Using Twitter... professionally

There's a fair bit of conversation online around how to grow one's Twitter "followers" number. One answer: become a college instructor, and assign your students to join Twitter and follow you!

By the end of this week, Red River College's first-year Creative Communications students will all be on Twitter. Interestingly, for the first time this year (in my classes at least), more first-year students were already using Twitter on entering the college than not.

But while most students are already on Twitter, many haven't been using it as a professional tool. Twitter isn't about what you did last night or what you're having for lunch, if you're using it to help establish and nurture your professional career in communications: it's about sharing useful information with communities of interest.

We're covering the topic of tweeting appropriately in class; but generally, my advice is "if you wouldn't want to have to explain it during a job interview, don't say it on Twitter." The fact is, if you say anything on Twitter you wouldn't want to have to explain in a job interview, chances are very high you won't get the job interview in the first place.

Employers will look for you on Twitter, and will judge your professionalism based on what they see.

Below, I've provided a roundup of useful online resources that give Twitter newbies some advice on how best to use it to reach their professional objectives.

Why are you on Twitter? A 'Twitter 101' lesson - First in a series of three really helpful Twitter lessons for beginners by Mike Johansson (@mikefixs) on Social Media Today.

Twitter 101 Day 2: How will you use Twitter? - Johansson's part 2

Twitter 101 Day 3: Who will you be on Twitter? - Johansson's part 3

Twitter 101: What to Tweet? Twitter and Your Personal Brand - good advice from Neal Schaffer (@NealSchaffer) on what to tweet to help position yourself professionally. Not sure I agree with "Tweet, and they will come" as an absolute, but that's OK.

PR Conversations - The angle of this article by Heather Yaxley (@greenbanana) is how to use Twitter for PR events, but the advice is valuable for many other organizational uses of Twitter, too.

Finally, if you're looking for background and specific how-tos about Twitter, check out Mashable's Twitter Guide Book - a good starting-point for the basics from @Mashable.

Happy tweeting!

Choosing which hairs to split

I was honoured to receive a teaching award from my PR students at their convocation this week - and as it turned out, the award provided a "teachable moment."

Red River College's College Relations department interviewed me for a short bio in the convocation program, which said that I had joined the faculty in 2008, "after serving 10 years at MTS Allstream, where she was Director of Corporate Communications." This is correct - I did serve as Director of Corporate Communications at MTS Allstream; and between MTS Allstream and its holding company, I did serve there for 10 years.

But I didn't serve as Director of Corporate Communications at MTS Allstream for 10 years, which is how that statement was understood by some. The College Relations writer and I actually discussed this specific sentence before it was printed, because I wanted to ensure it was accurate.

I started out as a Public Affairs Coordinator at Manitoba Telephone System in 1996; in the decade that followed, I was promoted, my title changed, and the company's name changed, too. All that detail, though, doesn't really matter to most people, we figured - so we gave the length of my tenure, and my title when I left.

My first call upon realizing how the sentence had been understood was to June Kirby, who was the Director of Corporate Communications at MTS from 1996-2000, and my boss at the time - I didn't want her thinking I had tried to take credit for her accomplishments. 

Her reaction? "Oh come on, kiddo, even I didn't read it that way! No-one will care!" (I love it that she still calls me "kiddo.")

Of course, I hope she's right - but I wanted to set the record straight regardless.

Finding the balance between efficiency and clarity in your writing

I spoke with the writer in College Relations this morning before writing this blog post, and we laughed a bit about how we had tried to make the sentence accurate while still straightforward... and obviously didn't do it well enough. 

He said he had considered adding something like "where she held a number of positions ending with..." but in the end, felt it over-complicated the sentence - and likely wouldn't matter. I had entertained the same thought, and had come up with the same conclusion. After all, the sentence was accurate as written... as long as you understood what we meant.

And that's the key. Whose fault is it, usually, if someone misunderstands what I meant? Mine. As writers, it's our job to ensure our messages are communicated clearly, with as little room as possible for misunderstanding.  

