere.

I had the honor and the pleasure of moderating @prsarahevans #journchat this past Monday night. It was an amazing experience that I will never forget. I’m very familiar with the Twitter chat session because of #PRStudChat. However, the #journchat community is considerably larger and moderating the conversation taught me a few more best practices with respect to creating and maintaining a dynamic community discussion. First and foremost, I want to thank so many of my colleagues/friends who showered me with incredible compliments that night. However, for the record, the true appreciation and the reason why I looked like I could “ROCK IT,” was a direct result of the passion, enthusiasm and incredible knowledge in this community. I just got the conversation started and the community did all of the work!

I’ve heard a lot of great feedback about the #PRStudChat January session, which celebrated the PR educator. We had @mikinzie as our special guest moderator and her preparation, passion and enthusiasm really added to the success of our Twitter discussion. Personally, this was one of my favorite sessions for a number of reasons: the knowledge, information, insight and sheer appreciation of the educator, as demonstrated by our entire community. @valeriesimon and I also tried something a little different at the end of our discussion…we gave everyone a homework assignment in preparation of the next session, which is scheduled for February 17th.

The year 2009 was a year of “all things” Twitter. I expect more of the same excitement, use and value in 2010. You can do a simple search on Google and pull up approximately 1.2 billion entries on Twitter or you can go to one of your favorite blogs and search for Twitter posts to reveal numerous articles (I found over 400 posts on Twitter when I searched on Brian Solis’ blog). There is definitely a fascination with micromedia and this particular network. I must be fascinated too, as I seem to be using it as one of my main sources of communication these days. Will another type of network launch and fascinate me…sure, but for now, I think there’s a lot of opportunity for relationship building on Twitter.

On Friday, January 8, 2010, I had the pleasure of participating in Syracuse University’s Newhouse School Masters in Communications Management program reunion. It was a great affair. I focused my presentation, Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, on three parts that I felt would be beneficial to this group of seasoned PR professionals: Learning from the past, PR today and Public Relations in the future.

In my December 21st blog post, I announced that #PRStudChat would move forward with themed Twitter discussions. I also discussed that this week’s chat would “Focus on the Educator.” It’s our way of thanking educators for their hard work and for bringing real world learning into the classroom for students to experience public relations.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a huge fan of National Public Radio (NPR). I listen to “The Takeaway” and “Morning Edition” every day driving to work. NPR keeps me company as I sit in traffic for over an hour driving up the Garden State Parkway. I heard a great segment the other morning. A surgeon being interviewed discussed how a simple checklist in the ER and in the Operating Room could save a life. He told a story about a man who came into the hospital with what looked like a small stab wound about an inch long. Because the proper questions were not asked in the ER, the man simply stated that he was stabbed at a Halloween party. Within 10 minutes the surgeon said that the man “crashed.” Apparently, the doctors in the hospital were not informed that the stab wound was so deep it punctured his aorta. He was stabbed with a bayonet (it was a costume party).