DC’s Social Media Operatunity

Last night I had the chance to attend M&M’s Opera in the Outfield at Nationals Park in Washington DC. The Washington National Opera has put on a live opera broadcast for the past five years for free at the stadium. We were able to walk right in to the stadium and get a wonderful seat in left field. I was with my girlfriend and her family, who are all originally from the Virginia area. Her family has always tried to take advantage of what DC has to offer but had never been to this specific event.

Even though there were a lot of potential talking points concerning public relations, marketing, sports and technology, I wanted to look at the use of Twitter at the event.

Because this event was targeted towards an older and more family oriented crowd, I was not expecting anything relating to social media. I was, however, ready to see more in terms of the M&M brand.

When we first arrived, the Mars candy and M&M presence was felt. They had M&M characters running around and free prizes and giveaways for both adults and kids. This was not the most interesting thing about this event. What struck me was how the opera tried to push social media.

At the beginning of the show we were told about the #simulcast hash tag and connecting up and using the handle @dcopera. After learning about some of the professional uses of Twitter in class, I was excited to see how it went and ready to join in!

The night started off with a Tweet sent out by the opera company saying how excited they were to have all of us at the event. Using some of the tactics taught in class I jumped in on the conversation. For a few minutes people were posting tweets and pictures from the event until suddenly…nothing.

Over the four-hour period we were there, only about 50 tweets total were sent out total about the event using the hash tag #simulcast. I was not only disappointed because I didn’t get to use my new skills, but more confused as to why more people we not joining in.

This was my first true lesson in target audiences as I realized that most of the people at the show were not of the prime Twitter age. This attempt to use social media didn’t quite work.

Unfortunately for this missed audience, according to a new study about adults using the Internet, adults over 50 are 1/3 less likely to be depressed if they use social media.

I guess for the newer generations, social media can make us feel more connected to our peers and maybe even make us less depressed? As this becomes more socially acceptable and our generation becomes adults, maybe we will see more of us tweeting at events like the opera.

Regardless of how social media was used, it was a wonderful experience and a great opportunity to open up to new ideas.

What are your thoughts on older audiences using Twitter? Also do you think that live tweeting of events takes away from the experience (missing parts while typing) or enhances it?

Gaga for…

As a graduating senior I have been forced to think long and hard about my future and the job market. Questions have arisen…like who do I want to be when I “grow” up? What I am going to do? What job I even want?  That is why it is important to realize what situation the we are facing as college students and take advantage of that situation by looking into our futures.

With the current economic downturn and the growth of communication technology we have witnessed a dramatic change in the relationships of employers and their employee public. Not only in how bosses treat them, but what those bosses are doing to make employees stick around.

Companies looking to expand their businesses in this economy are forced to have positive interactions with their employees. Although the job market is not all like this, the harsh reality is that it is a cutthroat world out there.

As the communication technology becomes more advance, employees are able to move around and search for jobs at all times. This makes it extremely easy to find qualified workers, but more importantly, difficult for employers to keep the ones they have satisfied. An alarming fact was shown in class about organizations and their workers:

“2/3 of employees say they do not want or plan to be with their current employer in two years.” – Walker Information Study

Alarming stats like this show how apparent and important it is for management to use employee relations tactics. Not only are these tactics used to keep employees excited about their jobs, but also to convince them that staying at the company is the right choice.

Although many may not think of employee relations as an important part of the company strategy, CNN’s list of the top 100 companies tells us otherwise. When looking at that list, there is one common theme with all of those listed as top company’s to work for, they put their employees first.

In the case of CNN’s top ranked company to work for, Google, employee relations is just part of the job.

With it’s excellent creative freedom initiatives, maternity and paternity leave, excellent food and even better pay, Google is a place most would die to work for.

You hear a lot about how great of a company Google is but sometimes I try to stay away from that bandwagon. Honestly I didn’t believe what all of the hype was about surrounding Google until I saw the Travel Channel video about the company located below.

Most of us will never work for a company who has an internal communications plan quite like Google does, but for the time being we can all sit back and be jealous. In a quote from a Google employee it was said that “employees are never more than 150 feet away from a well-stocked pantry,” showing just how Google bends over backwards to make sure their employees are comfortable.

Is this internal communications a little overkill or just good business?

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Journey Into Digital Design

My journey into the realm of digital design has been an interesting one. Besides learning that it is extremely addicting, I have come to see how important branding is to a company. First lets do a little test…how many of these companies can you name after seeing just a single letter from their brand/logo:

How many did you guess correctly? My guess is at least ten.

Some of you may be surprised at the amount of brands that you know right off the bat. As this little exercise shows, branding and recognition go hand in hand. The right brand image, one that “sticks” – for one reason or another – can speak volumes.