In the end, I don't know that anyone but me cares - but it's a good lesson just the same.  If you split hairs too much, your writing may be lumpy - but if you don't split them enough, you risk inaccuracy. Find the right balance, and your writing will be at its most effective.

GolinHarris gives CreComm a warm welcome and great advice

This morning, 35 CreComm students (and two instructors!) were welcomed at the global headquarters of PRWEEK's 2010 Large PR Agency of the Year, GolinHarris.

Alyssa and Alexandra:
"There's no such thing as a typical day in PR."

Assistant Account Executives Alyssa Bronikowski and Alexandra Kassel gave us a quick tour of GolinHarris' Chicago headquarters at the corner of The Magnificant Mile and the Chicago River, gave us a great overview of the agency's work, and then discussed some recent campaigns they've worked on for clients including Magnum Ice Cream, Breyers, and the Dow Live Earth Run for Water, among others.

They walked us through GolinHarris' different practice areas, and talked about the various activities account staff will often undertake over the course of a day.

Advice for aspiring PR professionals

Alyssa and Alexandra shared some excellent advice for PR students wanting to approach their internships and first jobs with the right mindset for success.

1) Always be looking for solutions.
In PR, you always have to be finding ways to make things work. If you're a "well, I tried but it didn't work out... and now I'm just going to wait for someone to tell me what else to do" kind of person, PR probably isn't for you. A lot of success in PR depends on your ability (and willingness) to dig until you find the information you really need -- whether it's the best vendor for chocolate jewellery, the right media monitoring solution, or the audience profiles that will ensure you reach the right people with the right messages for your campaign.

2) Be organized.  
In a PR agency (just like in the corporate world), PR people face different tasks and challenges, with different factors always changing, and oftentimes for multiple clients, every day. If you don't have your act together, you won't last long.

3) Write, write, write.
So much of what we do in PR depends on strong writing. We write materials for our clients; we write plans that must persuasively outline our strategies; we write proposals to win our clients' business in the first place. The more you write, the better you'll be.

4) Stay on top of new ideas in your profession.
Our hosts recommended our students sign up for The Skinny on PR (click to sign up), a free e-newsletter from PR News that focuses on the PR profession; subscribe to PRWEEK; and always be watching what other organizations are doing. Your education in PR never ends.

At the end of the session, Alyssa and Alexandra gave out their business cards and generously invited our students to contact them if they had any questions about internships, launching their careers, or even projects they might have in school next year. They were excellent hosts, and we were very thankful for the opportunity to learn from them.

Thank you so much, Alyssa, Alexandra, and everyone at GolinHarris -- and to Gini Dietrich of Arment Dietrich, who helped set us up for our visit there. It was a fantastic experience!

Internal communications case study at school

Over the last couple of weeks, first-year students in Red River College's Creative Communications program have been looking at internal communications: principles, tactics and tools.

As it happens, they also got an insider's look at a case study on internal communications in the age of social media, when they learned (via Twitter, for many) that beloved Journalism instructor Steve Vogelsang will be leaving the College at the end of this academic year to pursue new opportunities.

They responded immediately, and with hashtags.

While the departure of a teacher isn't the same as a major management change in a career, it can bring about some of the same feelings: losing an advocate and/or mentor, less certain footing for the future. It also illustrates a point about how people would rather hear about changes in their own "management" from the person making the change.

In Steve Vogelsang's case, he didn't stand a chance of beating Twitter. I'm not sure what his order of notifications was, but I do know that, when I read about his departure on Twitter and emailed to ask him whether it was true, he said that it was -- and he'd just shared the news 11 minutes earlier.

I saw a class shortly after the news had hit. Many students professed shock -- one asking me whether I had a "crisis communications plan" to address his departure -- and some were disappointed that they'd "had to hear about it on Twitter."

