The Coffee Smells Good At The FPRAblog

The Florida Public Relations Association is running a blogging week to showcase their member's talents. I've been reading some of the posts and here's my take on one or two of my favorite articles.

Kari Conley writes on the benefits of corporate giving. I found this article very interesting because I used to work in the marketing department at Washington Mutual Bank. The community-marketing department at WAMU concentrated its efforts on giving support to child related giving activities. The reason, people with children want bigger houses, the program really works and Washington Mutual's efforts in giving to children's programs has helped them to grow their customer base through the parents of those children. Check out Kari's post for ideas on how you can develop a corporate giving program that benefits the community and your company.

Jennifer Wakefield wrote a great piece on using RSS to monitor the web; Jennifer also gave a good overview of some of the other tools available. Monitoring is one of the most important aspects of blogging, without connection to your community and knowledge of the current trends. A blogger's writing can become stale and isolated. Jennifer gives you a good starter in the world of RSS.

I particularly enjoyed Ann Marie Varga's post about the Millennial generation, those people born after 1982. It was short and made me pause and think. Especially when Ann Marie mentioned the concept that many colleges now need a dean of parents.

Ann Marie also quoted Susan Heathfield, a management and organization consultant. "Unlike the Gen-Xers and the Boomers, the Millennials have developed work characteristics and tendencies from doting parents..." As a perspective parent I wonder if I will be doting to point of harm, or will I follow my late depression era parents example and leave well enough alone when I really should? Time will tell.

The post though short does make you think about how to manage Millennial people. And highlights one method of working I think many companies could really benefit from if implemented even for managing people of every age, the idea of working in teams.

Taking a note out of extreme programming and the software development industry. Working in teams to me isn't just about splitting up the tasks in a project and assigning them to each team member to go away and work on them independently. No it means something much more, it means actually working on the project together at the same time. If programmers can do this with code, and it works well, then marketing and PR people can do this with their work.

Ah, you cry but its so much easier to do the work myself, maybe I wonder, but I ask you next time you work on a work project try this technique you may be surprised. Check out Anne Marie's post on what Millennial can teach you today.

Posted by johncass at April 13, 2006 10:05 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://tmpmt.backbonemedia.com/mt2/mt-tb.cgi/478

Comments

Thanks for the props, John. My goal was to provide the basics for why and how companies should be monitoring the blogosphere. So far, I've encouraged quite a few PR people to get obsessed with RSS and other monitoring tools.

Posted by: Jennifer Wakefield at April 13, 2006 10:20 AM

Great job jennifer, I liked the post.

Posted by: John Cass at April 13, 2006 11:31 AM

Thanks John. You mentioned you were previously with WAMU and the Orlando Magic partnered with them on the Governor's Literacy Initiative, so I know how strong that company believes in giving back. I think our generation and generations to come are really focusing on our core values as to how we contribute to society as a whole and do so in any way we can. Thanks for the feedback!

Posted by: Kari Conley at April 25, 2006 9:22 PM

Post a comment

About Us

Company Profile