Advice to the class of '08: Blogging is an essential for new PR practitioners

January 29, 2008 • Joseph Thornley • Blogging, Centennial, newpr, socialmedia, studentpr

Centennial College’s Gary Schlee writes that the newest crop of students in his Online PR course are now setting up their blogs.

Gary is giving his students a real advantage in starting a career in PR. Those students who view their blogs as more than a class exercise, but also as an exciting way to connect and communicate with others who share their interests and passions, they will have started down the fast lane to a bright future in the new PR.

The old PR was about communicating messages to an audience. The new PR is about being part of a community.

In effect, students are taking the first step to developing their own online voices and finding people of like mind – becoming part of a community. This is the essence of the “relations” in public relations. It’s not a one-time thing. It should be a lifelong commitment. It will then turn into a lifelong asset, one which they can take with them wherever they work.

(Don’t be discouraged if early on it’s a community of only two or three. Remember, it’s not about numbers, it’s about trust.)

I do not hire entry level people without looking at their blog, following their twitter stream and checking their Facebook presence. I want a sense of who they are over time, not just when they are in my office. I want to know what they think on the issues they care about and how they express themselves. I want to see whether and how they connect with others. And I can find out all those things from their social media presence.

And then I will try to recruit the people who I believe not only have the strongest, clearest voices but also the ability to balance this with listening, respecting and responding to others in a way that makes them part of a healthy, positive community. These are the folks that I want to work with. And these are the folks I’ll look to hire.

So, in encouraging his students, Gary is providing them with a tremendous head start. I really look forward to the time when all PR educators are as forward looking as Gary.

Ruptured appendix shuts me down; changes my ways

January 28, 2008 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

I’ve been away from this space. In fact, I’ve totally missed a series of meetings and commitments over the past week. But for a reason better than “the dog ate my homework.”

My appendix burst. Painful and nasty.

And in hospitals in Canada, the nursing staff sure makes short work of your BlackBerry when you tell them you’re trying to Twitter your emergency surgery. So, no WiFi. No Internet. No BlackBerry. No nothing for several days.

These things never come at a good time. It forced me to miss several important meetings without notice. As for my trip to Vancouver this week, not a chance. So, I’ll miss ThirdTuesdayVancouver and Web Directions North, two events that I was really looking forward to.

Without doubt, it will take me some time to get back up to full speed.

And as I consider the 358 new emails in my office inbox and the 207 unread emails in my gmail box, not to mention the unanswered telephone calls, I realize that I should really look on this as an opportunity to pare back on some of my commitments. So, while I’m going to try to get back up to full speed as quickly as possible, I’ll try to focus on doing fewer things that really require my attention and keeping out of the things that can be done better by others (this will make the people I work with very, very happy).

That’s enough sitting up for now. Time to rest and get stronger.

Not sure when I’ll post again, but hopefully it won’t be too long.

FlackLife and The Client Side join Our Community

January 17, 2008 • Joseph Thornley • Blogging, blogpolicy, community

If you take a look at “Our Community” in ProPR’s sidebar, you’ll see two new additions: FlackLife and The Client Side. We’ve added these blogs because their authors, Bob LeDrew and Michael Seaton, have joined us at Thornley Fallis.

That’s pretty exciting for us. Not only do we gain two new work colleagues, but they also bring two blogs to us with two very different perspectives.

Bob LeDrew has been sharing his perspective on the public relations industry and issues since April 2003. Michael Seaton writes and podcasts from the perspective of a digital marketer who was until he joined us on the Client Side as Director of Digital Marketing at one of Canada’s major banks.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve been able to include some very smart people in our community who write about social media, communications, marketing and design. Our community currently includes: Michael O’Connor Clarke, Terry Fallis, John Sobol, the Web designers and developers at 76design, the PRGirlz (although they’ve posted sparingly lately), and the PR team in Canada’s capital. And although they’ve left the firm, we still think of David Jones, Chris Clarke and John Wiseman as members of our extended social media family.

Our approach to blogging is that we want people with their own blogs to bring them to our community. We encourage them to write as frequently as they want. And we always acknowledge that if they leave us, they can take their blogs with them. We will retain the value of what we learned and shared while they were with us, but their blogs are theirs.

While they are with us, we ask only that they observe our blogging policy – which is simple. It has only two provisions: “Blog Smart” and “Cause no harm to any person.”

I’m a longtime reader of both Bob’s and Michael’s blogs. They’re smart and always interesting.

So, if you haven’t discovered these two writers yet, I hope that you’ll subscribe to the feeds of both FlackLife and The Client Side and see for yourself why I’m excited to have them as part of the Thornley Fallis Community.