The fact is that, short of interrupting the school day and bringing all seven classes together for an assembly (an unprecedented action, to my knowledge), there isn't any way Steve could have simultaneously shared the news with everyone in person. I explained that at the time, and of course they understood: they were just sorry to hear he was leaving.

Think you're going to beat Twitter? Good luck!

The stakes are higher, of course, when a major change takes place on the job. Change can be nerve-wracking, and study after study shows that employees are better able to manage change when they hear about it directly from management before the news gets "out there."

This gives them the chance to let the news sink in before they have to discuss ramifications with anyone external, as well as an opportunity to ask questions about what the news will mean to their jobs. It also shows that the organization will give them as early notice as is possible under the circumstances.

My tenure in a corporate communications department preceded Twitter: in those days, our main adversary in the internal information race was the grapevine (potentially just as effective, locally, but not at lightning speed!). But even so, we created long and complicated notification timelines to ensure (as best we could, anyway) that every employee personally affected by a change would hear about it as quickly, personally, and from as appropriate a source as possible.

Nowadays, organizations have to recognize that the first wave of information may become instant public disclosure.

What does that mean for internal communicators? A couple of things.

1. They have to be vigilant about timelines, setting up rolling series of meetings to enable the rapid sharing of major change information to as many "affected" people as possible. When it's a question of helping employees deal with major change, and people's jobs are involved, you should hold that assembly. You interrupt the work day, because you want to show those employees that their well-being is more important than keeping to a normal schedule, even if only for 15 minutes.

2. In between announcements like these, they need to ensure the corporate culture is such that employees understand why information is shared in the format and order it is. This helps to avoid inadvertent insult, and to ensure employees understand the organization respects them and cares about their feelings... and will do everything it can to get the information they need to them as soon as it can be shared.

That means open, two-way lines of communication, in normal times and in times of change.

And as for our students?

While they're disappointed to be losing a favourite instructor, they're happy for him -- and even happier that he'll be sticking around until the school year's out.

And even after he's gone, you have to know they'll be following him on Twitter.

PR's new career path starts in school, not the newsroom

In the next week, 70 or so first-year Creative Communications students at Red River College will declare their "major" area of study for their second year: Advertising, Journalism, Public Relations, or Media Production (formerly "Broadcasting").

Many already know what they want to do when they leave college, but some are still on the fence, weighing their options and trying to figure out which major will be the best fit for them.

A fair number have come to ask me for advice, and I tell them all the same thing: they should major in whichever of the fields they plan get a job in, because that's what their portfolio will be best-suited for when they graduate.

I read an interesting article on the New York Times Education blog recently, about Mary Ellin Arch, a news editor who'd been 'downsized' from the newspaper where she worked, after 29 years in the news business.

Not yet ready to retire, she did what many journalists had done before her: she decided to look for work in public relations.

And after four months of  “no bites, no interviews, no calls, no interest whatsoever,” she realized she was losing all the PR jobs to people who were educated in PR.

The way it was

Not that long ago, it was a pretty normal thing for journalists to make the move to PR once they either realized they weren't going to become Walter Cronkite/Barbara Walters/Bob Woodward/Carl Bernstein, or they decided they wanted a job that might be a little more family-friendly.

In fact, if you talk to many veteran PR pros today, they'll even tell you that you should go work in a newsroom before making the move to PR, because it'll make you a better PR guy.

They say that, because that's how it worked for them, back then.

It made sense, really. Even a decade ago, a good understanding of how the mainstream media worked was sometimes the most important characteristic of a successful PR professional. The mainstream media represented one of the very few ways we could practically get our messages out to our external audiences. Logically, who'd know better than someone who'd been on the other side, right?

On top of that, working in a newsroom was how you learned to write like a journalist, which is what PR folks aim to do.

The way it is

Today, a few variables in the equation have changed.

First, public relations programs have grown and expanded in colleges and universities around the world, at the certificate, diploma, degree, and graduate levels.

