Many of us who have taught Shakespeare know that the Great Bard based his renowned plays on history or legend — in other words, his genius was not in the originality of plots, but in the art of his storytelling.

Art, imagination, creation are products of passion. Passion is the way we move forward. Passion is the way I, personally, am moving forward.

Book Review – Part One

This blog is a chronicle of my newly embraced career as a Social Media Evangelist. And one of the people most responsible is Brian Solis, who graciously and enthusiastically accepted an invitation to speak to two Public Relations classes at San Francisco State last spring — despite his hectic schedule advising clients, speaking at conferences, attending mashups, and promoting his most recent book Putting the PUBLIC Back in Public Relations.

To my mind, Brian’s book, co-written with Deirdre Breakenridge, is a conversation about a clash — the confrontation between old thinking and new realities.

Change is hard. People like the comfort of the Way it Was, and the Way They Know: but that is hardly a roadmap for progress.

How Social Media is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR

Below is a listing of passages I particularly liked from Part I: THE TRUE VALUE OF THE NEW PR

• Public Relations has always been about building relationships. It should never have been about spin.
• The first thing a PR practitioner should learn is to uphold integrity and credibility at all times.
• Listeners make the best conversationalists.
• PR 2.0 is creating a new toolkit with which companies can share content with new influencers as well as customers.
• PR has begun to look less like a typical broadcast machine and more like a living, breathing entity capable of also participating in conversations with publics.
• The new goal for PR is to understand the communities of people we want to reach and how to engage them in conversation without marketing to them.
• PR is rooted in democratized content, strengthened by enthusiasm and market intelligence, and powered by conversation.
• We no longer Pitch — we Participate. We no longer Sell stories — we Tell them.
• The New PR is all about 3 T’s: Transparency, Truth, and Trust.

The Social Media Book Club discussed Part I of the book last week,  and here is an archive of the remarks. Tonight at 8pm EDT [5pm PDT] you can catch the discussion of part II: Facilitating Conversations: New Tools and Techniques on Twitter #smbookclub. Here is a Book Club calendar. For more info, contact @ready2spark