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So far the minimal interaction I have had with Hostpapa’s staff has been excellent. The response time is the fastest I’ve yet encountered, and the staff is courteous and helpful. I hope this trend continues, because I’m certain to have questions in the near future!

If you’re looking for a web host, take a look at Hostpapa’s site. You get a lot of bandwith and storage space, 99.9% uptime guarantee and a free domain registration. The three factors that swayed me were: 1) It’s Canadian; 2) It’s 100% green energy powered (by wind, I believe); and 3) They have phone and email support with a lot of availability.

Oh did I mention it’s cheap? Hostpapa and I have this in common. With a coupon I found through google, it’ll end up costing about $5.11 a month before taxes for the next three years.

Enough with the promotion. What it means is that this website will soon be moving! Stay tuned for a new and improved PR for the People,  links and details to follow.

In the meantime, if you are paying for a blog, which host are you with? Any recommendations or hosts to avoid? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments!

In reality, I’m sure PR budgets would be cut a bit, or remain the same, hiring would slow down, all the usual impacts a recession has. But let’s take a look at some key practice areas of PR, and how I think they can play a pivotal role in a tight economy.

MarComm: I figured I would start here since this is such a common area of PR. If times are tight, I would advocate using public relations over marketing. You can accomplish a lot with a very small PR budget, through publicity, creativity and good relationships with your community. Traditional marketing can get costly, ad space doesn’t come cheap.

Investor Relations: If your stock is falling, or your business isn’t getting the returns it used to, the investors are going to want some serious reassurance. Investor relations should be a crucial facet of any business in a recession. If your ROI is coming back red, and your company remains silent, investors will be dropping out faster than Rudy Giuliani. If you employ some excellent IR, you can maintain their trust and hopefully keep them on board.

Internal Communications: I personally consider this to be the most important function of any company. Productivity and profit are directly linked to how engaged, enabled and happy the employees are. Nothing puts more strain on employee relations than a recession. Potential layoffs, salary increases and bonuses getting the axe, terms like “restructuring” being tossed around, it’s a time of high anxiety for everyone. A good internal communications plan can diffuse the tension, reassure doubts, or at the very least, keep people in the loop about what’s happening.

So there are three key areas PR can really aid a company when the chips are down. This is just my opinion, during the last recession of the early 90s I had a paper route, so I’m not speaking from experience. What do you think? If you have worked in PR through a recession, or just want to share your opinion, leave your two cents in the comments below. Thanks for reading!

If you are currently a student, or have been recently, I encourage you to take part in the discussion on Bob LeDrew’s blog Flacklife. He’s currently wondering about the presence (or absence) of Web 2.0 in the PR classroom. Is it being taught, used, discussed?

One instructor who is teaching Web 2.0 is Gary Schlee, who has his students on del.icio.us and blogging. Joe Thornley has taken notice and suggests blogging is a must for any new PR student. Good news for me, since I don’t think many of my fellow students are blogging!

As always, great post from Chris Clarke over on Student PR. He also mentions the online aspect of getting hired, along with networking and internship.

So the morale of the story is if you want to get in PR start trying out the new(er) web ideas. But if you’re reading this, you’re probably already well on your way!

This week just flew by! I didn’t even make a proper blog post, I’ll have to be sure to make time next week. In the meantime, here are some good links.

If you haven’t read the cluetrain manifesto, I definitely recommend it. I read it a while ago while in undergrad, thanks to a Prof who is really on the ball. He used to teach at York U, from the looks of his blog he’s now at Wilfrid Laurier, which is a shame for York. Anyway, you should read Cluetrain and draw your own conclusions. Now the 95 theses are available in a convenient slideshow format. Check them out:

If you like it so far, check out the book in its entirety here. Thanks to Michael Seaton from the Client Side Blog for posting the slideshow earlier.

If anybody follows this blog they know I love links to resources, and three great blogs delivered this week.

Chris Clarke is back with Student PR and he’s returned with a list of PR firms in Toronto, which is handy for those of us looking for a PR job. It’s great to see this blog active again!

Dave Fleet has compiled a solid list of Social Media Tips and Tools over on Fleet Street PR. Get your bookmarking finger ready before clicking over, you’ll want to save that one.

