PR in Action

This is an example of PR in action. This is an event that was held on the GCSU campus by the Zeta Tau Alpha sorority. The event is called War of the Wings and supports the sororities philanthropy of breast cancer awareness and education.

For PR they put up flyers, sent out letter, made a facebook group, and even advertised the event with the shirts they were wearing.

In order to prepare for the event they had to contact each restaurant and see if each place would come and donate there time and wings. They had to contact places like piggly wiggly for paper plates, cups, paper towels, and ranch dressing.

A Night with the Stars

As everyone entered Centennial center on a red carpet lined with a hall of fame of past GCSU athletes they were greeted under a balloon arch and presented with an auction number. When entering the gym you were back in the time of old Hollywood. A huge movie scene of King Kong was created. You could even take your pictures with it like my class is doing above. You heard the beautiful voices of two Milledgeville Idol contestants, including the winner, adding a feeling of being on an actual movie set. The tables were set with center pieces that we all created, of movie reels with pictures of different athletic teams on them. There were mini Oscars, team pictures, and some tables had swag bags full of popcorn, movie frames, sunglasses, candles, candy, and GCSU athletic wear. There were auction tables set up all around the edges guided by light post and large posters advertising each team apart of our athletic department.

I believe that the auction went fantastically. My PR class has been working on this auction for the whole semester and it is finally over. We all had a great time and helped the athletic department raise money.

I think that the strengths were firstly that our class is extremely close. We were able to work together very well and were not afraid to express our ideas. We are able to bounce ideas off of each other in order to create something amazing.

I believe that the weakness of the auction were things that my class was unable to control. Our dining hall always provided the food, and this year, for some reason, the food was not that great and people did not enjoy it to much. Also, when I asked one of my professors who attended the event what she thought, she said that everything that our class had control over was amazing; however, she thought that along with the bad food, the auction items were not as good as they usually were and that if the items were better then she would have bid on more things.

Doing the athletic auction was a great opportunity. I would love to plan events for a living and loved getting the experience of actually getting to be hands on and getting to see all sides of event planning.

I do not believe that there were any threats towards the class not finishing our goal. We had a plan and a schedule and we all worked to make sure that what Brittany, Shannon, and Zach thought of came to reality.

Being apart of the athletic auction was a great experience. It may have been stressful at some points, but was all over an amazing experience that I would definitely do again.