To get some first-hand experience with the branding process, I’ve been trying my hand at working “behind the scenes,” designing logos with Adobe Illustrator and placing the good ones in logo design competitions on CrowdSpring. CrowdSpring, a “crowd-sourced” creative website, claims to be  “the world’s #1 marketplace for logos, graphic design and naming.”

The site hosts competitions for logos, print ads & package design, company naming, and even slogan creation. The best part…winning one of these competitions can put anywhere from $200 up to $2000 straight into your bank account. Sounds easy right?

Not so fast…the site has over 120,000 designers, or “creatives” as they so cleverly call them. The average job (contest) on CrowdSpring brings over 200 entries – some as high as 900 – and many are from professional designers & design grads, making winning even a single contest extremely hit or miss. I have come to find out that you may have the best logo in the world for a client, but it may not be what they are looking for.

The most frustrating part about this whole process is that 9 times out of 10 (in my estimation) the customer chooses the logo that they want and not the one they actually need for their branding. It’s a bit like filling out your NCAA March madness bracket by which team colors you like best. You might win every once and a while, but often you’re working blind, or at least without any data to back up your decision.

But it’s the same on the other side of the fence. As a “creative,” I am forced to design a logo for a company based on little or no feedback, let alone market/competitor research, face-to-face interviews, or surveying/polling/focus groups. This means you have a client that doesn’t really know what they need, and a whole slew of designers working on a hunch (at best) to give them what they think they want. It’s worth thinking a bit about how this crowd-sourced design process might change the industry…and whether that change will ultimately be positive or negative.

Here are some of my latest mock up logos entered on Crowdspring:

 

Sometimes Wrapping it Up is a Good Idea

As some of you may already know, roughly 2,000 Ohio State students living on campus were sent to sleep at the RPAC for the past couple of nights. No, this wasn’t a Student Life-led Guinness Book of World Records attempt for largest student sleepover – it was the worst flood the university has seen in some 30 years.

So why, you may ask, does this flood concern you?

When you are in the PR profession, you are under the microscope. Or, maybe more correctly, you’re trying to re-focus the microscope. You are the one cleaning up after the boss’s questionable comment to the media, you are the voice of your company and you are the one who has to make sure the right people are in charge of your social media strategies. When those social media assets are in the wrong hands, disaster is only a tweet away.

This is exactly what happened in the case of the OSU Student Wellness Center.

Using the Twitter handle @OSUwellness, the Student Wellness Center attempted to reach out to the students staying at RPAC and “encourage healthy sexual choices.”  What followed was this series of questionable tweets:

Although I understand the idea of tailoring your messages to your audience – there is a fine line between being funny and being inappropriate. If this had been student tweeting these on his or her own Twitter page, I could see how these might be funny. For a university office, however, there is public opinion and common-sense professionalism at stake.

Because of digital media, PR practitioners are now under extreme pressure to monitor not only the company’s communication, but the comments, posts, tweets, and likes of every single employee and partner. In the click of the mouse a message can be sent out to thousands of followers. As far as OSU Student Wellness’ recent “tweet-gate” went, we can see that not everyone always is on the same page.

The best part of all of this was the response to the tweets by @OSUwellness:

All of the communications must go through PR professionals? Twitter is one of the most popular communications methods out there. A tip for the future…if you have PR professionals…USE THEM!

Blog Comments

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type of post

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Sept 19

Tonybenedetti13

Comment #1

An interesting look at the marketing strategy of the infamous McRib! I found a pretty insightful article detailing the entire marketing strategy of the McRib that can be found below. It gives some information about the marketing strategies of McDonalds covering more than this years McRib shenanigans.

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Sept 25

Sam Duff: Comm-elier

Comment #2

I originally heard about this campaign through another Comm class at OSU but I remember loving the idea of the simple message being the most powerful! Sometimes organizations like the CDC can try and be clever or funny and actually hurt themselves. In this case, they increased awareness of their brand and definitely got their name out there! Great post and great use of links!

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Sep 30

Nice post! Interesting that as the technological communication changes…so does the marketing strategies! What is the most interesting to me is that it costs them no money at all to put out these “ads.”

The other cool thing is that the amount of people these ads reach. The amount of people on social networks and the ability to share something in a click of the mouse is making it so much easier to reach an audience. Whether or not it is using your customers to do your ads for you or not — the truth is that has been happening for years (t-shirts, flyers, magazines, ect).

Comment #3 

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September 30

Thanks for this post! I really like your examples of bloggers! Cool to look at the differences in styles and formats.

What is extremely interesting to me is that I have read so many articles on news sites and then commented, thinking they were just news articles. What I have come to realize is that most of these are just blogs that get posted on news sites. I think that journalism is taking a turn towards blogs and i think that it is an interesting development.