Finally, Joe Thornley has just announced the beginning of a new series on the Canadian Council of PR firms blog.  The series will feature biweekly video interviews with leaders from Canada’s finest PR firms. It sounds like an excellent series, I’m looking forward to the first post. It’s also really nice to see a video format, it’s a good diversion from the endless RSS subscriptions and readers.

So there you have it! Lots of great posts this week, I hope you enjoy them. As always, feel free to leave some of your own choice links in the comments. Have a great weekend!  

This week has been a busy one for me. I’m in the full swing of the busy season at work, which means working to 9 pm until the end of June, and I’ve just started PR 201 and 202 at Ryerson. The courses and instructors are great, I’m really looking forward to next week’s classes. As a side effect, I’ve been reading textbooks instead of digging deep on PR blogs, so this week’s Link Love Friday is going to be brief.

There’s an excellent post from Todd Defren over on PR Squared, entitled “What I Wish My New Employee Knew.” It’s a good read for anyone, like myself, that is looking to get into PR or is just starting out.

It gets better! At the bottom of the post there are a handful of links that are all helpful pointers for the PR proselyte, all the way up to the PR pros. I particularly recommend 5 ways not to get an entry-level job in PR and Reasons a Student Should Get Involved in Social Media from Chris Clarke and Joe Thornley. I may be a little bit bias towards the content on those posts, but it’s still good advice.

These posts all connect to the Teaching PR blog, which I’ve only just discovered, and is an excellent resource.

Feel free to post your own favourite links from the week in the comments below. Enjoy the links, and have a great weekend!

The Star article about the Facebook posting can be found here.

Is posting or publishing on Facebook (or other social media) a violation of the court ordered publication ban? Can we define Facebook, or a blog, as a publication?

So when thinking about social media and gag orders, what it really comes down to is the definition. How does one define “publication?” I think it is certainly possible to make a case for Facebook being a publication, and I can see a judge agreeing. I’m no lawyer though, so let’s stick to the facts.

The law in question in the recent case (mentioned in the Star article above) is the Youth Criminal Justice Act. Here are the relevant citations:

Identity of offender not to be published

110. (1) Subject to this section, no person shall publish the name of a young person, or any other information related to a young person, if it would identify the young person as a young person dealt with under this Act.

Identity of victim or witness not to be published

111. (1) Subject to this section, no person shall publish the name of a child or young person, or any other information related to a child or a young person, if it would identify the child or young person as having been a victim of, or as having appeared as a witness in connection with, an offence committed or alleged to have been committed by a young person.

Right off the bat, you can see how the individual that posts on Facebook can be held liable, if you consider posting to Facebook as publishing. But can Facebook itself be held liable?

I checked out the Facebook Terms of Service to see if they could be on the hook if someone were to break a gag order. I will confess, I signed up to Facebook with little more than a casual glance at its extensive TOS. Once reviewing it, the most applicable passage that I found is its User Content section. Here’s an excerpt:

You are solely responsible for the photos, profiles (including your name, image, and likeness), messages, notes, text, information, music, video, advertisements, listings, and other content that you upload, publish or display (hereinafter, “post”) on or through the Service or the Site, or transmit to or share with other users (collectively the “User Content”).

On the legal side, here is their Indemnity section, in its entirety:

You agree to indemnify and hold the Company, its subsidiaries and affiliates, and each of their directors, officers, agents, contractors, partners and employees, harmless from and against any loss, liability, claim, demand, damages, costs and expenses, including reasonable attorney’s fees, arising out of or in connection with any User Content, any Third Party Applications, Software or Content you post or share on or through the Site (including through the Share Service), your use of the Service or the Site, your conduct in connection with the Service or the Site or with other users of the Service or the Site, or any violation of this Agreement or of any law or the rights of any third party.

The wording from Facebook is, naturally, concrete evidence against their involvement with what you may post. I had initially believed that Facebook claimed all ownership to everything posted on their site, but upon further TOS review I have found that to be incorrect. Here’s the blurb, also contained in the User Content section:

Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.

