Deirdre Breakenridge

I know I’ve blogged about the concept of Working on your “PR 2.0 Raw” in the past. I remember, as if it was yesterday, when a former journalist (now turned blogger) was asking me a few questions at a tweetup about little while back. After our discussion, he said, “I can tell you’re a PR person… you need to work on your raw.” I didn’t take this as an insult; on the contrary, it was a call to action to “Be Myself.”

I know why David Meerman Scott (@dmscott), author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR and World Wide Rave is one of my favorite marketing/PR authors…it’s because he writes a book that has me absorbed in every page. Congratulations David on World Wide Rave, another book really well done!

I’ve been following @adamvincenzini’s experiment, a year without newspapers, for several weeks. With a strong interest in media and the changing PR landscape, I decided to interview Adam to learn more about his motivation behind this project.

I’ve been gathering my thoughts, notes, interviews and articles and compiling them into a presentation for the Social media Congress Conference in Amsterdam on February 18th. My topic is the Value of Social Engagement for the 21st Business. As a part of my presentation, I thought it would be interesting to pull some of the findings from the Vocus PR Planning 2010 Survey and compare results between the United States and the United Kingdom.

It wasn’t so long ago that I was sitting on a Brand Hackers panel in New York City debating who owns social media. It was the public relations professionals vs. the digital creatives. Unfortunately, the conversation was off to an ugly start and the debate became heated. Now, for those who know me, you must have heard me say on Twitter, Facebook, on my blog or at one of my speaking events that “no one really owns social media, but we all play an extremely important role.”

I was really happy when Valerie Simon (@valeriesimon) and Arik Hanson (@arikhanson) approached me to participate in Help a PR Person Out (#HAPPO). What a wonderful way to share information and to help PR professionals with the job search by organizing an upcoming Twitter event. The goal: to help PR job seekers locate the numerous PR jobs that are finally becoming available.

It was Saturday morning and I woke up to 8 inches of snow. It was only 7:00 a.m. in the morning and the weatherman was predicting more snow, anywhere from 12 to 18 inches for our area. I knew the snow was coming, but didn’t think it would hit that hard and with so much force (blizzard like conditions). Of course, it wasn’t just any old Saturday, it was the Saturday of Event Camp and I needed to be in New York City at the Roger Smith Hotel for a 4:00 p.m. presentation.

Back in June 2009, I interviewed Thom Brodeur, COO of HARO. At the time, he had just accepted the position and was on the fast track to take HARO to a new plateau. Thom was true to his word!