Losing a valued colleague: A Peril of Blogging

• • No Tags

David JonesDavid Jones is leaving Thornley Fallis. He has been recruited away from us by another firm that wants to upgrade their expertise in social media.

That’s a bummer for Thornley Fallis. David is a good friend and a very smart guy. We will miss him.

Dave, Terry Fallis and I have spent the past year exploring the possibilities of social media. We have learned by doing. We have learned a lot from one another. We have learned by meeting and talking to others who are on the leading edge of developing social media. 

And as we have exchanged views and learned from other practitioners of social media, our own profiles have been raised. We have come to “know” and “be known” to people we have never met in person. This really came home to me when I first approached a fellow blogger at a conference. As I was about to introduce myself, he said, “I know you. I’ve seen your picture on your blog and I read you all the time.” (Nice compliment; totally unexpected)

So, I should not be surprised that another firm has swooped in and made David an offer he could not refuse (It’s all positive; no severed horse heads involved.) In exploring and engaging in social media, David has raised his profile and engaged in conversations with respected bloggers and podcasters like Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson, Joseph Jaffe, Colin McKay and Robert French. He has acquired a positive reputation beyond our traditional geographic area of operation and, in our small world, an element of celebrity.

Our experience defines the new normal for PR practitioners who engage in social media. Every time a consulting firm like Thornley Fallis encourages its employees to share their experiences and smarts through a blog, we increase the likelihood that we will lose those people to other opportunities. David’s not the first blogger to be scooped up by a bigger firm. He follows a path that in the past six months has been well trod by other high profile bloggers like Jeremy Pepper and Steve Rubel.

So, will Thornley Fallis stop encouraging our consulting team to blog and explore social media? Heck no!

We’ll accept that this increased risk is just part of the entry fee to engage in social media. And we’ll understand that it’s better to spend a year learning and exploring with a guy like David Jones than it is to spend a decade of the safe same old, same old practise of techniques we long ago mastered.

For PR consultancies, it’s grow or die. And we must learn to grow. We will learn to deal with this aspect of blogging.

And after all, one of the great things of consulting is that we get to hire or join our friends. And Dave’s a good friend. So, you never know what the future may bring…

Dave, I and all the gang at Thornley Fallis wish you every success at your new gig!

 

Linkworthy

• • No Tags

Blog Tools

  • Darren Rowse has compiled a list of blog tools (he added another 12 on May 1 for a total of 67). A useful reference resource.

Moneyball Theory of PR

  • Marcel Goldstein makes the case for recruiting outside of narrowly defined PR credentials. Read his post, not for the analysis of impact on compensation trends, but for the pure joy of a person who recognizes human potential. 

 

I've been blogtipped

• • No Tags

I’m blushing. We all write hoping that someone finds what we have to say useful, thought provoking or entertaining. Thanks to Chris Clarke for reading and blogtipping me.

And, yes, Chris, your tip is bang on. I do have to post more often. The past month has been hectic. The clients I work for and the people I work with have taken all my time (which I’ve gladly given) and blogging has suffered. However, things are settling down and I’m hoping to post more frequently.

Thanks for the blogtip!

Blogtipping: Canadian Entrepreneur

• • No Tags

A blog I like: Canadian Entrepreneur by business author, Rick Spence.

Rick Spence

Things I like:

1) Rick posts frequently about marketing, one of the functions that studies tell us entrepreneurs hold for themselves, but do not always understand.

2) Rick knows his stuff. A former editor of Profit, the Magazine for Small Business, he has been covering business for longer than he likes to admit. And now he is an entrepreneur himself. Living the dream.

3) A Canadian writing about Canadian small business! The U.S. has a much more vigorous blogging community. Rick is one of the pioneers in Canada. Keep going Rick.

Tip: Rick please enable Trackbacks. I frequently want to continue the conversation on my own blog, but Canadian Entrepreneur provides no way for me to ping back to your posting.

Blogtipping

• • No Tags

Easton Ellsworth has a great suggestion:

Calling all sentient bloggers: Monday, May 1, 2006 will be Blogtipping Day. (Perhaps the first Monday of each month can be Blogtipping Day – let me know what you think.)

What’s blogtipping? It’s where you forget yourself for a few minutes and think about another blogger. It’s a win-win. All you do is this: Say three nice things and offer one simple tip.

Sure appeals to me. So, tomorrow and the first day of every month, I plan to “blogtip.”

