Deirdre Breakenridge

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’ve been working on my presentation to the graduates of Syracuse University’s Masters of Science and Communications Management program. The University is holding it’s reunion this coming weekend and I’ll be presenting on PR 2.0 and the state of the industry. Part of my presentation discusses the results of the Vocus survey, “PR Planning in 2010.” I participated in a Vocus Webinar in November 2009 and wrote about some of the findings just after the event. I wanted to share with you a few more of the thoughts from the 1,800 PR and marketing professionals (who participated in the survey and who perform PR functions), with respect to their roles in 2010.

Here’s Part II of my blog post: Q&A from the Vocus Webinar: PR Planning Considerations for 2010. These are the last of the questions that I wasn’t able to address, due to time constraints. Once again, I wanted to share my responses on my blog:

You’ve probably heard me say this before, “One of the best parts about participating in a webinar is what comes after the presentation. It’s the Q&A portion!” Of course, there’s never enough time to answer everyone’s questions. So, I always try to answer what didn’t get a response, here on my blog. I’m answering these questions, from the Vocus Webinar: PR Planning Considerations in 2010, in a two-part blog post, with the part one below:

On November 12, 2009, I participated in the Vocus PR Planning Considerations for 2010 Webinar. I discussed the challenges of PR planning for 2010 and how to plan for the “unknown, unknowns.” When I think about the “unknown, Unknowns,” I feel that just being in public relations means always planning for the unexpected, based on our roles and responsibilities. We’re seen as the “conscience” of the company, reputation managers and damage control officers. Social media communication adds a whole new level of complexity to our planning process.

I think that the Vocus Virtual Conference is an example of social media learning at its best. The conference was about leveraging social media, it was promoted through social media and the attendees were provided with an interactive environment where they could network and collaborate together around a number of interesting topics.

I’ve been diligently testing new products and services to get my communications department up to speed for PR 2.0 and social media campaigns. I know that in several of my posts I’ve discussed how important it is to make sure that the PR team is equipped with great resources to build relationships with influencers, manage campaign efforts, and track program progress and measure results.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how many companies are taking their first steps into community building through social networking and PR 2.0.  I even recently mentioned during my Awareness, Inc. Webinar that some brands are taking some good steps, others are taking some missteps and there are several taking no steps at all.  If [...]