Deirdre Breakenridge

It’s Friday, so let’s keep it light and fun, yet meaningful.  Today’s topic is influence. Because influence is often difficult to define, I wanted to take an opposite approach to discuss what influence is not.  So here goes…Influence is NOT: About technology or an algorithm that captures a score; influence is about the people and [...]

A best practices approach to social media begins on the inside of the organization, with education and training for employees. In a recent blog post, “Internal Social Media Education and Collaboration,”

We’re gearing up for a dynamic #PRStudChat discussion on April 20th with Eric Schwartzman (@eschwartzman) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), the authors of the book, Social Marketing to the Business Customers.

I’ve been writing about the social media audit process, uncovering what an organization learns when they go through this exercise. My last post “The Social Media Audit: Five Common Missing Pieces” mentioned the fifth missing piece as “Training and Education.”

Going through a social media audit process is an eye opening experience for any organization.  There are often issues uncovered that pose significant challenges for a company, if left unaddressed. Many of the areas that need to be tackled moving forward are often commonly overlooked or missing pieces to a social media program, which fall [...]

Last week I wrote a post, The Characteristics Index: Rate Yourself, which discussed the attributes or characteristics that you could cultivate to become an influencer.  They ranged from trust and knowledge to motivation and passion.  A very interesting comment on my blog prompted me to write this post.  I can’t thank Lisa Gerber enough for [...]

I’ve been examining the characteristics of an influencer and the rise to influence among a network of peers. I’ve narrowed it down to several characteristics that I’d like to share with you.  Each characteristic has different values, so you can cultivate these attributes on your own.  My philosophy is that if you can rate yourself [...]

When you’re in your social media planning phases, an audit is critical to the success of your social communications program moving forward.  The social media audit is usually conducted to identify any of the challenges or problem areas within a brand’s current program, as well as to pinpoint genuine opportunities and what’s been working with [...]