Students in these programs learn the fundamentals of organizational communications, and put them into practice. They learn what they need to know about their audiences in order to get -- and hold -- their attention. And they explore the creativity they need to figure out how to break through today's noise with a meaningful and persuasive message, on top of learning how to write for PR.

The "learn-it-by-watching-it-from-the-outside" approach of reluctant journalists doesn't hold up as well anymore. They are competing for PR jobs against people who can show employers work samples illustrating the range of skills they're looking for. PR grads don't have to say "trust me -- I have experience in a related field, so I'll probably be pretty good at PR."

Secondly, while understanding how the media work remains important for PR pros, organizations' reliance on media relations for mass communication will decrease steadily as social media grow.

There's a reason newspapers and magazines are fighting for audiences these days -- and it's because those audiences are getting their information online. Today's PR pros do need to understand how to work effectively with the mainstream media, but they also need to be able to communicate much more broadly -- a skill that requires a far greater breadth of PR knowledge and experience than having written for a newspaper.

Don't get me wrong

Please don't think I'm saying it's impossible for a journalist to switch into PR today, because it isn't. It continues to happen, and I expect it always will, for certain people.

When I was the director of a corporate communications department, I hired a number of former journalists -- all of whom demonstrated in their portfolios and in interviews their understanding of how PR works.

I also interviewed and declined to hire many more, who didn't.

If you want to work in PR today, you'd do yourself a favour by entering a formal PR program in a post-secondary institution, and by building a portfolio that shows your understanding of the fundamental principles of effective communications and how you respond creatively to a range of communications challenges.

Writing articles is only one of many writing-based skills a PR pro needs -- not to mention the need to understand different stakeholder motivations, to be able to create effective strategies to reach them, and how to use the growing number of communication tools at our disposal effectively.

I got lucky.

I entered this profession in the mid-1990s, before the Internet was even widely used. I received my PR education "on-the-job," when I was mentored by a partner in the communications firm that hired me based on my English degree, my strong writing, and the strength of my interviews.

Today I wouldn't stand a chance. There are far too many grads of public relations programs who can prove they already know what they're doing, and are ready to hit the ground running for their client.

My PR majors would have beaten me out for that first job in a minute, I can guarantee it... and I'd have been back to school.

Why would a PR guy love teaching so much?

I love my job(s).

By day (during the academic year), I teach Public Relations to 100 or so bright, enthusiastic, committed students at Red River College. By night (during the academic year) and during the summer, I do freelance communications consulting. Before coming to Red River, and launching my consulting business, and having my daughter, I worked in corporate PR for more than a decade - and never once, for a minute, was bored.

I love every aspect of PR work: the diversity of people, the issues, the brain puzzles, the gratification that comes with success - even the parts that are sometimes uncomfortable and rarely but occasionally terrifying.

But I love teaching here at the college, too. On a recent drive home, I started to wonder whether it was unusual that someone who was so in love with PR as a career would so quickly fall in love with teaching.

Am I fickle?  I don't think so. I worked in retail in school, and I didn't love that.


So what do teaching and PR have in common?


A lot, I think.

To me, teaching and PR both:

1. require you to read your audiences, and challenge you to tailor your "pitch" to their interests and needs if you're going to be successful. 
2. require you to employ persuasion -- whether it's to influence public opinion or to encourage a student to recognize the value in the curriculum.
3. present you with challenges and puzzles every single day.
4. provide the opportunity to meet new people and learn about their perspectives. 
5. encourage you to take calculated risks.
6. force you to become a more efficient communicator, and a comfortable public speaker.
7. help you develop leadership skills.
8. demand that you be credible.
9. reward empathy, initiative, and extra effort.
10. allow you to be a life-long learner.

What's not to love?

Why I don't endorse students on LinkedIn

Over the last couple of years, I've had a number of former students send requests for my endorsement on their LinkedIn profiles.

I'm one of the instructors who's advised them to join the site, and to be active on it and other social media platforms -- which makes it seem odd when I decline their requests. (I must point out off the top that all the students with whom I've had this conversation to date have been very understanding about it.)

