Mentors @ Humber PR

[Michael Cayley]

Updated January 2010

We would like to roll out a warm welcome to the many mentors who have joined us here on the Humber PR network. We are honoured to have a portion of your attention.

This network is not just about social media. Regardless of a mentor's personal level of adoption with social media, your experience is an incredible resource for our students. Above all, we want our students to develop the kind of instincts that you have honed over the years.

We know that your association with us will make a difference. More importantly, we hope that you will also find that this network evolves into a unique resource for you.

There are a variety of ways that you can get engaged as a mentor ... choose one or many ...

1. Join the Community by adding your Profile: By adding a profile here, you help us keep it real. You are giving us a window into your career that will help us connect our work at the school to the trajectories that you have experienced. We will up our game because the distance between our practice field and your field of practice will be just a little smaller.

2. Share Insights & Hot Topics with a blog post or via Twitter: Many of our mentors are already avid bloggers or Twitter users. You already share interesting articles & ideas related to social media, public relations and digital/new media business on Twitter ... why not link to your latest blog post with a teaser here on Humber PR or add the tag "#humberPR" to your tweet so that it will pop up into our network radar. This will help us tune our own perspectives to yours. Feel free to drop in on the #humberPR thread via Twitter Search where you will find us bantering about such topics as pitching social media to the C-suite.

3. Join the conversation: Join in on the #humberPR twitter thread, we are tweeting live from our classes and at all times of the day. There are times when we are specifically looking for your input as we think about social media and you should always feel welcome to add a comment to any of the blog posts on our network. We know how valuable your time and perspective is.

4. Drop into Class Via Skype: Everyone of us is sitting in front of a broadband enabled computer, we have a projector and great audio system. We have had good experience with this. You pop in via skype to say hello, introduce your practice, deliver a nugget of wisdom, share a perspective. If you can free up ten minutes for this, please contact Michael.

5. Be a Guest Speaker: This is a bit bigger commitment. Ideally we are hoping for about an hour of your time and if you are local, it would be great if you could join us in the class but we have had guests via skype from Boston, Geneva and just a few kilometers away in Toronto. If you can spare time to cover a topic for us ... again, please contact Michael with a message here or @MichaelCayley

6. Help Us Shape the Course, Evaluation & Assignments: By now our social media course is probably one of the most widely vetted in college history! See the course outline here. We originally shared it with our PR advisory committee, shared it with other leading practitioners & educators in the field, opened it up to our students for discussion and we would value your perspective as well. We are working on ways of keeping peer to peer, the points of views of mentors and our college driven requirements in mind as we try to come up with evaluation methods that more closely resemble how social media is judged in practice. When we ask for your input, trust that it will really impact what we do.

7. Volunteer to Evaluate Personal Brands: Further to point six, a big part of what our students have been asked to do during this course is to develop their online identities. We are doing this because it matters. Like it or not, everyone being considered for any kind of job today is subject to a google search of their name. By demonstrating that they have effectively shaped their online destiny, Humber PR grads demonstrate that they can have this same kind of impact on behalf of employers and clients. Developing their online identity is a key plank in their long term strategy of maintaining networks of learning. We need several mentors to help us on this. Please contact Michael to learn more about this commitment.

We hope that you discover how the HumberPR network becomes valuable to you over time and share these stories with us. To begin with here is what we are hoping for:

1. Point of Syndication: You can syndicate your twitter stream and RSS feeds from your own blogs to your HumberPR profile. It is great content for us & another outlet on the web that helps improve search results for your original points of presence.

2. HumberPR Mentor Group: We have started a group that is restricted to the mentors on this network. There are many ways that this could become a trusted harbour of exchange.

3. Recruiting Volunteers, Interns or Entry Level Employees:
Our students are always on the look out for great experiences that will place them along side mentors and challenge them to exceed their previous limits.

Thanks again. Feel free to invite your trusted colleagues to join us.