Mean In Green

The end of last semester my PR class started to work with the basketball teams to help promote the games.
The first home game we coined the phase "Mean in Green" and decided to use it for the whole season. The first game we planned together as a class and it seemed to be a great success. When this semester started in January we each were responsible for a basketball double header game. It was up to us to create a theme and publicize the event. For my game I partnered with Zeta Phi Beta and the Creekside Flippers.
Zeta Phi Beta is a sorority on the GCSU campus who wanted to use a game to help support their philanthropy. My contact was a girl in the sorority named Natalie. Their philanthropy is the March of Dimes Foundation so we decided to make the theme of the game "Come to the Game and Bring Some Change". Zeta Phi Beta brought large baby bottle piggy banks for everyone to put change in to go towards March of Dimes and they also raffled off different prizes throughout the game.
During the half-time of the girls game the Creekside Flippers performed. Creekside is a local elementary school in Milledgeville and the Flippers is an after school program with the elementary school where they learn to flip and tumble. My contact was Donnie Coburn who is in charge of the Creekside Flippers. A lot of people came to support the elementary school children flip across the court. They were extremely cute and so much fun to watch.
During the half-time of the men's game the GCSU dance team, the Sassy Cats, performed their 9th place nationals routine and wowed the crowd.
This seems like it was all so easy, but I did encounter difficult situations along the way. Working with Zeta Phi Beta went really well, they knew exactly what they wanted from the game and what they wanted to do. It was easy to create a flyer for them and they decided that they wanted to hand them out around the campus. However, I did make one mistake I forgot to put the "Mean in Green" logo on the flyer.
The next problem I has was getting in contact with Donnie from the Creekside Flippers we seemed to have some communication problems, but in the end they showed up an performed great.
Because of the difficultly I had trying to get in touch with Donnie, I did not have my press release done in time, which was a big mistake and I still feel awful about it. I did get it done, however, and it went up on the GCSU athletics cite.
Another challenge that my whole class faced was dealing with the Thunder Crew. At GCSU we have a spirit group called the Thunder Crew. They come to all the game, sit in the front row, and head up the student section. While athletics had come to our PR class asking for our help it seemed that everything we did the Thunder Crew would do the opposite. We would create a facebook page for the event and then they would create another with different information. Same goes for flyers, posters, and support. The girls basketball team always has less people at them then the men's game does, and one of our goals was to get more people out to the girls game. The Thunder Crew only seemed to support the men's game and that is what they advertised. The Thunder Crew and our PR class seemed to always clash with multiple messages going out into the Milledgeville community.
With these challenges, however, came the best takeaway learning experience. I learned that it's hard working with other people who don't necessarily work the same way as I do. You must be patient, be able to compromise, and most importantly be flexible.
Even thought we encountered these difficulties of working with the Thunder Crew I would say that the "Mean in Green" season was a success.
I believe that all of the games we provided PR for were a success. For each game I think that success is based differently. For my game success came to me in three different ways. The first was with Zeta Phi Beta. They raised a lot of money for the March of Dimes foundation and thanked me for letting them have the opportunity to use a game to get their message out there. To this day I am still friends with Natalie. The next form of success was with the Creekside Flippers. At first it seemed very stressful, but when they went on the court during the women's half-time they did an amazing job. They had family and friends come and support them, which brought more local Milledgeville community members out to watch the game. It has been hard to get community members to come and support our athletics by coming to the basketball games, but that night they came out. The third reason that I feel that my game was a success was the crowd. I felt that there were more people at the women's game then there usually is and I felt that more people were at the game.
Throughout the season, I believe, that more and more people showed up to more and more games. I believe that our PR made a great deal of a difference and that the fans who came to the games made a winning difference to our bobcat basketball players.
If I had to do one thing over again it would be to take my time more with the flyers to make them truly great. I would not have left out our "Mean in Green" logo if I did not rush and took more time with them. If I had to grade myself I would give myself a B. I think this because I did not do everything as great as I could have done it.
In order to keep "Mean in Green" going I think that the phase needs to stay so the college knows that when it's "Mean in Green" time...it's GAME TIME. Also, in order to keep it going I think that we need to coordinate with the Thunder Crew more efficiently and work together. I think that if we keep the phase going more and more people will start to recognize it and start coming to the games.
In general I think that "Mean in Green" was a success. Our class really learned to work together with this project and became very close. This was an amazing learning experience for us and I had a lot of fun!

PR for Panama City Beach Spring Break

This past week I celebrated spring break in Panama City Beach. While there I started to think what makes people, especially college students, want to go there for spring break. When I was younger Panama City Beach (PCB) was thought the be a "trashy" area and the only reason one would go there would be to PARTY. It was Destin that was known as the more family friendly beach.
However, in more recent years PCB has started to clean up their image; for years they hosted MTV's spring break, but this year they did not invite MTV back. They have also built a new beautiful pier full of shopping and restaurants and have more family friendly attractions. While looking through different cites for PCB PR, it looks as though they have cleaned up their image and have truly become more family friendly.
Reading press releases, looking at advertisements and going to different marketing cites I have noticed that PCB has not truly changed its image after being there. The beaches were full of college students playing beer pong, funneling beer, and taking shots. While PCB did not invite MTV back they did host BET spring break. In PCB I did see a few families, but everywhere that there were families there were a lot more drunk or crazy college students. Even at a miniature golf course high school students and college students were drunk and acting inappropriately.
This got me thinking...Can good PR change the image of PCB?
I think that it can, but will good PR has to come changes as well. I believe that the advertisements for families and opening new family attractions and a beautiful new pier are defiantly improvements. If they want more families to start coming and enjoy their stay they need to keep the good PR; however PCB also needs to take some action. Putting out a press release is just the first step there must be follow through and there must be changes.
They should keep some areas of PCB just for families and use PR to advertise those areas more. I do not know if the stigma that PCB has as a place for college spring break partying will ever change, but if PCB wants to make its place more friendly to more then just college students partying they will need to actually put more action into there PR plans.

