Last night we were at Manchester Metropolitan University Business School to run our second CIPR Blogging Basics Workshop, this time on behalf of the North West region.
We were really pleased to have Simon Collister of GREEN Communications as our trainer for the evening especially as he's currently juggling the completion of his CIPR diploma and making preparations to take a new job providing online PR expertise for London-based Edelman.
He'd probably be the first to agree that his PR blog Simonsays was instrumental in raising his profile in the UK and ultimately played a major part in being offered such a prestigious career move.
Simon did a great job of guiding everyone through the process of setting up their first blogs and offered some very good advice on how to best apply their potential as a PR tool.
I think we've truly reached a point now where social media skills have become essential for all forward thinkers in the PR industry and there was certainly a real enthusiasm from our delegates to take this opportunity to get some hands on experience.
We'd learnt from our last event in Yorkshire that less is sometimes more so we purposefully limited the available delegate places to a dozen to ensure we could give everyone the kind of hands on assistance needed to get the most out of the evening.
Judging by the evaluation forms I think we got most things right and hopefully we'll soon see a number of new bloggers in the area!
Finally a few quick notes about the venue. MMU's Business School is ideally situated in Manchester city centre and is close to Piccadilly train station and the Metrolink tram network. There's also plenty of free on street parking after 6pm.
We were using one of their computer rooms and despite a few technical problems their staff soon resolved the issues and made sure everything was running smoothly for us long before our delegates arrived.
One word of warning - computer labs get very warm but you can't take drink into them!
Simon has kindly agreed to make his presentation available as a PDF for our delegates and anyone else who may be interested in blogging as a PR tool.
To view or download Simon's presentation please click this link.