Class Wrap Up

This was a great class to take, I have learned a lot in a very short period of time. Dr. Cannon (The Old Perfessor), was excellent in his lectures and the in class assignments brought the concepts to life. He was able to capture our interest by using real life examples such as the syringe in the Pepsi can, used real life advertisements to explain further what he was talking about, and made us write a press release to an event that will be happening later this summer.  He made the class think and apply the theories in our class public relations project. Thank you Dr Cannon for the wonderful class experience!

June 22

Our guest speaker this evening was Mark Simpson, assistant commissioner with Big South Sports (Big South Website). His presentation was also geared towards social media and how the conference uses it to promote their events. They use Twitter to post small announcements, such as announcing when conference schools are releasing their schedules and post it with a link to the schools schedule. He said they challenge is trying to fit everything in 140 characters.  The conference also has a you tube (Big South Video) channel where they stream over 700 events a year, and have a Facebook page to go into more detail about events. He was talking about some of the challenges the conference has, currently they compete with ACC, SEC, pro sports in the Charlotte area, and TV deals. They try to get the media to cover events on “off” news days so they don't have to compete with the larger market teams. From moving to North Carolina with no job and having to networking and use his contacts to break into this market, he has had a challenging career and has worked through the ranks to get to where he is today.

June 20 (Philip Tate)

This evening we had Phillip Tate, Senior Vice President with Luquire George Andrews INC (LGA Wedsite) speak to us. Mr. Tate’s background in public relations is very extensive in and out of the sports field. One of most recent projects the firms has taken on was to rebrand the now Wells Fargo Championship (Wells Fargo Championship). The needed to market a new logo, and make sure that they still have a successful turn out for the event. Mr. Tate said this year they were spending 60% of the marketing budget with online media and not print. He said online media is a better way to spend money because it will filter people back to the website and they could update information instantly rather than having to redesign an ad for print. Since the tournament has started they have sold out every year with the help of LGA.

Some campaign that have done that I am familiar with is for Novant Health (Presbyterian Healthcare) , which is my current employer. The following are some videos and campaigns LGA has done for them Cancer Care,  Women's Center. Overall Mr. Tate has a very interesting position and gets to work with a lot of different publics in his field.

We Want Rings!

After listening to the interview with Mark Cuban on NBA TV, when he said “Rings are done, its time to take it to the next level” I didn’t think he was talking about a championship bracelet. I think Mr. Cuban needs to keep the tradition going with championship rings. As I sit and think about how an interview with Dirk Nowitzki will be 10 years from now and how he talked about his championship bracelet not ring. Let’s just think about Michael Jordan, his 6 championship rings and his poster posing with them. How weird would it look with him posing with six championship bracelets, would he do 3 bracelets on each wrist or try to make them all fit on one wrist, makes it too complicated. Mr. Cuban, we need to preserve the history and tradition that winning a NBA championship has, would you like a different championship trophy to go along with those bracelets, because trophies are so done!

June 15 (Class #7)

Tonight’s class is starting to put everything we have talked about together, it also is starting to make sense with the public relations campaign and how important all aspects of public relations are. I like our in class exercise, and how we were able to talked about the types of public relation ads. The Chevron ad makes you wonder how effective a public relations ad like this would have been during the BP crisis in the gulf, would all the good that BP has done in the past get over shadowed by the latest crisis f they would have done this? We all know how it affected the former CEO of BP, when he said he just wanted his life back, while he got what he wanted, his old life back in the unemployment line.

Another part of class that was interesting was when we talked about how Wisconsin decided not to print media guides for football and the over all savings for University. I had no idea of the cost to print them; I just assumed that the cost was deferred from ads sold in the guide. While you know what they say about assumption . . . .

June 13 (Class #6)

Tonight’s blog will be shorter than the others, tonight we took our first midterm exam and it was a good one. The questions that were on it really tested the knowledge and made sure we were able to master the concepts of public relations. I know I struggled on one of the questions when it asked (some thing similar to this) the historiography of a subject of public relations, I know that I missed this questions, my mind went blank on this one. I did find the sample press release to be interesting and found plenty wrong with it, including an incomplete phone number for the contact person that I found toward the end of the test. After the test it gave me some additional time to work on our group project and finish designing a post card that we will use in our presentation. Hopefully I will be able to post the sample soon.

