Social media and PR from the digital immigrant perspective

Over the next few months, I’m leading a couple of half-day workshops for the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) as part of their CIPR Masterclass training programme.

The first of these takes place on February 26 at the CIPR’s headquarters in central London.

Under the catchy heading of "New Media for Old Hands," this workshop is designed to help more experienced PR practitioners (which I’d venture to describe, broadly, as the digital immigrant crowd) get a clear sense of where social media fits into traditional PR practice.

These are the headline topics that I plan to cover in the workshop:

• What is ‘new media’ otherwise known as ‘social media’?
• The social media ecosystem explained
• Overview: From command and control communication to sharing and engaging
• Changes in society: the drivers and their impacts on organizational behaviours
• Business uses for social media
• Monitoring the blogosphere and social networks
• Who do you pay attention to and why?
• Why Google loves social media
• The role of social media on corporate reputation
• The emerging practice of blogger relations

One thing I’m paying close attention to as I plan this workshop is to ensure that I present the content and focus discussion in ways that are a) neither condescending nor too geeky and b) relevant to real-world situations that practitioners encounter in their daily routines.

On that latter point in particular, one other thing that will happen in the next week or so is that we’ll be asking some questions of the participants ahead of the workshop that will add some extra relevance to the content we’ll be addressing on the day.

In chatting with the CIPR yesterday about this workshop, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that all places have already sold out and there’s now a waiting list. So we’re discussing running a second workshop sometime in March (I’ll add it to my Events page once I know the date).

So if you’re an experienced PR practitioner looking for answers that you can apply into your current work, this half-day workshop might be worth your while.

And by the way, as I’m also a digital immigrant, we can address these things from a similar perspective.

Take a look at the current workshop outline. You can sign up here.