Sharing With Students

We care a lot about students at PRSA. We support two student chapters, one here in San Antonio, and one in the Rio Grande Valley. Coming up this month is our semi-annual Shadow Day event with the UTSA chapter. While details are still being finalized and will be available later this week on PRSA San Antonio's Web site, today a Twitter post caught my eye. David Mullen of Communications Catalyst is developing a shopping list for PR students he's meeting with next week. Read his post titled What Advice Would You Share with These College Students . There's a lot of great information about do's and don'ts that should be part of every student's vocabulary. Come to think about it, they should be in every practitioner's vocabulary too. Share it with a student today and we will all become better practitioners.

Finding Blogs in Your Industry or Market

One of the first steps in a blog monitoring or a blogger relations campaign is to create a list of blogs in your industry that you want to follow. You can’t possibly watch them all. So how do you prioritize those blogs?

Jason Falls has demonstrated how he created a list of education blogs for a client that his firm was working with. Even if you're not following education, the process that he describes is really useful. He even ranked the blogs based on an engagement score.

So go to his blog post, “Determining the Top Education Blogs” and see what he did. If you are working in education or with clients focused on education, Jason has generously made his list available to everyone who wants it.

Jason also has a post, “How To Pick The Right Blogs For PR Outreach,” where he provides a presentation called, Not All Blogs are Created Equal,” he made recently to the Blugrass Chapter of PRSA.

For an added dose, listen to the interview of Jason by Eric Schwartzman for the On the Record Online podcast. They talked about how organizations should and should not get into social media. It's an excellent interview.

San Antonio Joins the Social Media Breakfast "Franchise"

On Wednesday, January 21st Social Media Breakfast San Antonio will hold it’s first meeting. Founder of Social Media Breakfast, and recent transplant from Boston to Austin, Bryan Person will be on hand to kick off the event and will speak on the topic "Humanizing Business Through Social Media."

I had the opportunity to meet Bryan in Boston in October when I attended Chris Brogan's "New Marketing Summit" and found Bryan to be a fabulous resource on social media as well as someone interested in passing that knowledge along to those interested in learning.

Bryan and I discussed the opportunity to expand his Social Media Breakfast into San Antonio, and when I then discovered Jennifer Navarrete (organizer of the San Antonio Social Media Club) was also interested in starting a breakfast, I knew it was time to move!

Join us on Wednesday, January 21st at the Magnolia Pancake Haus from 7:30 to 9 a.m. to help us kick off the fun in style. Seating is limited to 20. So, be sure to register for your seat and breakfast from the Magnolia Pancake Haus.

Resources for Learning about Podcasting

Here is some information about new resources available about podcasting.

Trafcom News Podcast 79: The Podcaster's Toolkit
Donna Papacosta’s latest podcast episode outlines the “podcaster’s toolkit” in less than 20 minutes. Her web site includes links to all the resources she mentions in the podcast.

Podcasting 101: How to connect with targeted, passionate listeners
Shel Holtz will be leading a 90-minute webinar on podcasting on January 27. An earlier webinar he led is what helped me get IDRA’s Classnotes started. I recommend it. There is a fee of $209, and the session is sponsored by Ragan Communications.

Cleaning House When the Calendar Turns

It happens every year, usually around Halloween. The overwhelming piles of paper, files, news articles to read, and other minutae from a year’s worth of projects begins to aggravate me. I move them around from left to right on my desk, sometimes buying fancy containers from one of those organization stores to make ti look better. After a month of rearranging and, occasionally, even purging some of the paper with repeated trips to the recycle bin, I start to get serious. I go on all-out binges, saying ‘who needs this?’ to myself or ‘why did I save that?’ and ‘what on earth was I thinking when I stashed this in the drawer?’ and suddenly, the cleaning goes into high gear.

By Thanksgiving I usually move a trash can into my office. This is when the high gear “chucking” begins. After completely purging the paper nonsense of the current year, it’s time to start on the electronic files. Delete, delete, delete, what do I need all this little documents for? Why are there 3 versions of the same release? What on earth are all these empty folders doing here?

Before you know it, it’s December and I have removed the professional dust bunnies and am laying the groundwork for a new year. I can go off and celebrate the holidays with a clean conscience, knowing I am ready for the challenges of the new year. In case you haven’t yet mentally gotten your year started, here are a few questions to ask yourself as you clean house:

1. Does anyone else but me care about this project, paper, document?
2. If this project were in a time capsule, what would happen when it’s opened in ten or 100 years?
3. Do you want to tell your grandchildren about it?
4. Is it worth submitting for an award?

If not, then let the “chucking” begin. Happy New Year!