Deirdre Breakenridge

My trip to New Jersey was inspired by a bland class assignment for my public relations course at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan: job shadow a public relations professional for a day and write a five-page paper about the experience. Shortly after moderating #PRStudChat in January, I thought this could be a great opportunity to venture out of Michigan and connect with #PRStudChat co-founder and one of the greatest minds in the PR 2.0 movement, Deirdre Breakenridge. She was completely onboard with my proposal, going above and beyond my request: I got to spend not just a day just with Deirdre, but three.

There’s a little song I learned back in Girl Scouts (yes, I was a girl scout… rocked the cookie sales, horrid when it came to crafts!). Make new friends, but keep the old. One is sliver and the other gold.

This must be the week of great PR announcements. Here is another special announcement about our very first #PRStudChat Tweetup. I’m happy to announcement that #PRStudchat is hosting a casual/informal event on Wednesday, March 10th at Gary Vaynerchuk’s (@garyvee) Wine Library (@winelibrary) in Springfield, New Jersey from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

Here’s a special video announcement on #Chatmixer that will take place on Tuesday, March 9th at 8:00 p.m. EST. Looking forward to chatting with all of the different Twitter chat communities!

Unless you are a brand new start up with a clean social media slate, chances are you won’t have to fix anything before you even begin your new social media outreach program. Fixing first can be a big part of your strategy before developing and implementing new and exciting programs. I think that fixing comes naturally with the web 2.0/PR 2.0 collaborative communication.

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’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.