Check Me Out

For our social media class we have had to various projects throughout the semester. The biggest one was maintaining this blog, and this is my last mandatory post. While I won’t be required to post anymore and there won’t be topics that I’m supposed to blog about, I’m going to keep this thing going. I think it will be interesting to see how much I blog about and what I blog about when it’s not required. But I digress.

The various projects we’ve had to do were a podcast, a promotional video and most recently, a personal brand website. Now I will say I was not thrilled about doing this site. The website that I used to create me site, Wix, is not very user friendly, and it takes a little bit of getting used to when editing content. But I will say that I’m pretty proud of what I did. It’s not super flashy, it’s clean and clear cut and gets the message across.

So check out my site here and if you want to let me know what you think, go for it!

So long for now,

Jake

The Pope's on Twitter

I’ve mentioned before that social media is literally everywhere, and I recently discovered that everywhere now includes Vatican City. Yes, that’s correct, the pope has a Twitter.

The pope? Really? Now, I’m Catholic and I’ve no qualms with the pope, but what why on earth does His Holiness need a Twitter for?

I checked out his profile and was just as surprised at what I saw then as when I found out he had a Twitter account. After being on Twitter for less than a week @Pontifex has 598,132 followers, is following only seven people and has zero tweets.

After doing a little research I discovered that the pope will only follow himself (the seven followees are the same account is seven different languages), and he will start tweeting on December 12, 2012. Also he will be tweeting mostly on spiritual matters, has if there was any question as to what he would post.

Now, I’m all for the mass spread of social media, but I’m not completely set on the leader of my faith being on Twitter. I’m not exactly sure what the reason was for the pope to enter the Twittersphere, but I’m sure we’ll see how this goes.

This should be interesting,

Jake

Trust Him, He's a Dr.

Earlier today our PRSSA chapter sponsored a media training day with the one and only Dr. Joe Trahan. Dr. Trahan is a media relations specialist and is full of advice that can instantly improve someone’s on camera skills.

We started the morning off with Dr. Trahan giving a presentation on media relations and about the “before, during and after” of an interview. The biggest point that I took from the presentation was the amount of preparation that is needed for a successful interview. According to Dr. Trahan he said in order to complete a successful interview you generally need one minute of prep time for every minute you’re on camera. So if your spokesperson is going to be on camera for seven minutes, you need at least seven hours of prep time.

This blew my mind! I didn’t know that much time needed to be devoted to an interview. But as Dr. Trahan went on to explain, reporters can ask just about anything and your spokesperson needs to be prepared for anything.

After the presentation we had the opportunity to do on camera training with Dr. Trahan. Going into it I was naturally a little nervous, but once you get on camera instincts kick in and you just go with the questions asked. The trick is trying to remember all the points that Dr. Trahan talked about in his presentation.

All in all everyone who participating in the training did really well, and Dr. Trahan had many positives to tell us as well as a few things to improve on. He is an extremely entertaining presenter and knows his stuff. I had a great experience and I learned valuable information, which is good because I’m interested in media relations and the more knowledge I have the better!

Always learning and improving,

Jake

Who Likes Toast?

I was checking out my Twitter feed today perusing for something to write about when I found this tweet from Bill Stoller (@PublicityGuru) titled “15 ways to use Twitter to toast your competition.” The article came from Mark Schaefer’s blog “grow” was interesting and a good read. Because the article is kind of long I’m not going to post all 15 ways, so you can read it here if your heart desires.

I will, however, point out a couple of the points that I really liked.

4. Discover consumer problems, product issues, or potentially damaging PR disasters:

Monitoring your brand can be extremely beneficial because people will turn to social media to complain about a product or service in an instant. If you’re keeping an eye out for these things you can prevent a lot of headaches.

11. Use your tweets as real-time testimonies:

“Always tell a story” is something that I’ve learned from my professors here at ONU. If you can make something thing personal and get on that level with your target audiences it’s going to be beneficial for you in the long-run.

15. Twitter is a great way to keep up on the latest news and trends:

Knowing real-time news and trends can keep you ahead of the competition especially if they are not doing this. Being able to make decisions and work with the most up-to-date information is best.

Now you can go out and have a better presence on Twitter and can use it to better your personal brand or your company’s.

Get to toasting,

Jake

Anything But Dead

This coming week is dead week at ONU and it will be anything but dead for me. Historically dead week is supposed to be laid back and easy, but for me it’s going to be one heck of a time.

I have to finish my research paper, finish a case study and complete a group project. While that doesn’t sound like a whole lot, it really is and is going to take up quite a bit of time. I wish there was a way that I could put more hours into the day so I could be more productive and get some more things done, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who wishes that. I know all of my classmates are wishing the same thing.

So in order to complete all my work I will be taking up a permanent residence in the PAC lab (the computer lab that us PR kids use), and I will be there for quite some time.

The one good thing about my dead week being so crazy and busy is that I will have nothing during finals week. I have to bust my butt this week, but next week when everyone else is freaking out about finals I can sit back and relax. I just need to make it through this week first.

It’s go time,

Jake