A look behind the scenes at Canada's major public relations firms

January 15, 2008 • Joseph Thornley • CCPRF, PR, publicrelations

Are you interested in corporate communications and public relations ? Are you curious about the people who advise CEO’s and corporate communicators on the newest strategies and tactics?

If you answer yes to these questions, click over to the Canadian Council of Public Relations Firms and subscribe to the RSS feed there.

and in Who leads Canada’s public relations firms? How did they get to where they are? What do they think makes each of their firms special? What advice would they give to young people who would like to pursue a career in public relations?

Next week, we’ll start a new series of video interviews in which I talk with the leaders of Canada’s PR firms about how they got to where they are, what makes their firms special, what advice they would give to young people starting out in public relations and other issues that they think are important to public relations today.

So, if you’re curious about the public relations industry and the people who head up the ‘s major PR firms, subscribe to the CCPRF blog and you’ll receive a stream of biweekly interviews.

Hear ChickAdvisor at Third Tuesday Toronto

January 10, 2008 • Joseph Thornley • Conferences, Marketing, PR, publicrelations, ThirdTuesdayToronto

“I love your bag! Where’d You Get That?”Your hair looks fantastic! What Salon do you go to?”What’s the best cleanser for oily skin?

Hold on. Don’t click away. Yes, you ARE on ProPR. What do these questions have to do with ProPR and social media, you might ask?

One of the great things about Web 2.0 and social media is that entrepreneurs can bring their ideas to market with relatively little initial capital. ChickAdvisor is a prime example of a company started this way. Founders Alex and Ali de Bold have drawn on their own resources – personal savings, family and friends, and credit cards – to bring their idea to life.

Alex and Ali describe ChickAdvisor as “a social shopping reviews website for women to share advice on everything from hair salons to health clubs. All content is user generated and focuses on the products and local services women use every day. Members can add reviews, send links to their friends, add items to their hotlists and click through to buy items locally or online. Nothing beats a good recommendation and that’s what ChickAdvisor is all about!”

Since they started their service in September 2006, Alex and Ali have built a community around ChickAdvisor by appealing to a focused interest of a clearly identified group (shopping and women). They haven’t reached profitability yet. But they think they are on course to do so.

So, Alex and Ali are two people who know a lot about creating an interesting social site that serves a need for a defined audience. They also know a lot about the challenges of creating a viable Web 2.0 business.

And they’ll be sharing what they’ve learned when they appear at Third Tuesday Toronto on Wednesday January 23 (yes Third Tuesday Toronto is on a Wednesday this month!). If you’re in Toronto that night, come out and join the discussion. You’ll meet lots of other people who share an interest in social media and Web 2.0. And you’ll hear a presentation by some people who are “there and doing it” right now.

Third Tuesday events are free.* But we have to guarantee a minimum to the pub where we hold the event. If you plan to attend, please RSVP on the Third Tuesday Toronto meetup site so that we can get an accurate forecast of the number of attendees.

* Yes, there’s a reason why these events are free. They are organized by volunteers and direct costs such as the sound system and room charge are paid for by our sponsor, CNW Group. Thank you CNW. You make it possible for Canada’s social media community to gather and learn.

A blogger's wisdom

January 1, 2008 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

“If I do something really idiotic, it gets viewers. If I do something really smart, it gets participants.”

Community Project: Roundtable on Social Media Measurement

December 26, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

How do we measure the value of social media to an organization? What should we be measuring? What are the metrics that accurately capture the things we want to measure?

Over the past year, people like Jeremiah Owyang, Kami Huyse, Scott Karp, Christopher Carfi, Mike Manuel, the Research Fellows at the Society for New Communications Research, John Bell, Flemming Madsen, Geoff Livingston, Katie Paine, David Brain, Brendan Cooper, Brian Solis and Jeff Jarvis have made valuable contributions to our emerging understanding of social media measurement and metrics.

The online discussion is great. But sometimes, it’s even better to sit down face to face and talk things through.

This is what I’d like to do. Let’s bring together a group of experts for a roundtable discussion of social media measurement and metrics.

Participants could be drawn from three groups:

Social media thought leaders who have been writing about these issues.
Corporate and organization executives who have been attempting to apply social media measurement and metrics.
Companies that are developing measurement and metrics solutions.

Let’s engage a moderator or group of moderators who would frame the questions and then attempt to draw out major issues, points of agreement, and lines of additional discussion. The roundtable format should enable participants to have a full discussion of each topic, with free exchanges of opinion, and hopefully the development of consensus on principal issues.