"The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell

"The Tipping Point" is a book about epidemics and how they get that way. There are five ways for an epidemic to tip: word of month, the stickiness factor, the law of the few, the power of context, and the innovators and early adopters.
Word of mouth is a "multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns" and is the "most important form of human communication. In "The Tipping Point" the most prominent example about Paul Revere's midnight ride with the epidemic phase of "the British are coming!" In order for word of mouth to start an epidemic the person communicating the message is important. If a person of no importance ran around and said "the British are coming" many people might not believe him, such as William Dawes who also rode the midnight toward Lexington. Even though Dawes communicated the same urgent message, it did not alert local militia leaders. This is because Revere was the more prominent person to believe.
The next part of how epidemics tip is the stickiness factor. The stickiness factor is how does the epidemic stick, or what causes people to keep doing something. The most prominent example in "The Tipping Point" is the idea of Sesame Street. In order for something to have stickiness it must have ideas that are to be memorable and move us to action. This is what Sesame Street did. Children were not just watching television, but they were also learning. The creators of the show "discovered that by making small but critical adjustments in how they presented ideas to preschoolers, they could overcome television's weakness as a teaching tool and make what they had to say memorable." This is the idea of the stickiness factor, to make something memorable that we keep coming back to it.
The next way to make an epidemic tip is the law of the few. The law of the few is how a message travels through a population. The main idea that came from this is six degrees of separation. This means that most people are connected through others by a difference of six people. However, the law of the few states that the "one critical factor in epidemics is the nature of the message." Messengers are what make the message spread, such as Paul Revere could make the message of "the British are coming" stick better than William Dawes could. Another example of the importance of the message was the advertising campaign for Columbia. Columbia had a man named Wunderman who was in charge of the print ads, but they wanted to bring in someone different for the television ads. Wunderman did not like the idea of this and basically asked for Columbia to give him a chance. So Wunderman and the new competition, McCann, each made television ads for Columbia. In any other circumstance, McCann should have won, but Wunderman ended up winning. Wunderman's success was due to his tactic of a "treasure hunt". Since Wunderman was in charge of the print advertising he was able to put little golden treasure chest in every TV Guide and Parade ad. Then, in the commercial he told the audience that if they could find the gold treasure box that they could write in the name of any record on the Columbia list and get that record for free. In this case more people were interested in Wunderman's message than McCann's.
The next way to make an epidemic tip is called the power of context. This means that epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur. "And the kinds of contextual changes that are capable of tipping an epidemic are very difference than we might ordinarily suspect. The prominent example for the power of context was the violence in the New York subway system. The walls and subways were covered in graffiti and violence was at an all time high. Then a decade later when New York decided to clean up the walls and trains the epidemic tipped and violence is now seemed as unusual in the New York subways.These are examples of environmental tipping points, which are the things that we can change, we can clean up the graffiti on the New York subways for example. Another part to power of context is the idea of groups. You have to understand the purpose of the group in order for the power of context to work.
The last way to make an epidemic tip is the innovators and early adopters. These people want change, something that sets them apart from everyone else, and will take enormous risks.