Effective use of time: Reading list triage

• • No Tags

As I sit here choosing whether to dive into the half foot high pile of “things I really want to read” or to find time to blog (after a hectic week in which I had time to do neither), I have to admit I’m stretched too thin. So what to do?

Kathy Sierra offers some great advice for cutting down on the backlog of reading. While she has written primarily for a tech audience, these ideas can be put into action by anyone who needs to cope with exploding information flows – and that’s all of us. The picture accompanying Kathy’s post sums up the problem:

Keeping Up

She offers practical advice for what I call “reading list triage.” Some of the best tips:

  • “Find the best aggregators.” There are websites and services that filter content and feature the best (That’s one of the ways I use blogs.)
  • “Cut the redundancy!” (Is the news really different in three daily papers?)
  • “Unsubscribe to as many things as possible.” In my experience this is particularly useful. I periodically unsubscribe from blogs and let magazine subscriptions lapse. It’s surprising how many I can live without. And I can always resubscribe to the ones I really value.
  • “Recognize that gossip and celebrity entertainment are black holes.” Oh yeah. Playing solitaire on your PC is as good a use of time.
  • “Be a LOT more realistic about what you’re likely to get to, and throw the rest out.” The ultimate solution. Don’t be afraid of this step. Before I leave the office every Friday, my last act is to clear my desk. And that doesn’t mean filing things. That means discarding the things I just don’t have the time to read. And it’s amazing how rarely I have to ask for a copy of one of the things I’ve dispensed with.

    • Kathy offers additional tips in her post. I think you’ll agree that reading it is time well spent!

    A giant leap forward for PR Measurement in Canada

    • • No Tags

    Experienced PR practitioners agree that measurement of what we do is one of our industry’s most pressing challenges.

    Tomorrow, a group of volunteers sponsored by the CPRS and NewsCanada will take a major step forward to provide Canadian public relations practitioners with MR2P, a valuable new tool to measure the effectiveness of our media relations programs (disclosure: David Jones, a Vice-President of Thornley Fallis worked on the volunteer committe that developed MR2P and 76design, our webdesign firm, developed the MR2P blog.

    And there’s more good news. On the eve of the launch of MRsP, Bowdens announced that it is fielding its own upgraded measurement offering.

    Canadian PR practitioners can only benefit from better tools to measure the value and results of what we produce. And the twin offerings by Bowdens and the MR2P group provide choice now and the promise that no one will rest on their laurels.

    Congratulations to the MR2P team of PR volunteers, NewsCanada and Bowdens.

    FeedDemon 2.0: PC Magazine Review Gets it Right

    • • No Tags

    Nick Bradbury points with justifiable pride to the positive review of FeedDemon 2.0 in PC Mag.

    PC Mag calls FeedDemon 2.0 “simply the most comprehensive, feature-rich, and intuitively organized RSS feed aggregator/reader for Windows.”

    The review concludes by pointing to FeedDemon’s

    amazing combination of simplicity and flexibility that lets you easily organize feeds into folders, sort and share feeds, subscribe to new feeds, and generally manage everything from within a single interface. Keeping track of your feeds (sometimes even seeing them all) is generally much harder in browser-based RSS readers. You’ll save money using them, but you’ll lose time. If you can’t live without your RSS—and a whole lot of it—and you prefer to keep your feeds in a standalone application instead of teasing them out of an Outlook add-in or a browser, the FeedDemon 2.0’s $29.95 price tag is a bargain.

    Amen to that.

    I'm back

    • • No Tags

    … and where have I been, you ask?

    Two weeks ago, I was sitting in my office. The world was in order. Business was good. All was fine. When….

    One of our consultants walked into my office, closed the door and said, “I have bad news. I’ve accepted a job with a competitor.”

    These aren’t words that an employer ever wants to hear. But they are words that we all will hear sooner or later. And when we do, we have to be ready to put in the extra effort to meet the expectations of clients and honour commitments made to them.

    That’s what I’ve been doing for the past couple of weeks. And, as I approach the Easter long weekend, I’m feeling a real sense of accomplishment that we met all of our commitments and kept our clients smiling and satisfied.

    And by the way, if you are an experienced public relations consultant working in the Ottawa region, I know of a great public relations firm that is hiring. If you are interested in applying to join our team, email your résumé to me at joseph.thornley[at]gmail.com.