Facebook does claim essentially unlimited use of what you post as their right, as part of the conditions of using their service, but they maintain that it is your property.

So those are the black and white facts, but where it always gets interesting is in the grey area. Does Facebook constitute a “publication?” Is it considered private or public? Are the users “publishing” details of a case, or just discussing it amongst their friends? Can it, or should it, be held liable for what is said, written or posted through it? Is it liable through its complicit distribution of what is said? If such questions were brought to the court, it would certainly be a landmark case not only for Facebook, but for internet publications as a whole.

I encourage you to post your thoughts, legal evidence or precedents, or just general rants in the comments below! Check out this link to Wise Law Blog, with a post on the same topic.

It’s 2008 and we’re back with Link Love Fridays! Spreading the love to my favourite PR posts for the week. If you missed these then I definitely recommend checking them out.

The first link comes to us from Sean Moffitt of Buzz Canuck. He’s just started a series that will list a word-of-mouth blog for every day of the year. On Wednesday he dropped January’s edition, and it is a monster. 31 great blogs, and let’s just say my reader is going to need a new folder. Many of them I already follow (the Canadian blogs especially,) but there are numerous that I’m new to, thanks Sean!

PR measurement is a area that I find very interesting, and I still have a lot learn about the field. If you’re in a similar frame of mind, I recommend this post by Kami Huyse of Communication Overtones. There’s a lot of great info with links to books, articles, PR measurement services, online tools and even an interview with measurement guru Katie Paine. There is a wealth of information here, it’s a post definitely worth bookmarking.

Lastly, the ultimate in desk decorations has arrived. Seth Godin now has an action figure. If only this had come out before Christmas!

That wraps it up for this week, thanks for reading! Have you got a great link you’d like to share? Post it in the comments!

Basically, to me, this is the equivalent of having a television broadcasting network in your pocket. At any point you can pull out your celly, film something, and have it broadcast to anyone who cares to view it, live. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about, filmed by the Scobleizer.

The potential seems immense.  Not because it couldn’t be done before, but because of the sheer ease and mobility of the idea. Speeches or lectures could be delivered from anywhere, at any time, while maintaining some of their live impact. Amateur news broadcasts can go “live from the scene” with ease. I don’t even need to mention the massive potential for bootleggers of concerts and movies this may have.

My only critique is that it seems to be only one way. You can broadcast straight from your cell phone to the internet, but I don’t know how much you can receive on your cell phone from other users. You can probably watch completed videos, but can you watch a live stream? I can only speculate because my current cell phone isn’t compatible with Qik, and even if it was, I don’t have an unlimited data plan from my provider. Just another reason why Canadian providers need to really step up it with their mobile options, and I’m not alone when thinking so.

At the very least, it’s a great way store videos taken by your phone, effectively eliminating the storage constraints of your standard phone. If you’ve got Qik on your phone, let me know about your experiences with it in the comments section. Hopefully they’ll add some Samsung compatibility soon!

So here’s a cheesy topic to blog about: New Year’s Resolutions. I usually don’t make them, if I plan on doing or achieving something I find the best time to start is always right away. But this year I have a blog to take care of! So here are my 2008 blogging resolutions:

1. To blog more frequently, and regularly -  I hope to post a few times a week, and to maintain regular features such as Link Love Fridays, and maybe Top Ten Tuesdays. I just came up with that last one, but it sounds like a good idea.
2. To attend a PR event, and blog about it – I haven’t done this yet, and I always appreciate when others do. It’s a great read for people who couldn’t make the event but wanted to, and for people that attended and would like to discuss it.
3. To upgrade the design and features of PR for the People – Right now this blog is looking pretty much the same as it did when I signed up. I’m trying to find a nice pic to put on the top bar, possibly related to the topic and/or theme of the blog. I would also like to add some fun widgets, but currently this is a free webpage, and java is disabled. I definitely need to upgrade to a pay server, one that I can use the wordpress engine on. If you have any suggestions, or recommendations, please let me know!

So those are my resolutions for 2008 here on PR for the People. They’re published now, so I’ve got to keep them. What are yours? Feel free to post in the comments, or link to your own blog with your ideas. Thanks for reading in 2007, hope to see you again in 2008!