Deirdre Breakenridge

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 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 had the honor and the pleasure of moderating @prsarahevans #journchat this past Monday night. It was an amazing experience that I will never forget. I’m very familiar with the Twitter chat session because of #PRStudChat. However, the #journchat community is considerably larger and moderating the conversation taught me a few more best practices with respect to creating and maintaining a dynamic community discussion. First and foremost, I want to thank so many of my colleagues/friends who showered me with incredible compliments that night. However, for the record, the true appreciation and the reason why I looked like I could “ROCK IT,” was a direct result of the passion, enthusiasm and incredible knowledge in this community. I just got the conversation started and the community did all of the work!

I’ve heard a lot of great feedback about the #PRStudChat January session, which celebrated the PR educator. We had @mikinzie as our special guest moderator and her preparation, passion and enthusiasm really added to the success of our Twitter discussion. Personally, this was one of my favorite sessions for a number of reasons: the knowledge, information, insight and sheer appreciation of the educator, as demonstrated by our entire community. @valeriesimon and I also tried something a little different at the end of our discussion…we gave everyone a homework assignment in preparation of the next session, which is scheduled for February 17th.

The year 2009 was a year of “all things” Twitter. I expect more of the same excitement, use and value in 2010. You can do a simple search on Google and pull up approximately 1.2 billion entries on Twitter or you can go to one of your favorite blogs and search for Twitter posts to reveal numerous articles (I found over 400 posts on Twitter when I searched on Brian Solis’ blog). There is definitely a fascination with micromedia and this particular network. I must be fascinated too, as I seem to be using it as one of my main sources of communication these days. Will another type of network launch and fascinate me…sure, but for now, I think there’s a lot of opportunity for relationship building on Twitter.