Last week HM&P traveled to Salt Lake City, Utah to support the CORDURA® brand at OR Winter Market.

Leading up to the show, CORDURA® brand spokesperson and world-explorer Helen Thayer traveled around the Salt Lake City community speaking to more than 3,000 students and outdoor enthusiast. Helen also participated in a CORDURA® brand backpack donation at Escalante Elementary School, where the CORDURA® brand team donated 40 packs to the students of the Face of Fitness program.

Helen also participated in several media interview including a radio program on Access Utah and KCPW, a local NPR station. Click on the links below to hear recordings of the broadcast.

Access Utah – Utah Public Radio

KCPW -  National Public Radio

To wrap up a the week, Helen joined the CORDURA® brand team at OR Winter Market. While at the show the team meet with outdoor publications such as Backpacker, Inside Outdoor and Outside USA. The day ended with an industry party at the CORDURA® brand booth. The extravaganza featured local beer, food, prizes and live music by Jason Adamo.

Scroll down for more photos from the week.

To help with the relief and recovery efforts surrounding the recent earthquake in Haiti, Howard, Merrell & Partners has taken up a collection of new and gently used shoes to benefit Soles4Souls, an organization founded to facilitate shoe donations from drop off points around the country to provide poverty and disaster stricken people with proper footwear.

Locally, the Triangle branch of Soles4Souls has a goal of collecting 150,000 pairs of shoes to help the organization reach its national goal of collecting one million pairs for Haiti.

So far, at HM&P we’ve already collected over a fifty pairs, and the generous employee donations keep coming! We will be bringing our donations to Mobley’s Shoes at 7422 Creedmoor Road in Raleigh. Click here for more Triangle area drop off sites.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Soles4Souls and the amazing work they’re doing, follow them on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

Last week the PR team surprised Kipp Bodnar, who was recently honored as one of the “Top 15 to Watch” by PR News, with his award and a bottle of bubbly to celebrate! The award was a nice addition to the decor in his new office! Congrats Kipp, we are proud to have you on our team!

To read the original post announcing his award, click here.

Grades are something I thought I left behind on the stage at graduation last May. Not true, I recently found. Though they may not give out suma, magna and cum laude seals of prestige there are several Web sites that can help you gage your Twitter GPA.

Sites use various measurement methods and some give you a bigger ego boost than others. For example, on Twitter Grader I received a score of 93 out of 100 (a solid A in my book) but Klout told me I was a ‘casual’ user. No where near the ‘persona’ level I dream of where rocks stars like JasonFalls, gialyons and schneidermike hang out.

Either way it’s kind of fun to give yourself a checkup to see if you make the grade. Plus, you only have to show your parents if you want to.

Here are a few more to try out:

• Twinfluence
• Twitter Analyzer
• Twitalyzer
• Twitrank

Do you have any that you recommend?