Traditional views and Social Media

Traditional media outlets seem be strung out across a range of emotion towards social media. Our traditional friends may want to thumb through an AA 12-steps-to-acceptance pamphlet next time they go to CVS, because social media is here to stay.

one: Admit we are powerless over the rise of social media- our professional fields have changed

two: Power greater that ourselves lies within social media, that can be harnessed for good

three: Stop turning a blind eye social media, and come to terms with the changing times of all       media outlets.

four: Make a searching and fearless inventory of social media sites and their potential as it pertains to us.

five: Admit to ourselves and our professional counterparts our previous wrong in verbalizing scathing and offensive thoughts towards social media in a vain effort to change the unchangeable.

six: Ready ourselves to take the plunge into mixing tradition with the abyss of social media

seven: Hunbly remove all bitter emotions and prejudgment towards online networking

eight: list all opportunites we have lost in our stupor of close-mindedness

nine: make efforts to uptake all opportunites that were lost do to reasons described on the previous step.

ten: continue to make steps to remove the bitterness and hostility that has inevidably cemented up into a wall of disdain towards social media and its users

eleven: sought through research and trail to improve our outreach through understanding social media. We understand this will give us power to carry our messages to the masses

twelve: Having been awakened from our slumber of ill-mindedness, we try to carry our message of glad tidings to all media experts who are hiding from the truth.

Now that we've excepted that the rise of social media has finally caught up with traditional views of marketing and business; we can move past of fragile, scared state and be welcomed into the world of media relations.
Clearly,  now more than ever, social media is working to redefine business and politics. In Liberal Democrats' View: It Was Traditional Media That Did It by Mark Pack, liberal representative's social media sites were monitored during a British political debate. After the debate finished, the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg's facebook following had risen percent, while his Twitter following rose 23 percent.
This information gave voice to the face that social media is not just for twenty-somethings posting pictures of themselves in the mirror anymore. Social Media is a real time representation of what is happening in our world. Twitter has supplied an opportunity for politicians to communicate their position with a mass audience.

My Events

In the Business of Blogging

In an article published in Bloomberg Businessweek in 2005, Stephen Baker and Heather Green delved into a new crazy sweeping the internet:

Blogging.

In 2005, when "Twittering was an activity dominated by small birds" and "Facebook was still an Ivy League sensation", this article was one of the first to address the potential of blogging; the opportunity for consumers to write in cyber stone what they think about you, your brand, your business. The writers realized that this communication outlet was a springboard to things to come. With 9 million blogs out there and a some 40,000 new ones published every day, blogs were and continue to be a force to be reconed with. Businessweek used online article as a wake up call to white collar Americans that blogs and online forums are not something to be ignored, but something to be utilized and appreciated.
The article dove into the gossip-y, scandal train stigma that blogging and online messaging was seen as.

The overwhelming majority of the information the world spews out every day is digital—photos from camera phones, PowerPoint presentations, government filings, billions and billions of e-mails, even digital phone messages. With a couple of clicks, every one of these items can be broadcast into the blogosphere by anyone with an Internet hookup—or even a cell phone. If it's scandalous, a poisonous e-mail from a CEO, for example, or torture pictures from a prison camp, others link to it in a flash. And here's the killer: Blog posts linger on the Web forever.

BUT

Ideas circulate as fast as scandal.

Potential customers are out there, sniffing around for deals and partners. While you may be putting it off, you can bet that your competitors are exploring ways to harvest new ideas from blogs, sprinkle ads into them, and yes, find out what you and other competitors are up to.

Something interesting happened with this particular 2005 article. Bloggers linked to the article, creating traffic from business men to blogs and vice versa. It became somewhat of a middle ground between the tech savvy and the stiff-fingered CEO's.

Read the UPDATED article at http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/feb2008/db20080219_908252.htm

Social Media: The Big Seven

Twitter has proven that one-hundred and forty characters and a user base of 200 million can put you on the map. Real time communication has affected nearly every professional field. Marketing in particular has been reshaped by the ability to communicate with an entities’ audience directly and immediately. The doors of privacy and silence have been ripped from their hinges and the user-friendly welcome wagon bearing tweets and freebies has strolled in. Companies and individuals are now expected to communicate in Twitter real time. TechCrunch recently reported that there are now 200 Million tweets a day, up from 65 million a day a year ago. Clearly, Twitter has proven itself as a force to be reckoned with.

