Speed’s Digital Apprentice training day happens next Thursday. Another training day? At such a busy time of the year? Yet another flimsy course during which supposed gurus will sound off and try to make social media sound deliberately complicated?

Not a bit of it

We’re going to be getting all the staff at Speed wet – everyone will be bathing in digital media. It is not optional. And we’re turning off the phones and email to ensure that it is so.

This idea has struck a chord with many we’ve spoken to about it. Clients, journalists, peers, in fact anyone who’ll listen.

This is what we’re going to be doing:

8.30am, training day begins (Speed offices, Leicester Square)

8.45am, the first of four short talks from external experts: pushing the frontiers of online video, making search an integral part of communications planning, how journalism is responding to media change, and the digitisation/socialisation of radio and TV

10am, the morning challenge.  Nine teams, each assigned a ‘dream’ client, each has the same challenge – work out how you could make 1,000 (consumer) or 100 (B2B) more people want to buy this brand’s wares by sundown. Produce one piece of content you would need to do it. There are three hours to work together on this. Choose a pretend client from a major retailer, mobile phone manufacturer, university, magazine publisher, software company or food brand (we have the actual names, but are keeping them private until the day). Then each team will present it back to the rest of the company in five minute slots

1pm, presentations from the morning challenge, then lunch and brief talk by Francis Ingham, chief executive of the PRCA

2pm, the afternoon challenge. Same nine teams, each given a challenge to get more than 100 audience interactions from an editorial campaign about Speed/PR by 5pm. Pick a tool with which to achieve this from this list: a viral video, blog post, hashtag, picture, conventional press article, or a radio/audio item

5pm, teams present their results back. One overall Digital Apprentice winner is picked from across the company, and wins an iPad

5.30pm, champagne, heckling, pub

Follow #digitalapprentice or the blogs on our web site for more. It will be covered throughout the day, followed by pithy post-match analysis.