LinkedIn: "Facebook for professionals"

I've heard LinkedIn referred to in this way many, many times -- and in some ways it's a fair comparison. LinkedIn provides the platform for online networking between people who call themselves professionals the way Facebook does it between, well, people who may or may not call themselves professionals.

Both sites encourage their members to share information about themselves (whereas most people use Facebook for personal information, most use LinkedIn for professional information), to provide updates and links to things of common interest with the people with whom they're "linked," and to engage in conversations that take place within groups of people on the site with common professional interests.

In addition to those and many other features, LinkedIn also invites its members to provide public recommendations for each other's professional work, called "endorsements." These endorsements become part of the endorsed person's LinkedIn profile, and help to characterize that person's professional aptitudes/skills/advantages for potential employers or clients or partners to see.

It's great, unless you don't necessarily want your endorsements to be available for the world to see.

Hence my problem.

As a college instructor on LinkedIn, I feel like I'm in a bit of a difficult spot when it comes to endorsements.

In the Creative Communications program at Red River College, we work with a great many outstanding students, who we know will be outstanding professional communicators; accordingly, I have written a significant number of glowing reference letters for graduates and for continuing students looking for summer work.

As any student for whom I've written one of these letters will tell you, I personalize each letter to the student and the position being sought -- I spend time on them, because I know how important they can be. I take a great number of reference calls for students, and prepare for them the same way. So the problem isn't that I'm unwilling to take the time.

Issue #1: Hurt feelings (maybe)

We all have strengths and weaknesses. Some students are stars, some are excellent, some capable, some solid... and not all in the same areas of what we teach. Any meaningful endorsement will speak to that student's particular strengths, and will use descriptive language appropriate to how the endorser (in this case, I) saw the student's work and potential. But while that makes it a meaningful endorsement... it also makes it a potential feelings-trampler.

Put simply: I don't want former and current students to be able to see the endorsements I've given their classmates.

Not every student puts in an excellent effort and produces excellent results, so it follows that not every student will get an excellent reference. It may sound harsh, but it's true, and it's what gives professional references value.

So I don't want classmates reading into what I did say about one person and didn't say about another, or the adjectives used to describe one but not another, or even the fact that I agreed to endorse one but not another. I think that's between me, the student, and the employer, if the student chooses to provide my name as a reference.

Issue #2: Lack of context

I always prefer to recommend based on a candidate's aptitudes for a particular position. I don't want a potential employer who is considering more than one of my former students to compare my short, context-less LinkedIn endorsements and make assumptions about how their performance in college might translate into their workplace. I'd want the opportunity to tailor my recommendation to the position; then, I'd know I'm addressing the attributes that will be most relevant for the employer.

Any student for whom I provide a recommendation can be assured that I will take the time to provide an honest appraisal of their skills as they relate to the type of work they're looking for -- and as some of my former students will tell you, I'll keep re-tailoring letters until they find the job that's right for them.

I just won't be doing so in public, on LinkedIn.

Do I worry about such things too much?

Probably; but that's me.

If you are a former student of mine and are asked by a potential employer why I haven't endorsed you on LinkedIn, and you want them to hear my perspectives on your performance in CreComm, please give them a link to this post... and my email address.

Red River College students making snoows

This week, graduating students in the program in which I teach, Red River College's Creative Communications, are presenting their year-long independent projects to a packed house in south Winnipeg's Park Theatre.

These presentations are an annual tradition in Creative Communications; but this year, there's a new twist: they're being live-tweeted by a quintet of first-year students using the hashtag #ipp10.

I wrote a guest post for the snoo.ws blog about this, and many of the ways our program has evolved to reflect the changing communications industry, this week.

If today's excellent presentations were any indication, there's a lot more in store for us Thursday and Friday. If you're in Winnipeg and have some time to be impressed, come down to the Park Theatre -- and if not, follow the event live on Twitter!

