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.