The REAL World of Public Relations

I just got back from Real World PR, a networking event and conference put on by Georgia's PRSA Chapter in Atlanta.  It was my first time going and I wasn't really sure what to expect, but it was a great experience!! The panels were all really interesting, I saw a lot of friends from my classes, and also got to meet a lot of great people.  

Each time block had multiple sessions to choose from, and I'm planning to post the pages of notes I took throughout the week for anyone who missed a certain session or wasn't able to attend the event at all.  I hope some of my classmates will do the same since I would have loved to go to all of the panels but could only choose four!

"So what does 'poking' mean?"

The day that I've been anticipating for years finally came.  My mom got on Facebook. 

Plenty of my friends' parents have already joined the Facebook club.  My mom being the cool mom that she is, I figured it would only be a matter of time before she jumped on the bandwagon.  Sure enough, I was on her laptop a few days ago and went to log in to my page, but it was already logged in to Facebook.  Figuring it was my younger brother's page, I did some exploring only to realize it was my mom's page!  I don't know if it bothered me more to discover that she had made a Facebook page, or to realize I wasn't the first person she had tried to search for and friend.  

Since my discovery we have had a few conversations about her generation's use of social media (as a recent MBA grad, she's also on LinkedIn).  It's so funny to see her try and figure out what it means to "poke" someone and how to tag and untag pictures when these are things that are so normal to people in my generation.  It also makes me wonder how much things will change by the time I have kids, and what they will make fun of me for being confused by...

Social Networking

As someone involved in public relations, I have recently been experimenting with various social media networking sites (Twitter, LinkedIn, PR Open Mic, etc.).  They're all easy enough to create profiles on and find people to connect with, but I've been wondering how "effective" they truly are for networking (aren't PR people always trying to prove how effective something is?).  I feel like people go through the motions with these websites, accepting "friend requests" or searching for coworkers but few people really get much out of these connections.  I just read a post on PepperDigital's blog (a division of one of the companies I interviewed with this past week, Peppercom) that seemed to share my sentiments - these websites are great in theory but are more passive than anything.  

I wonder if these websites will be more widely used and effective as more people get involved in the social media world?  It's interesting to be in the generation that gets to watch all of this evolve first hand, and I can't help but wonder how different things will be in 5 months when I graduate.