Today’s guest post is written by David C. Rickey, chair of the PRSA PR Defined Task Force, in response to Redefining Public Relations by Gini Dietrich.

The discussion and debate around the Public Relations Society of America collaborative “Public Relations Defined” initiative, in which PRSA and 12 allied professional organizations have given public relations and other communications professionals a platform to shape a modern definition of public relations, has been robust, spirited and, perhaps most of all, strongly opinionated — all good things for the profession.

With the release of the three final candidate definitions for public voting, and with the winning definition to be adopted by PRSA, more strong opinions now are being expressed.

We certainly anticipated a diversity of opinions and our fair share of criticism, and public relations professionals never disappoint with their passion. Continue Reading »

Right before the holidays, PRSA embarked on a new initiative: Redefining public relations.

An admirable undertaking and one that surely was not to please everyone, they made an impressive decision to have the definition crowdsourced.

There were, of course, some flaws in how you could submit your definition. In an effort, I would guess, to make everything uniform and make it easier for them to get through all of the responses (nearly 1,000 of them).

Last week they announced the final three definitions and voting is open for you to participate.

I have lots of friends at PRSA so I hope they don’t take offense to this: The definitions suck. Continue Reading »

Welcome back to the real world! I hope everyone had a really good Thanksgiving weekend.

To start the last 20 work days of the year, I thought now was a good time to discuss trends for next year.

This will get you started on planning and getting everything ready to launch the year on January 2.

I’ve written the eight social media trends you  need to pay attention to for next year.

But, before we get started, we’re going to let you choose the ninth trend, just like we did last year, for the chance to win two seats to the trends webinar.

The contest information is at the end of the post. Continue Reading »

It’s Facebook question of the week time (clap, clap, clap)!

Unfortunately, I have had zero time to scan the questions and record a video.

You may be asking yourself why I have time to type a blog post and not record a video. It’s because I’m still in my PJs…and a portion of this blog post was already in my drafts folder.

So we’re going to talk TweetUps today. And I’ll be back on schedule next week. Continue Reading »

After hearing Martin Waxman recount the keynote Soledad O’Brien gave on the opening day of the PRSA conference (I was playing hooky), about storytelling, and having written about creating an online conversation just yesterday, I’ve been thinking a lot on the topic.

Once upon a time, storytelling was the way we passed information from generation to generation.

Before tweeting and Facebook and text messaging, we had only one way to tell stories: Long-form.

For millions of years stories have been told around campfires and in family rooms and at holidays. But in our world of fast everything, we’re losing the art of spinning a good yarn. Continue Reading »

It’s almost time for PRSA! I’m going to Orlando just in time for Chicago’s sub-40 degree temps.

I actually love sub-40 degree temps, but I guess I can do with sitting by the pool on Sunday afternoon with Abbie Fink (right, Abbie?!?).

Don’t forget, if you’re going to be there, look me up! I’ll be the one with the two Canadians and large microphones.

And, we’re hosting a TweetUp on Monday night. If you RSVP ahead of time (invite here), Martin Waxman and Joe Thornley will buy your first drink.

Me? I’m just going to going to be eating bon-bons and people watching.

If you’re not going to be there, well…here is Gin and Topics to tide you over. Continue Reading »

It’s Facebook question of the week time (clap, clap, clap!)!

I will have you know that Abbie Fink stole my, “Hello. I’m Johnny Cash” at Counselors Academy on Sunday. I actually yelled at her from the audience. Brat!

Neither here nor there.

This week there isn’t a question but there IS a video!

PRSA Chicago took an hour keynote I gave last month and drilled it into a five minute video.

But it’s not a dreadful PowerPoint presentation with me droning on forever. Rather, we took questions from the audience on the fly. Continue Reading »

A few months ago, Jack Monson, who is the programming chair (and good friend) of the Chicago chapter of PRSA, asked me to do something that hadn’t yet been done at one of their monthly lunches: Take questions from the audience the entire hour.

At the time I said, “Sure!” without really thinking it through. All I thought was, “Great! I won’t have to prepare a speech two weeks before we launch Spin Sucks Pro.”

But taking questions from an audience, for an entire hour, is pretty nerve-wracking because you have NO idea what is coming and you have zero time to prepare. It’s completely on the fly and, I learned yesterday, that you have to have a whole bunch of confidence (which began to diminish the closer to 12:30 we got) in order to do that.

Afterwards, I was scrolling through the Twitter feed to see what people tweeted the most, in order to give you some of the key points. I don’t know what we did before Twitter. I guess we didn’t blog about it the next day! Continue Reading »

My good friend Troy Claus asked me to write this for his blog, where he has a fabulous series called “The Entrepreneur’s Journey.” So, if you read it there first, there is nothing new to see here. Move along until tomorrow.

It’s a very vivid memory. Sitting in the conference room at Fleishman-Hillard with our Ocean Spray clients. There are five or six three-inch binders full of media placements sitting in the middle of the table.

The artwork we’d commissioned to showcase the beauty of the cranberry harvest was strategically placed around the conference room. The stationery, with the same art, signified seating assignments.

It was the first grown-up meeting I’d been invited to attend with this client.

Sure, I’d had lots of meetings with the PR director, but never with her boss or her boss’s boss. It was intimidating.

But we were ready! Continue Reading »

It’s finally here, if you can believe it! How long have we been teasing you?

We’re ready to unleash Project Jack Bauer and, as we swallow our waves of panic and try to get some sleep through our excitement, we hope you’re as ready (if not more) for this as we are.

Introducing….Spin Sucks Pro!

What Is Spin Sucks Pro?

If you’ve ever heard me interviewed, the question about how we survived through the recession inevitably comes up. I’m not going to lie and pretend it was some easy task. There were many days (many more than not) that I wanted to curl up in the fetal position and not even get out of bed. But there was this exciting thing going on in our industry. An exciting thing that kept me motivated, all while figuring out we have something to offer, no to give back, to our PR and marketing colleagues.

And that’s what Spin Sucks Pro is: It’s us giving you our knowledge (and that of our friends), while helping you further your professional development. Continue Reading »