Those pesky ethics keep holding me back.

Flying under the radar (har har) of the balloon boy hoax of last week was a media hoax of a far different kind: the Yes Men's successful effort to dupe major U.S. media into relaying their messages on climate change.

The Yes Men are activists whose business, according to their website, is "Impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else."

On Monday, their target was the United States Chamber of Commerce. As the National Post reported earlier this week, the Yes Men booked the National Press Club in Washington late last week for a news conference, under the name "U.S. Council on Climate, which has the same acronym as the Chamber. On Monday morning, they called and changed the contact information for the event, and set up their press conference with U.S. Chamber of Commerce logos."

Staff at the National Press Club realized something was up, and alerted the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that the fraudulent news conference was about to take place. The video below shows what happened when a legitimate representative of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce arrived on the scene.



While the news conference was only a few minutes old when it got broken up, a number of media outlets had already reported on the announcement. According to the National Post,

"Reuters had already filed a story based on a fake press release. The news appeared on several websites and was announced on live television; an anchor for the Fox Business Network retracted the news within seconds of reporting it. Reuters quickly issued a correction."

The situation was an embarrassment for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Press Club, as well as the media who reported the story before realizing it was a hoax. But the Yes Men certainly got what they wanted: national headlines and coverage of their messages on climate change.

Some may see publicity stunts like this one as victimless crimes; and in some cases, they might be (other than the damage done to the credibility of the PR and media industries). But in others, there can be real victims: as the National Post story recounted, in 1994 the same front man for the Yes Men
"tricked the BBC into thinking he worked for Dow Chemical. In an interview with the broadcaster, he said Dow would pay US$12-million to the victims of India's Bhopal gas disaster. By the time that stunt was exposed a few hours later, the company's stock had plunged by US$2-billion."

This story has highlighted the fundamental problem of a "tweet-first-ask-questions-later" approach to journalism today, driven by the need to stay ahead of social media in breaking news. Whereas reporters used to have time to do background research before filing stories, today they are pressured to get the news out, at least in some preliminary form, as soon as they receive it. As the media landscape evolves, journalists will need to find a way to ensure the accuracy of what they're reporting, if they want to remain a credible source for their audiences.

In first-year PR classes at Red River College this year, we have discussed professional codes of ethics, and why professional associations like the Canadian Public Relations Society and the International Association of Business Communicators would need to have them; this story provides us with a perfect illustration of why such ethics codes are needed.

The Yes Men's stunt may have earned headlines, but it did nothing to build relationships. Ethical public relations does not employ dishonesty, arguing that the means justifies the ends; rather, ethical public relations involves open, honest communications between a client and its audiences, in the interests of fostering better understanding and, hopefully, earning trust and support.

It's important for ethical public relations practitioners to denounce actions like those of the Yes Men, because in some circles, their tactics are understood, incorrectly, to be the tactics of PR.

They aren't.

Have you heard about the Nissan cube?

I hadn’t – that is, until a student sent me a link to a site maligning the campaign Nissan used to launch it in Canada (thanks Adam!). My first thought was "all I know about this car is that someone doesn’t like the way it was launched; I’ll bet that’s not what Nissan was going for."

So I Googled it – and was impressed. (I just hope Nissan read the market correctly, and that now’s the right time to target a car launch to a niche audience.)

As Nick Krewen tells it in an interesting article in Monday’s thestar.com, Nissan launched the car in Canada in mid-March using an all-social media campaign: no television, radio, print, or outdoor advertising. The campaign was a contest aimed at younger, "creative" Canadians, to create an online submission about the new car and promote it using social media; the prize: one of 50 cubes to be given away. (It rings notes reminiscent of Tourism Queensland’s celebrated “Best Job in the World” campaign, which I blogged about last month.) The eventual 50 cube winners, announced a couple of weeks ago, were chosen from among 500 contest finalists. Here’s one of them:



While I’m lukewarm on using only social media for any mass-market consumer launch, this one appears to be the start of a larger integrated campaign. Nissan's "hypercube" website media page provides a lot of detail about the campaign, including the post-contest continuation of the campaign through winners' blogs, the impact of its community-building focus, and some measurement of campaign awareness.

