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.

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!

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.

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.

I’m really excited about Event Camp on February 6th. I’ll be traveling into NYC and speaking at the Roger Smith Hotel to discuss best practice Engagement Strategy for events (from planning your event to measuring participation/engagement).

I met Adam Vincenzini (@adamvincenzini) when he shared his newspaper experiment with me, which has been featured by international media including El Mundo. Adam decided to go 365 days without reading a newspaper and began to share his experience through his blog, The Comms Corner. I thought it was a creative and very difficult experiment (at least it would be for me at this point in my life). Then, Adam asked me to participate in another creative exercise called 140 Characters from 140 Comms Characters. He gathered 140 communications professionals and asked them to, in 140 characters (or less), give their definition or meaning of social media.

I traveled to Holland last week to present at the Coopr PR 2.0 launch event in Rotterdam.  It was an incredible trip and I had the honor and pleasure of meeting Ruud Bijl, the owner of Bijl PR and his PR team, and also spent time with @jodykoehler and @josgovaart who are driving force behind [...]