For the GCSU Athletic Auction our tipping point will be where the unexpected becomes the expected. Since the auction happens every year we need to think as innovators and early adopters, we need to think of ideas that the groups before us have never done. Our message is clear this is an auction where all the proceeds will go to the Athletic program at GCSU. Our theme is "A Night with the Stars of GCSU Bobcats". When everyone comes into the gym, hopefully they won't see a gym, but they will be sent back to old Hollywood, where the athletes are the stars. We also need to concentrate on what we do best. Each person should use there talents to create something unexpected. For example, Zach and Ben are great with computers and graphic design, Brittni is a great writer, the rest of use are great creatively, which means that we can see what we want it to look like and make it a reality. We need to learn to take a small budget and make it look like a million dollars. Also, we need to learn our group, the people who are coming all have one common interest and that is there support for GCSU athletics. If we remember what they are here for then we can use the power of context to keep the group happy and wanting to come back again next year.

In my life I would think that I am in the stage of innovators and early adopters. I am still in college and have the whole world open to me. I still think that I can change the world and think that I can take extreme risks without harm. I know that this may seem naive of me, but I do believe that just one person can change the world, but not just anyone can, you must be able to risk putting yourself out there and stay strong in your beliefs.

PR Real World

PR Real World was hostessed by the Georgia Chapter of PRSA for students evolved in PRSSA. This was an opportunity to meet professionals in the PR field, found out what they do for a living, network, get internships, and future job opportunities. The morning started out with breakfast and getting to meet people involved in different chapters of PRSSA from Georgia and other states. There were four breakout sessions each with 3 to 4 seminars you could choose to attend.

The first session I went to was Social Media's Place in PR. I found this the most beneficial seminar that I attended. The reason for this is that PR is becoming so much more then just press releases and events; it's becoming more about how you work different social media's such as facebook, twitter, etc. There were three people who lead the session: Ashley Payne from the Georgia Aquarium, Stephen Brown from MS&L Worldwide, and Nick Ayres from The Home Depot. They helped us to understand the importance of social media in today's PR world and how to make older professionals who did not necessarily grow up with facebook and twitter to understand why it may be important. The most important thing to remember about social media in PR is that you still need to remember ALL ways of PR. We go to the audience, we do not make them come to us; for example the older generation may not know how to use facebook or twitter and then there are some people who always want that newspaper in there hand, so we use all of our PR skills. I really enjoyed the seminar on social media and could have spent the day talking to the professionals, learning how they use the social media, and getting good advice.

I also went to seminars on Health care, Nonprofit, and Government, Celebrity PR, Resume critique session, and Sports PR. After the resume session we were able to meet people from PR agencies, corporations, etc. We were able to apply for internships or even jobs. PR Real World was an amazing experience and I can not wait to attend again next year for PR Real World 2011.

First PR Pitch

Our PR class was assigned to come up with a pitch for our schools athletic auction. We were divided into three groups of three. My team consisted of Lauren, Angela, and me. We considered many ideas before coming up with "Fishing for Bobcat Success!" For the pitch we created an invitation, program, dinner ticket, budget sheet, floor plan, two different center pieces, and decorations. We worked for weeks making sure we had everything perfect. When it came time to present our team was picked to go first. We were not allowed to talk about our ideas with our teacher, classmates, or any of the athletics staff. I was so nervous when it came time for us to present; however, I was glad to go ahead and present because I was so excited about our idea. We came prepared with folders for everyone with all of our information and ideas in the packet. We explained everything, including borrowing a boat from the GCSU fishing team to put in the gym. When we were finished presenting no one had questions for us, which made me both nervous and excited. I was nervous because maybe they hated the idea and did not want to know any more about "Fishing for Bobcat Success" and I was also excited because maybe it was that we explained it so well that they really didn't have any questions for us. After the other two groups went I became extremely nervous. There was a Hollywood idea with the "Stars of GCSU Athletics" and then there was a Hawaiian theme, "Tropic Thunder". All the ideas were great, but I could not help hoping that our team would win. It turns out that our team did not win, and to me it seemed like my first PR pitch was a failure. However, I am very excited for my classmates who won with "The Stars of GCSU Athletics" and I can not wait to help them make their ideas into reality with the Athletic Auction coming up in April. I have learned a lot about how to present a PR pitch and even though I was disappointed to not have won, I am so very thankful for the learning experience that came with the ability to have Athletics want us to put on the Athletic Auction this year.