In the States, the post-launch marketing campaign Nissan has been running combines new with traditional media, and it appears Nissan has taken a user-generated content approach to that, too. The company reportedly engaged communication students at 10 U.S. universities to conceive and run cube ad campaigns on their own campuses, competing for the chance to pitch their campaigns to Nissan executives. [Note to Nissan: if you're considering the same approach in Canada, start here! We have an excellent advertising and PR program at Red River College.] Nissan’s agency has integrated Web 2.0 elements into its traditional advertising, including a call-to-action to SMS Nissan for access to exclusive content including music, ringtones and video. The U.S. campaign reportedly also involves product placements ranging from a cube “cameo” on an episode of NBC’s Heroes to a role in a graphic novel on the NBC website devoted to the show, as well as a free iPhone game called “cube Party Roundup.”

There is almost always crossover between the U.S. and Canadian markets, and I would imagine the Canadian marketing strategy will take a similar combined new/traditional media approach. Either way, I’ll be interested to see how it translates into vehicle sales (the true test of the campaign's effectiveness, as long as the cube lives up to its billing and actually meets a market demand).

And what of the complaint site that initially brought this campaign to my attention? I don’t know whether there’s any merit to its claims, but it does illustrate a risk of any campaign these days: there’s always the possibility that someone complaining about your product will reach your potential customers before your own messaging does.

You make that risk even greater if you limit your own messaging to a niche audience – and yet further, if you go out of your way to engage the “creative” class, as Nissan openly discusses having done. Participants among the “creative” class are certainly likely to get attention for your product among their peers – but they’re also well-positioned to get attention for complaints about your organization.

I'll bet that, from Nissan’s perspective, the risk was worth it.

PR excellence, prairie-style

At its annual awards gala in Vancouver last night, the Canadian Public Relations Society (“CPRS”) recognized the best and the brightest in the Canadian public relations industry. The winners were from top-ranked agencies, governments and businesses across the country; and as you might imagine, a large percentage of the winners were from Toronto and its environs.  But two of  last night’s major awards show that Manitoba is growing into a centre of excellence in PR.

First, I am proud that Red River College’s own Steve St. Louis received The CPRS/CNW Student Award of Excellence, which recognizes the outstanding public relations student in Canada.  Steve is a more than deserving recipient of this award, having demonstrated outstanding leadership, skills, and insight throughout his studies in our Creative Communications program. I’ve no doubt that he’s a future leader in our industry.

I also noted that Winnipeg’s ChangeMakers Marketing Communications received a CPRS National Award of Excellence in the Electronic & Interactive category.  ChangeMakers has been a trailblazer in integrated marketing communications for a number of years, and I’m glad to see them recognized by the industry nationally. It happens too infrequently for practitioners in the prairies.

We put a new focus on social media and its role in public relations, advertising, and journalism in the Creative Communications program this year, and are working to incorporate even more interactive and Web 2.0 media in the curriculum for the academic year to come.  Our grads come equipped with all the strategic, writing, public speaking, campaign development, and production skills employers are looking for – and they also have an extra edge over many of their more experienced competitors in the job market: they understand the power of social media, and know how to use it to help clients meet their objectives.

Portage and Main may not be Bay Street – but our little PR community is doing great work, and is spawning excellent firms that help organizations benefit from the power of social media.  In addition to ChangeMakers, check out Dooley Communications and ICUC Moderation Services – they’re all helping their clients interact with their audiences in new ways through social media.

I’m happy for ChangeMakers and proud of Steve and his classmates, and am excited about the future of PR in Manitoba.  Check out the full list of CPRS National Awards of Excellence in The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business today, or see the list online.