Deirdre Breakenridge

It was a wonderful trip to Washington, DC.  A trip I will never forget thanks to my friends at the PRSA CHE Summit and Shonali Burke (@shonali) for putting together the IABC Tweetup at Ceiba.  I even got in a little sightseeing, which for me, when I travel rarely happens. Another favorite part of my [...]

Someone asked the other day … are you always on Twitter? Hmmm … yes, I guess I’m on Twitter quite a bit. Twitter allows me to interact with so many friends/followers in different ways. Being on Twitter has taught me how to move my new friendships up the Twitter Relationship Stairway. In keeping with the idea of moving up the stairs, I wanted to share with my community an opportunity to take our relationships a step further. Being on Twitter is an excellent way to listen, learn, participate, make friends, bond and share incredible insight. And, as I review my calendar in the upcoming months, one more excellent way to move up the Twitter stairway is to meet my New York City friends/followers in person.

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about the differences between the tools in the traditional PR toolkit and the resources we use today in the PR 2.0 toolkit. However, there was one tool that I completely overlooked. I’ve used this tool in the past. And, it’s definitely worth discussing how this tool has evolved over time to provide us with branded content and good PR results.

This is a first for me, the book review in two parts. I found so much useful information in the book Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff that I thought it would be best to break the review in two. Now I know why this book is a BusinessWeek bestseller and when I mentioned that I was going to read Groundswell my community on Twitter told me how much I would enjoy the book. Thank you Twitter friends, you were right! Tapping into the Groundswell is a great experience and I want to share my thoughts with you.

On April 14th, the #PRStudChat community was faced with its first small crisis. Valerie Simon and I had planned another dynamic chat session that would focus on our graduating PR seniors, jobs and the hiring process. Everyone was gathered and ready; our PR pros, students, educators were present and our special guests were just introduced. Unfortunately, we didn’t get very far into the chat as we immediately realized that Twitter was down. Valerie and I had to assess the situation, respond quickly to the community and then continue with our damage control.

In December 2009, I had the honor of keynoting Social Media Congress in Amsterdam. It’s such a small world when you travel all the way to Holland to meet people/companies from the United States. As I was finishing my session, I met Joel Kramer, sales director at Bazaarvoice. Coincidentally, I had used a Bazaarvoice case study and the results in my presentation.

In 2003, my book “The New PR Toolkit” was published by Prentice Hall. I co-authored this manuscript with a very talented journalist, Thomas DeLoughry, who at the time was the editor of Internet Week. Our goal was to present to PR professionals a better way to develop and implement online media relations strategies, from both a PR professional and an editor’s point of view. To this day, it was one of my favorite projects and a book that I believe did a good job educating PR people on early web PR (or web 1.0) best practices.

We’re getting close to our April 14th #PRStudChat discussion. Because it’s almost graduation, our focus for the chat will be JOBS! Yes, it’s that time when our graduating seniors are preparing to make the big transition into the communications work world. It’s exciting and challenging at the same time. To help our seniors, Valerie (@valeriesimon) and I decided to plan a chat session with several special guests who are experts in PR recruiting. And, we ask all of our educators and pros to join in to give their advice too.