Deirdre Breakenridge

I think one of the biggest issues that organizations face today, as they navigate the social media landscape, is how they view the consumer disruption as a result of Social Media. Brands, in my opinion, could be helping to alleviate the chaos by lessening the noise that comes out of their own organizations. They need to learn how to become valuable resources to their stakeholders in the market. Of course, it takes time, effort, resources and commitment to develop a Social Media program and to participate in the social economy the right way.

There’s no shortage of excellent blogs and the numbers continue to grow. But, with the hundreds of thousands that pique your interest, how many do you visit regularly? Now, ask yourself another question, with how many of those blogs do you actually join in the conversation, tweet about and mention in your own blog to get a conversation started? After all, one of the main benefits of Social Media is the dialog that you have with other members of the community. You can share ideas, learn about almost anything and educate others on mutual topics of interests.

Wednesday night, I co-hosted a book signing event with Brian Solis and Tara Hunt, author of the Whuffie Factor.  We attracted over 70 people at our meetup and it was a great night.  I met so many smart and interesting people.  The conversations were dynamic and each one taught me something new.  One conversation in [...]

When Brian and I were writing our book, Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, a large part of our focus was to identify the issues in PR, to motivate professionals to tackle challenges in the industry and to move forward with a new approach. As we sorted through our research and had numerous conversations with experts, both in our industry, in social media, the complaints were all similar. PR lost its credibility and it was time to build back the integrity and respected reputation of a 100+ year old industry. The more we talked to people and reviewed blog posts, tweets and comments surrounding the concerns in our industry, we realized that the problems existed for a long time. Today, social media along with the ability for anyone to become a content producer highlights these pressing PR issues and propels them into the spotlight.

I read a really good article in O’Dwyers PR Report, the March 2009 Food, Beverage & Nutrition PR Issue. The article written by Danielle Pagano, “Celebrity food: turning chefs into rock stars” discussed how in PR, having a good solid product sometimes isn’t enough. There’s a tremendous opportunity, especially today with PR 2.0 and social media communications to make a real personal connection with people. The article provides a recipe for turning a chef into a rock star in a 4-step process: the look, the philosophy, the trend and the show.

Yesterday was the official launch of my 4th book published by Pearson, Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, co-authored by Brian Solis. This is the first time that I worked on a year-long writing project with Brian, who is not only a pleasure to work with but he enriched the process and made this a wonderful and thought-provoking experience for me (Thank you, Brian). Every page of this book illustrates our passion for public relations, social media and technology, and how PR 2.0 is reshaping a well established, century-old industry.

With PR2.0 comes the responsibility to listen, engage, learn more and understand the new media landscape. If and only if you do this, then you can teach others how to listen, engage, learn more and understand how to use New PR effectively for their brands.

My first post on New PR 2.0 Measurement was well received. Measurement is one of the hottest topics right now. I’m noticing that most of my professional associations and well known publications are having monthly seminars/webinars on this topic. There are so many tools and techniques that it can almost be overwhelming for the PR professional. How do you measure the conversations that take the form of tweets, comments and blog posts? What about negative comments in social networks? Are free measurement tools such as Google Analytics and TweetBeep enough?