Do you work for a PR agency? Do you look around you most days, at your colleagues, and think that while some people have taken the plunge in understanding how social media works and media is modernising, others are only dipping a toe or two, while some are utterly unbathed?

This is a familiar scenario for many PRs at the moment. We know we have to modernise, we know social media is just one part of what’s happening to our industry. But while some have taken to it like ducks to water (some a bit too vigorously in my opinion, at the risk of drowning in their own excitement), others quack away about it without much more than the occasional paddle and others watch from the banks, occasionally preening their feathers.

This struck me again yesterday at the PRCA National Conference when Hill & Knowlton’s EMEA CEO Sally Costerton appealed for all PRs to “get wet” by taking the plunge into modernising media, social media in particular.

Now I know banging on about social media all the time can prompt exasperated puffing from some PRs, me included. But it’s good for SEO to keep writing about social media, so social media and search experts tell me in our conversations about social media.

And I think Speed has come up with an interesting approach to PR’s bathing challenge, so I wanted to share it (sharing is very much a social media thing, you see).

On 2 December, we’re turning off email. All email, all day. And phones. All day. It’s a company-wide training day and we’re all being forced to use modern media alone to do PR. No making calls, no sending emails, just using the web. We’ve got some outside experts in to talk about the latest interesting stuff going on in search, video content and journalism. Then we’ll be doing a pretend client exercise. After lunch is a PR exercise with the sole purpose of generating commercial returns for Speed by using social media.

Why do this? To force people to bathe in social media, in a nice way. To open all eyes to it and drive experimentation. We’ve spent two years here training the whole team so that everyone has skills in both conventional and social media, avoiding a digital ghetto. But we can go further, and this is an interesting way of doing so. The person with the best ideas and most success at the end of the day will get an iPad.

How will it go? I don’t know. I’m expecting us to learn as much about what doesn’t work as what does. But we’ll document the day and, fittingly, use social media to let anyone and everyone interested know what we’re doing.

Like the #speedkids day this summer, we hope it gains a strong following. We’re calling it the Digital Apprentice. Look out for #digitalapprentice build-up, coverage and post-match analysis soon.