Deirdre Breakenridge

We are less than a week away from our February 23rd #PRStudChat with our very special guest @ChrisBrogan, co-author of Trust Agents. Chris joins us that night at 9:00 p.m. ET (please note the time change as we usually begin at 8:30 p.m. ET) for our Twitter discussion on the PR influencer and how to [...]

The key to building an effective social media policy is to customize the guidelines to meet the needs of your organization. A well developed policy will guide your employees in the many ways that they engage in social communications. The best practice approach requires that your organization invest the time, resources, and effort to plan and build a policy that empowers the organization, allows people to understand the value of social media and helps them to see how they can better participate as internal brand champions.

You may have heard me say this before, but it’s really important to read everyday to stay on top of the trends, news and industry information. There are so many great resources for professionals to keep us in the “know.” However, we also need to set up a daily reading regimen to peruse interesting articles, blogs, newsletters, etc.

When Traackr reported the Top 25 PR Influencers, I thought it would be fun to quickly find out a little more about some of the bloggers on this list (beyond the “Footprint” that was provided). I decided to take a few of their blog posts and drop them into Wordle.net, turning them into beautiful word clouds.

On January 19th, we announced a very special guest for our #PRStudChat February session. @ChrisBrogan, co-author of Trust Agents, joins our Twitter discussion to enlighten our community on the PR influencer and how to build trust online. Today it’s very important for PR and communications professionals to realize that they are moving from a liaison role to an influencer role, as they become bloggers and educate through democratized media.

Before the holidays, a young PR/Marketing professional contacted me about helping him with his resume. I reviewed both his cover letter and resume carefully and gave him some initial feedback. He was thrilled with the comments and immediately incorporated my suggestions. One conversation led to another and the next thing I knew he asked me a very interesting question: Would you be my mentor to help me in my job search.

Last week, a friend from Switzerland reached out and asked me a few questions about blogger relations. She was concerned with the time it takes to initiate and nurture relations with bloggers before you “need” them to write about a client. But, at the same time, she realized that unless you are specialized in a certain field, there is no way that you can converse with all these bloggers.

anuary 19th from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. ET is our #PRStudChat session, which will focus on a hot topic that’s weighing on the minds of many executives: the social media policy. Our discussion will cover everything from team development (who is responsible for policy creation) and the important areas to be addressed in a policy to how policies should be guiding employee social outreach and participation.