The product of the roundtable could be a white paper that will follow on the Jeremiah Owyang-authored white paper, Tracking the Influence of Conversations.

We’d also organize a special Third Tuesday social media meetup at the conclusion of the roundtable to enable the broader social media community to discuss these issues with a panel of the roundtable participants.

It looks like 2008 Mesh Conference will be held the third week of May. If we could organize the roundtable the day before or after Mesh, that would enable participants who travel to the roundtable to attend Mesh. The fourth week of May is the U.S. Memorial Day holiday week. Holding the conference the Memorial Day week would give U.S. attendees a chance to spend a long weekend in Toronto. Either way, May is a great time to visit Toronto. The leaves have emerged and the flowers are in bloom. The patios are open. And the streets are alive with Torontonians rediscovering after a long winter just how great their city is.

What do you think about the concept of a roundtable on social media measurement and metrics?

If we organize it, will you come?

Colin McKay gives us a behind the scenes look at Canada's Privacy Commissioner Blog

December 20, 2007 • Joseph Thornley • No Tags

Colin McKay and Ian Ketcheson talk at Third Tuesday Ottawa [ 10:51 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Colin McKay is one smart guy and as experienced as they come in social media. He’s been blogging as Canuckflack since 2003. Earlier this year, he launched a second blog, SoSaidtheOrganization, focusing on government communications and social media.

Colin also has a day job as the Acting Director of Communications at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. And he’s used that position to launch what is arguably the most successful example of a government blog so far in Canada – the Privacy Commissioner’s Blog.

Colin was our guest at Third Tuesday Ottawa last month. During his presentation and in a lengthy question and answer session, he offered a candid view of how he managed to obtain the support to initiate the Privacy Commissioner’s blog and how he sustains it.

How has Colin been successful in introducing blogging and other social media tactics into a government environment that has been slow to embrace social media? His Third Tuesday discussion provided some practical tips and observations based on his experience.
Build a business case

“I’d been spending four years slamming my head against a wall bringing up social media and building some sort of conversation within a much larger department. And I think everyone who’s worked in a bureaucracy realizes at some point or another that there are institutional barriers to social media – fairly strong ones. But what I realized coming into a smaller organization like the Privacy Commissioner … if you enter an organization that has at least one or two people who recognize the benefits of social media, if you build a strong business case … something that drives along a business case model that identifies risk and how you will mitigate risk, you can convince … people to try something new…”

Don’t deny risk. Tackle it head on.

“At the Privacy Commissioner, I don’t have a Minister or a Deputy Minister. I have an Agent of Parliament. That means that my description of risk and my expression of the way that I would mitigate that risk and deal with crises as they evolved did not have to reach the same level of sophistication they would with a normal government department, with a department with far more people, far more issues and the possibility of many more things, either on a policy or a program level, going wrong.”

…

“What you have to be able to do is to say that we’re going to limit our experiment to this environment, to this particular policy, to this particular program and here are the five ways it could go wrong and here are the ways we’re going to kill this experiment if it does go wrong.”

Social media isn’t a stand alone. It’s part of a coherent strategy.

“The first thing I did when I arrived [at the Privacy Commissioner’s Office] was I took a look at what we were doing in terms of communications and marketing and what we doing to reach out to specific audiences and whether we were missing audiences. It seemed to me that we had our stakeholder relations program down pat … and we were speaking to them through our traditional programs. … But we didn’t have any popular aspect and we didn’t have any techniques that would approach people who thought of privacy from a different point of view. …That was my access point to suggest that there are some fairly easy to deploy technologies that will let us communicate with these people in an experimental way.”

Help IT to understand that social software won’t punch holes in security.

“… communicators have to stop taking IT people’s denials and the assertion that the infrastructure needs to remain secure as gospel. … There’s no reason why a department couldn’t host a blog externally and link it to their internally hosted server. There’s no reason why the software can’t be deployed. It’s so easy there are twelve year old Russian boys doing it. If there’s a thirty-five year old man or woman telling you that the IT policies state that you can’t do it because of the integrity of your network, then they’ve got some worries about their network that relate to really poor construction and serious structural weaknesses. In which case, you have to work through your business case with the IT management to make them understand the options available and not depend on your IT people to sell it for you.”

Good things happen.

“I was surprised from the first day we were getting positive comments. We haven’t gotten a lot of comment SPAM. … What has appeared are a lot of supportive messages and a lot of comments like, “I was giving a presentation to my children’s grade school today and I saw your video and I’m going to pass it along to the teacher to show to the class. Which is exactly the sort of ‘home run’ I was hoping for.”

Colin and Third Tuesday host Ian Ketcheson talk about these and other issues in the following highlights audio clip.