June 8 (Class #5)

Tonight’s in class assignment was great! I really enjoyed the situations and how we were to decide if they were ethical or unethical. One particular situation was the student intern calling a similar public relations firm, telling them you are a student working on a class project, and you were trying to collect information about the kinds of services they offer clients. In my line of work we would call this competitor shopping to make sure we are on the same level or even better than our competition. In my opinion I felt this situation was ethical because competition keeps prices down for all consumers. The other part of class that I enjoyed was the presentation on satellite media tour, and how effective it is in the public relations arena. The source was very knowledgeable and was able to customize the broadcast to each market he was talking to. Over the past few days I have been watching different media outlets to find a real life example, but have not been able to find any on the news stations that I watch. I feel that we all could use the ethic values in public relations in our everyday life to keep the playing field even for all organizations.

Reflection Charlotte Knights

I had the opportunity to shadow Lindsey Roycraft who is the Community and Team Relations Manager for the Charlotte Knight (Charlotte Knights). My night started off a bit interesting, we met her on the field and she was dressed in a nice black skirt and polka dot blouse, before I meet someone I try to picture what they would look like and she didn’t look like what I thought. I pictured her in a Knights polo and khaki’s. During that time on the field some of the Carolina Panthers (Carolina Panthers)  were there taking batting practice before the game started and she instructed us to stand by the fence until batting practice was over so we wouldn’t be in the way of the interviews. That was the last time we saw her for the night, she was occupied with behind the scene events with the Carolina Panthers players and were unable to meet back up with her. Therefore, most of this interview and background about her came by email which she replied back to very quickly. While conducting the interview by email it was some what challenging but I was able to get most of the answers to my questions to finish the assignment

Lindsey has been in with the Knights for the past year and a half and has held the position for the same amount of time. She previously worked for Pkolino which is a children’s furniture store and handled their public relations, marketing and sales. Prior to that she worked as an intern for Heel summer baseball league as the general manager. She has also volunteered with teams such as the Charlotte Bobcats, and Carolina Panthers. Something that did surprise me was that she graduated from Wingate University in 2009 with a Bachelor of Science in Sports Management. Her job is very demanding and responsibilities include some of the following:

• Review and grant donation requests for over 1500 organizations
• Plan and organize monthly volunteer outings for the front office staff (EX. Men’s Shelter, Classroom Central)
• Coordinate special charitable events, Pink Knights, Charlotte Knights Golf Classic, and JDRF Swing for cure night
• Manage and authorize Mascot appearances, payroll, and game day responsibilities
• Oversee player relations and manage baseball camps and clinics

As you can see she is a very busy person even when there’s not a game. Some of her game day responsibilities include any outside special event, such as the Carolina Panthers batting practice yesterday (which was given to them last minute and organized through a financial advisor at Bank of America, and the Knights sales dept), coordinating and handling all aspects of PRE-GAME (parades, first pitches, dream team, national anthem, etc.) and Oversee on field promotions and regulate game activities, so through out the game she is everywhere. I tried to find out what was her most difficult event to organize and she couldn’t come up with just one she said every night is a challenge and often things are thrown at you last minute.

Lindsey is a key player in public relations for the Charlotte Knight and things don’t happen if she drops the ball. I completely understand how fast things can get out of control and how she is in a fast paced role within the organization. She comes in contact with different publics in her role as Community and Team Relations Manager, the publics she comes in contact with are fans which happens every night, for example last night they had a Facebook contest for one lucky fan and his/her family to take batting practice with the Carolina Panthers. Other publics are the players, Knights staff, anyone interested in the organization, people that they do volunteer work with and the list could go on and on because of her position.

This assignment definitely gives me a new look at public relations in a sports organization, and how fast things can go wrong and how fast the day can change from what you may have already planned out. The position is definitely a key position in the sports organization because of all the publics they interact with on a regular basis. I learned from the night that you have to be able to adapt to any situation that and be flexible on the personalities that you may come across, you can’t be start struck when you meet a celebrity and have to be able to maintain a professional attitude while around these publics even if their demands may seem unreasonable and out of the norm from what you are use to.

June 1

The things that I learned tonight were about output and impact and the difference between the two. As my company looks into moving toward social media marketing and the proper way to do it this portion of the class will come to use for me in my career. Recently I created a Facebook page (Southern Pines Diagnostic Imaging) for my office and was thinking how am I going to know the true impact it will have and this lecture has given me some ideas on how to track the pages progress and the impact it will create in the market.

Another part of class that I really enjoyed was the crisis management exercise. This is something I am extremely interested in this because every organization will go through this at some time or another and only the ones that are prepared are going to survive the crisis. I have worked for several large companies and all have experienced a crisis at one time and have responded to the public well and continue to be at the top of their industry. If I were to go into a career in public relations, crisis management would be an area that I could see myself being part of.