Valerie Simon
Tomorrow, November 18, at 9pm eastern, my BurrellesLuce colleague, Debbie Friez, will be joining the #PRStudChat (PR Student Chat) community on Twitter as part of a special panel of experts who will be discussing events for professionals. Whether she is attending events on behalf of BurrellesLuce or helping to lead them as President of Washington Women in PR (WWPR), Debbie has an innate understanding of how to maximize the value of an event.
Debbie notes that social media offers many opportunities to create awareness and generate enthusiasm for events. “With 
WWPR, we try to post information and teasers on the event across many social media platforms, like Facebook fan pages, Facebook events, LinkedIn groups, LinkedIn events, and Twitter,” she shares. “If the speaker(s) have a Twitter handle, we like to promote it and our hashtag #WWPR. And, we encourage live tweeting from the event. We have found several free calendars on the Internet, which we use to promote our events.”
For students, and seasoned media relations and marketing professionals, alike, Debbie offers valuable advice — “In Washington, DC, networking is big, but not always taught in school.” She suggests that attendees looking to maximize learning and relationship building at events:
- Make a goal to meet X number of people at each event you attend. And, try to spend only two to five minutes talking to a new person before you move on to meet more new people.
- You should always carry business cards, even if you are in school, to help people remember you. After the event, send them a personal note and invite them to connect with you on LinkedIn or other social media.”
Have you found industry events to be an effective means of building new business relationships? What best practices would you recommend? What challenges have you encountered? Please share your thoughts with me and the readers of Fresh Ideas.
I hope you’ll join Debbie (dfriez) and I (ValerieSimon) Thursday evening for what is certain to be a dynamic conversation that helps bridge the gap between academia and the public relations profession. If you are new to Twitter chats, be sure and download Using Twitter Chat for PR Success available for free in the BurrellesLuce Resource Library.
Big Media, Mass Media, New Media – Oh My!
Friday, September 10th, 2010A few days ago, I read NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen’s inaugural lecture to the fresh crop of future journalists at Sciences Pos School of Journalism in Paris. I’m not going to recap the historically rich (and lengthy) address, but will borrow a piece or two for the purpose of discussion here. (Note: his post can be found here if you’d like to read it in its entirety.) This address was directed to future journalists, but I think public relations practitioners that deal in media relations, can learn from it just as well.
Rosen began with a clip from the 1976 movie Network, which is about a TV news anchor who begins to act out on the air. I realize this was before many of you were born, but please take a few minutes to watch what is probably the most well-known scene in the film.
Rosen believes the filmmakers are “showing us what the mass audience was: a particular way of arranging and connecting people in space. Viewers are connected ‘up’ to the big spectacle, but they are disconnected from one another.” He explains, “But Howard Beale does what no television person ever does: he uses television to tell its viewers to stop watching television. When they disconnect from TV and go to their windows, they are turning away from Big Media and turning toward one another. And as their shouts echo across an empty public square they discover just how many other people had been ‘out there,’ watching television” – concurrently yet disconnectedly.
I agree with Rosen’s belief that this clip clearly demonstrates the great event we are living through today: the breakup of the mass audience and the shift in power that goes with it. What if today’s TV personality acted like Howard Beale? Rosen answers: “Immediately people who happened to be watching would alert their followers on Twitter. Someone would post a clip the same day on YouTube. The social networks would light up before the incident was over. Bloggers would be commenting on it well before professional critics had their chance.”
Cases of where citizens beat journalists to the punch are numerous but a few off the top of my head are: the Mumbai attacks, the Hudson River plane landing, or more recently the Discovery Channel hostage situation.
Rosen goes on to explain, “The media world today is a shifted space. People are connected horizontally to one another as effectively as they are connected up to Big Media; and they have the powers of production in their hands.”
The digital revolution changes the equation, according to Rosen. “It brings forward a new balance of forces, putting the tools of production and the powers of distribution in the hands of the people…”.
From my media relations standpoint, this means the days of blasting out a press release to every big (or small) media outlet are rapidly coming to an end. NO, I’m not saying big media is dead, nor is the press release (sheez, don’t get me started!)
What I am saying is that PR agencies, public relations practitioners, branding/marketing folks, small business owners, etc. now, more than ever, have additional opportunities to reach out to their publics in multiple ways – connecting with their individual audience(s) – and each other wherever they hang out. Big media and small media alike are still very much part of that equation, but now there are even more possibilities.
That’s my takeaway from Rosen’s speech and the clip. What is yours?
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