My first blog entry…what to write on this momentous occasion?
I think I’ll start with me. I’m Josh Turner and I’m a PR consultant for Trillium Corporate Communications in Toronto, Canada. After months and months of thinking about blogs, reading a book about blogs (Naked Conversations…a great book, I should say), contributing my comments to blogs, listening to podcasts, I decided that it was time to stop being an observer and start being a participant. So here is my blog. turn ‘er around! A blog about PR issues but particularly about social media and how it is changing the practice.
I see this as a huge opportunity for me in a couple of ways. First, I think this will be extremely fun and fulfilling. I’m sure that maintaining this blog will be a challenge as hundreds of blogs are created and ditched within a few months. Fear not! I will persist through thick and thin. I think that if I put a concentrated effort into this at the beginning, people will start to visit and then I would be able to interact with them. That’s the hope anyway. By the way…please feel free to email or leave a comment. No comment is too small and all are worth responding to…so long as they aren’t racist, sexist, intolerant or laden with excessive profanity. Blogging policies to come soon…
Secondly, as a PR professional, it is impossible to ignore this medium. Blogs are fundamentally changing the way people communicate and that includes how organizations communicate with their publics. One-way communication tools, such as news releases, are just one tool within a PR professional’s tool box. Having a blog can add a new dimension to communication plans that was previously unavailable. My hope is that operating this blog will provide me with some new skills to further assist my current clients and attract new clients. I hope that doesn’t sound too abashedly opportunistic. 
A bit about me and what I do….I consult in public relations and specialize in high tech, government, environmental issues, and business-to-business. Prior to joining Trillium, I was the director of communications for the Packaging Association of Canada. There, I wrote articles for members about government, regulatory and public affairs, and kept them aware of changing industry conditions.
I am fluently bilingual in spoken French but my written French is a little weak. Si tu m’écris en français, je te comprendrai complètement mais ma réponse peut-être sera moins que parfait. If any francophone wants to let me know if I got that sentence right grammatically, I would love to hear from you. (btw the translation of the above is “If you write me in French, I will understand you completely but my reply might be less than perfect.”).
I also know a bit of Hebrew. While I went to Hebrew school as a youngin’, I never really had any practical use for the language, aside of Jewish prayers (I guess you can figure out that I’m Jewish now). That changed quite dramatically after I met my wife Revital who is an Israeli PhD student in law at the University of Toronto. I have a whole new Israeli family and a number of our friends are Israeli as well. I have taken some Hebrew lessons and I know some elemental Hebrew but, at least for now, responding to Hebrew comments would be tricky at best for me. I do practice all the time and we have the Israeli channel on our TV so one day…interactions in Hebrew may be possible.
Revital and I also have a son who is almost 8 weeks old at this writing. His name is Ittai (pronounced eet-TIE) and he might get some reference in this blog from time to time. Revital and I want him to be fully bilingual in Hebrew and English so I speak to him in English and Revital in Hebrew. If I want to know what my wife is saying to our son, I better learn Hebrew I figure. Our perhaps it’s best if I don’t understand…
I’m very excited about this and welcome everyone to leave comments. My next project for this blog will be to create a set of policies that lay the groundwork of how this blog will operate. Stay tuned for more turn’er around! communications…
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joshturner[at]rogers.com
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OK! Congrats to you. The Canadian space certainly needs more voices and it’s great to see Trillium is interested in letting you learn about this stuff in real time.
Enjoy the ride. I’ll add you to the Feedburner PR Network too.
Welcome to the PR blogosphere, Josh! Looking forward to reading your thoughts.
Dave
Hello Josh,
Welcome to PR blog world. Good to have your voice joining in and sharing your views.
You’ve made a good start. Nice post. I might just share this with my students as a good way to initially write in their blogs.
I like how you recognize social media (or one form if it) as “one tool” and how it “*can* add a new dimension to communication plans”. This tells me that you haven’t sipped the koolaid, and that’s a good thing.
Keep up the blogging. Looking forward to reading your ideas.
All the best.
Robert
Holy cow batman! I had no idea that I would get three comments so fast! Knowing David Jones must help…
It was funny because David told me that he posted something so I went to the blog and saw nothing there. So I waited…and waited…and hit refresh…and hit refresh again. I was starting to wonder if David was playing a cruel joke on me!
But then I went to my inbox and saw that I had comments to approve. I didn’t know that I could approve something!!! It was kind of like…yes, I grant you permission to comment. I guess I sort of thought of blogging like being at a bar…you say something and then someone can say whatever they want. Having a blog makes me realize that I can have a real say on how things go around here…like I can set the tone. Very cool stuff.
Oh dear…I think I have a new addiction. My poor wife and child.
Josh
I may be an oddball out, but I don’t find blogging to be difficult at all. In fact, I find it hard *not* to blog. Then again, mine is all personal, and only things I share with people close to me, so it’s a whole different ballgame.
One comment: I’m not sure how well laying out groundrules is going to fly.
For one thing, if you post it early, it will not be viewable by future readers unless they scroll back. If you post it as a link, not everyone will read it. For those who do see it — If you give people rules, people will want to break them.
More importantly: People are generally pretty respectful. I expect that the kinds of people who will be reading your blog will be intelligent ones.
Besides, with the ability to approve comments, it’s a moot point.
The bigger concern will be spammers. Again – you’ll be approving the comments.
Hi Jill…thank you so much for coming to see my new blog! Some very interesting comments that bring a new perspective to things.
To refer to your comment about groundrules…I’m not really looking to set groundrules but rather policies, which might be splitting hairs a bit, but hear me out. These policies will speak to how I will conduct my own postings and the criteria in which I accept comments. The idea is that people can look to these policies to understand what they can expect from me, and, if they post something and it doesn’t go up, they will be able to understand why.
As an example, one critical policy that I will put up is that the opinions that I express are mine alone and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer, Trillium Corporate Communications, or its clients. This is to distinguish that this is a Josh Turner blog, not a Trillium blog, and for people to not be confused between the two.
One set of blogging policies that I will use as a reference in constructing my own is written by PR blogger David Jones and his blog prworks.ca. He has graciously allowed me use portions of his policy but I will be looking over others for inspiration. The policy page of his blog is http://www.prworks.ca/index.php/my-blog-policies/.