Welcome to March everyone and our second month of the Friday 5.  I hope you are enjoying our new blog series.  What type of Friday 5 items are you most interested in?
Here are some of the highlights and tidbits from this week.

Casinos have been in the St. Louis news lately, and this week the region [...]

This week’s Friday 5:

Donna Vandiver returned from London after a meeting with the Pinnacle Worldwide network, where she serves as president.  The group of more than 50 privately-owned public relations agencies met to share best practices and initiatives for 2010.
The Olympics start tonight in Vancouver, Canada. Sponsors are using it as a way to continue [...]

This month St. Louis Small Business Monthly  (SBM) asked local business owners how to most effectively use Twitter. In addition to sharing some local small business success stories on Twitter, SBM features Donna Vandiver’s suggestion of the one-third rule when tweeting.  Check out more information on the one-third rule and other suggestions at the SBM [...]

Every day I receive e-mails inviting me to attend various conferences and training sessions related to social media, marketing, public relations, or all of the above.  Some days the e-mails are so frequent I simply delete them.
My question is– with all the professional development opportunities within the field of communications- how do you determine which [...]

Have you ever wondered what it was like to work for a strategic communications firm, or wanted to get the inside scoop on how things are done in a firm like The Vandiver Group, Inc. (TVG)? Well, look no further. Senior Account Executive Cassie McCloud, Account Executive Shelley Lester and Account Coordinator Kanna Taylor provide [...]

According to WorldWideWebSize.com, as of August 24, 2009, the Indexed Web contains at least 21.88 billion pages. It is crucial that your site looks current and stands out (positively) when your audience visits it or they will continue on to one of the other billions of pages.
Do you stand apart from your competitors and [...]

Sustainability in agriculture is being talked about everywhere these days, from the front page of The New York Times to the White House.  But what is often missing in these discussions is the voice of an actual, working family farmer.  That’s why I was so pleased to read the article by Missouri farmer Blake Hurst [...]

At one time or another every business, government agency or non-profit organization and its leaders face a crisis. Large or small, a crisis can pose real challenges, and often catches an organization off guard and unprepared.
The experts at The Vandiver Group have developed a short threat assessment quiz to determine your risk for a [...]

What is the ETA on the CDC RFP? This is a TMI.
Have you ever worked for a company with so many acronyms that they provided you with a list of definitions? Or has the increasing use of abbreviations for texting and social media left you scratching your head?
Acronyms can be helpful and time-saving in internal [...]

This week a new study from Altimeter Group and Wetpaint (which I read about on TechCrunch) ranks the top 100 brands on the web. The listing measures level of engagement within social media, predominantly based on the number of social media channels the brand is using.
Starbucks, Dell, eBay, Google and Microsoft round out the top [...]