13 Mind-Bending Social Media Marketing Statistics by Kipp Bodnar gives mildly creepy statistics on just how quickly social media is becoming mainstream communication.
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/23865/13-Mind-Bending-Social-Media-Marketing-Statistics.aspx

The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of information being sent out into cyber-everywhere is noise. Sorry Kris Jenner/Kardashian, but I don’t want to read in awful shrt hnd (short hand for short hand) how excited you are to eat at some restaurant you’re shamelessly endorsing. To make it in social media, you need something to say and an audience that wants to hear it.
   Maybe I Should Shut Up: How to be Heard on Twitter by Andi Putra at http://www.webmarketerdepot.com/maybe-i-should-shut-up-how-to-be-heard-in-twitter/
 addresses the basic Twitter ettiquette that can translate into loyal followers and less unfollowings due to garbage thrown from your account onto the general public. Be kind, recycle, have something of importance to say. In a social media world where everyone has soapbox, you need a strategy to get your voice heard by the people you want to hear it.

Twitter has given us the opportunity to build a relationship with the people and forces that share our interests. Positive relationships can build our reputations and provide chances for success, while negative relationships can burn bridges and stiffle opportunities.

What are you planning to do with... That?

       As a soon-to-be junior in college, I find myself a constant recipiant of the repeatative, mildly-uncomfortable slew of questions reguarding my field of study . The asker of the mildly-uncomfortable inquisition (usually an aquaintance whose last name and existance I had forgotten some time prior) begins by asking the knee-jerk "So, are you in school?". After the polite assurity that I am, indeed, furthering my education and planning to aid society, "Are you in school?" is followed, without fail by: "What are you studying?"

"Public Relations".


When you Google Image search public relations, you get this:

?

and this

...?

In the cases of those who don't Google Image everything (as I have a tendancy to do), and who watch E! as I most defintely do; public relations most likely brings the following image to mind:

*Picture aquired via Google Images

It is no wonder, really, why I am met with blank stares and looks reflecting mild-to-moderate judgement towards my area of study.

I would like to take a minute to recognize a few responses to the mildly-uncomfortable questions we've covered thus far. These responses not only developed some personal reservations about working in the relations field, they hightened my suspicions that people are generally not intelligent.

In no particular order:

Me: "I'm studying public relations."
MUQA (mildly uncomfortable question asker): My friend Debbie* got her wedding planning lisence in like, a month online. I'll give you her number, you could save a lot in tuition.

Me: "Public relations".
MUQA: "What?"

Me: "I'm in PR."
MUQA: "Oh wow. Do you ever worry about getting AIDS? I could never work with blood!"



I understand that not everyone has a negative (or non-existant) understanding of PR. Most people have heard of the field though few are familiar with all that it includes. Those few who are familiar with public relations have a hard time explaining what we do to small-talk Joe Schmoe. There are countless applications of my intended degree. After many tounge-tied attempts to explain what public relations is, I have drawn up my definition:

PR professions have one hand directing traffic in an organization, and the other on the ground feeling for earthquakes that could damage their client.  Public relations deals with communication between groups. More often than not, public relations professionals are the liaisons of communication between their client, whether that be a person or organization, and the groups that benefit them. Networking, image, event planning and use of media all play into the job description.


S. H. Simmons provides my favorite definition:
“If a young man tells his date how handsome, smart and successful he is — that’s advertising. If the young man tells his date she’s intelligent, looks lovely, and is a great conversationalist, he’s saying the right things to the right person and that’s marketing. If someone else tells the young woman how handsome, smart and successful her date is – that’s PR.”  


      Even the most simplistic definition is not very simple.

Defining pr is child's play compared to explaining to MUQA what I plan to do with my misunderstood degree. This brings us to the climax of the mildly-uncomfortable slew of questions"

"So... what do you plan on doing with that?"

My two remaining years of college are ticking away like a time bomb, counting down to my impending doom of being tossed into the real world. Don't get me wrong, I have big dreams for myself. The problem is, I have too many big dreams for my future. In perfect land, answering the pinacle awkward question would sound something like this-

"The public relations field is exraordinarily broad. I've always been interested in working with large corporations, but my recent employment with a non-profit group has opened my eyes to a whole different aspect of the field."

 That girl has her act together, right? Her plan of attack is not yet etched in stone; but she has vision, dammit!

Real-life me sounds more unfortunately like this:

"I don't know, um, school is really fun but work sounds good too. I, um, want an internship in New York. Doing PR. I like doing non-profit, plus I'm good at planning events.. yeah, I don't know."

Ugh. That was rather confusing, you may as well have Google imaged 'public relations'.

The truth is I don't have a post-graduation master plan. I love so many aspects of PR, it is an absolute necessity to explore as many jobs in communications that I can.




*Name changed to avoid uncomfortable follow-up texts