Do you think that commenting helps or hurts the industry? The one thing that I question is the lack of evidence to back up the arguments. Anyone can comment…but the people writing the blogs for news orgs have to have the facts.

http://talkinthetalk.wordpress.com

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Nov 14

Evan…great post! I really enjoyed your ideas about psychology and our major. I think that it is interesting that if people are not interested in commercials and do not look for these behind the scene ideas.

It is also funny you talk about low budget local ads because I also cannot stand them. It has become acceptable to put out ridiculous ads that go so over the top they leave you asking “what just happened?” Whether or not this is psychological, I don’t know. I do think you are spot on with the Ray Lewis example. Those commercials are definitely psychological and an interesting look at celebrities in ads. I find myself agreeing with ideas and seeking out products that are endorsed by celebrities just because I think they are trustworthy. They wouldn’t be advertising if the product wasn’t awesome…right?

I think of how professional athletes do ads for McDonalds and Coke…I wonder how many of them actually buy those goods.

Psychology of Marketing

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Nov 18

Wow. I had no idea that Arkansas did this. Pretty cool use of pop culture and media trends by the Razorbacks. I don’t think that a player will ever have a hashtag on the back of their jersey but I do have to say that I would have never expected a team to do this either. I could definitely see more schools jumping on this bandwagon however. It is an easy way for the college and professional teams to get their brand out into the mainstream media even more.

The interesting thing I find is that Twitter is so much less complicated than Facebook. I remember when I had my first Twitter and no one thought it would take off. People loved Facebook for the pictures and the posts…now it seems that the only people we want on our Facebook pages are our close family and friends. Twitter is simple. easy. and effective. Twitter wins.

Twitter Taking Over!

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Nov 18

I agree! Bring on the change. Wendy’s, in my opinion, has done something awesome here. After that long of a logo…I think it was time for some change. Although I am not the biggest fan of their new logo, I think that it should momentarily provide the company with some press (positive or negative). I read somewhere that the sales from the stores that had done the logo change have gone up 25%. Maybe the new look has brought a breath of fresh air to the Wendy’s workers? I think it will be interesting to see how the perception of Wendy’s brand will/has changed after this new look. I also think it will be of interest to track whether or not Wendy’s can sustain the 25% sale increase or it is just a short time deal. Cool post and interesting news that I hadn’t heard about until I read your blog!

Wendy’s: Biting off more than they can chew?

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Nov 18

Great post Logan. I too find this subject very interesting…because I don’t think anyone really knows what will happen. I like the idea of our generation not wanting to be advertised to because in reality, we are always being advertised to. I also think we are to the point that for an ad to be effective, it needs to wow us. If it doesn’t wow us, we aren’t interested. Which makes me think we like be advertised to up to a certain level. I don’t know if anything is cool enough to really take Twitter off the map though….We all want to be a part of something while still being unique…who knows what the future holds.

Killing it.

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Nov 19

Stephanie, good post! I think it is interesting that although print may not be dead…it is slowly dying. I do not think there will ever be a time when print is completely dead, but we are getting close. I think the more boring our print has become, the more neccessary it has become to bring something creative to the table. I like the idea of stylish brochures and I think that is one way to break through the clutter of every day print nonsense. I feel like the same thing is true with the internet, if you aren’t special or unique, you aren’t anything. I think it would be interesting to see how long some of these brochures took to put together!

http://stephaniecichy.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/will-brochures-make-the-cut/comment-page-1/#comment-10
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Nov 19

Thanks for the post Patrick! I had a similar experience with Tweet chats. I feel like it is a love-hate relationship that I am unsure will ever change. There is something about being outside of a conversation and trying to put in or take out valuable information…it just doesn’t seem to work. I think that whether you are in person or online we should all put down our phones and listen.

A Different Way to Chat

In the beginning.

Hi, I’m Chaz. I am a fourth year studying strategic communications and linguistics. Welcome to my blog about my current adventures in communications. Let me start off with saying that I am decently new to the major and have a limited background in communications. I worked for a company this summer doing press releases and research for their website and client projects. Although I enjoyed this, the most interesting thing about me lately has been my freelance work in graphic design. The best part of this is that I have no background in graphic design but it looked fun and I figured why not! I have really enjoyed working along side my brother to complete client projects (even though sometimes it seems like we have no idea what we are doing…because sometimes we actually don’t). I am looking towards a future career in marketing or some aspect of design. I was originally lured to communications by some of the wonderful campaigns I had seen companies carry out. It is an interesting idea to me that a single person, or group of people, can stimulate significant change for a client. This change can be transformed from what the client received, into direct consumer satisfaction. Hopefully I will be able to share some of the many frustrating, confusing and exhilarating parts of my journey into the life of communications.