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Christine Smith, Centennial College and the current group of Corporate Communications and Public Relations students did a great job organizing and hosting this year’s Talk is Cheap 2.0. It was a fun evening with interesting sessions of which I attended three.

• The Ethics of Social Media PR session with Dave Fleet and Michael O’Connor Clarke speaking about the obligation we as PR practitioners have to be up front and honest when participating in the social media space. An interesting conversation started to brew about ghost blogging and ghost Twittering. Some provocative questions were presented by audience members. Barack Obama’s Twitter account does not explicitly mention it is a member of his staff updating it, so is that unethical? Probably not as the majority of people would understand that he has more important things to do with his time and would assume it is one of his staff. The conversation then led to why is it that ghost blogging is unethical but writing a speech that a CEO gives and assumes her/his own is considered fair game. Quite interesting stuff and I’d like to hear more on this topic.
• The second session I attended was Influencing the New Influencers with PR professionals Keith McArthur, Brenna Flynn and blogger Eden Spodek. They spoke about the importance of developing relationships with bloggers before you pitch to them, the same as you would pitching to a journalist.
• The final session I attended was Digital Snippets given by much of the Social Media Group team. They talked about SMG’s version of the social media press release they call digital snippets which is being used for their client Ford. It was quite interesting to hear them talk through how the digital snippets work. The most important element of the digital snippet is that in order for it to be interesting there needs to be a constant flow of new information to it.

I recommend this event for anyone in PR/marketing interested in learning more about trends in social media.