Blogging Time

By Nigel Heneghan – The time has come,  I have been pointedly informed, to get with it and to get blogging. So here goes.

Unless a client requirement dictated otherwise, I managed to safely navigate my way through the noughties in blissful ignorance of Boards and Blogs and other such offerings. And as far as I was concerned, social networking was meeting someone after work on a Friday.  Like most people, I am a consumer of online media.  National news, business sites and big picture global news such as Reuters regularly feature on my desktop. As public relations professionals, much of the content generated by this office has regularly filled the screens of the online news media. All good stuff.

But apparently not good enough in terms of the promised personal and professional benefits accruing from online networking.  Therefore, in the past year, I have become a latter-day convert to various online offerings, to which I am told if I do not subscribe, I will be doomed to the oblivion of reality.  So it started with LinkedIn where my relationship was slow to take off, and remains slow in terms of progress.  I have in the past few months been availing of it more in terms of renewing old contacts and responding to contact requests, but I think LinkedIn is badly designed and is not conducive to assisting someone who is either short on time or more likely in this day and age impatient. But it is an interesting networking tool.

In the middle of last year I buckled and joined Twitter.  I still have to get it.   I am told if I start blogging I can post a link on my Twitter page, so at least that will be something. Or I might be in some remote part of the planet without access to BBC Radio 5 Live and I’ll get the latest Leeds United score.  Let me quickly add that that is not my reason to start Tweeting.

My favourite is Facebook, for numerous reasons. I have been contacted by people from my distant past I had almost forgotten existed; it is more colourful and visual then LinkedIn or Twitter; and is certainly easier to navigate then the former.  It is there to dip into now and again, but you are not obliged to keep checking it every 10 minutes. You can create various categories of contact for example family, friends, work, international etc… and importantly and I suppose this is across all of the networking sites, you can decline a contact or an invitation.  Also, you can choose to control the level of information you wish to impart.  I have noticed one deficit with Facebook that needs a small bit of work. That is to try and migrate some of the professional contacts towards the company Facebook page and likewise, there might be one or two friends on the company page that might instead be part of my personal page.  

I have to say Facebook is a positive tool when it comes to work and we see the Heneghan PR page as being of potential benefit to our both clients and to ourselves.

I need to confess here that Bebo and MySpace have passed me by.  But as it stands, I text, I email (business and personal addresses), I am on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. So if someone is trying to find me they will.  And now I can do all of this stuff on the move because of iPhone.  

Other then the above I am not going to use my blog to converse about all things online, funky and technical. I will leave that to the people who know what they are talking about.  I have done it now and it is out of my system.  I just may revisit Twitter at some point, to either confirm that I have mastered it, or to salute its high-profile but short-lived existence in cyber-land.   

Moving forward, I hope to talk about things I have an opinion on, be they personal or professional.  If you have made it this far, thank you for reading my first blog and feel free to comment.

Nigel Heneghan