Buzz About Town

So whats the crack I hear you ask. Well since my video has now miraculously achieved 5000+ votes things started to go back to normal and my life ensued with horrendous normality. That was until Francisco (a silver fox from STA Travel Buzz) invited me to attend a travel event, meet the team, other travelers and WTI hopefuls.

Before I jumped on the next megabus I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone. Why not take this opportunity to meet some really cool guys as well as practice my video making skills?! So that's what I did. I pulled myself out of bed and started shooting. If I have to make videos of my experiences this summer I'd better start practicing right? After all I'm no Spielberg yet. So any who here is the fruit of my labour. (don't know why YouTube cut the last 3 secs!)

It didn't take long to make, and I think ill be making some more soon.

Thanks again to STA Travel Buzz and the team, great hospitality, thanks for the beers and it was awesome to mingle down in sunny London! ha! x

STA Intern Blues

Having uploaded my video, achieved 400 votes (amazing!!), and now having to crack on with life. I feel a little blue. I have nothing to do now except wait and dream.

check out my application profile.

Voting begins!

I have 123 votes already people!

Thanks to all those who voted.

Good luck to everyone.

Internship video blues....

My eagerness to create my internship application video for the 2010 STA Travel Internship, is certainly not being match by the termoil world that is IT.

Terms like DV, firewire, and USB compatible connections, have become words a that are steadily becoming linked to suicidal tendencies!!

Ok maybe not that bad, but by hell the world of video shooting, uploading, and editing is slowly becoming a true test of my patience.

My experience in this type of activity is small, but I think steadily im starting to get the hang of this.

I am really trying my best to get my video up first to beat the crowds, but I have a feeling I will fail. Ive been spending hours looking at other videos from the US version of this programme with great interest. Some of the videos are truly fantastic, the majority however wont be as good as mine. I just hope those high budget films shot by film students won't over shadow mine too much. I suppose the only thing I can do, is do my best, and hope my personality can push me forward into the top 20.....!!!

I am getting VERY excitied.

STA Travel Internship = A job for me!

Ok so I was flicking through STA Travels website recently when I came acorss a link to the STA Travel Internship 2010. It's basically a huge PR stunt, but by far and away, the best PR stunt ever!

It entails a trip round the world and back for free! The coolest thing apart from having the trip of your life time is that you get to share it with a stranger who also shares a passion for travel.

The requirements are you have to be passionate about travelling, a good writer, excellent verbal skills, photography and camera skills, and a sense of adventure.

Where do I sign up?

Can't wait to apply!

April 25th draws near!!

We PR students must now put together all our hard work from the year and cleverly, aesthetically and creatively mount it.

Unfortunately this is becoming the most tasking part of the whole deal.

I'm bloody useless at this sort of thing, who thought cutting card would be so demanding.

Fly me away!

I was flicking through the latest issue of PR Week, and it seems Virgin Atlantic are now regarding Blogger's and other Internet writers in the same light as other journalists when it come to reviews and other comms related issues.

Luckily this works out fantastically for me, the summer holidays are soon approaching and I'm free as of 16Th of May guys so I look forward to hearing from you.

What The Bloody Hell Is Web 3.0?

I finally understood what Web 2.0 was, and now people are already talking about Web 3.0.

Eric Schmidt CEO of Google has said -

"Web 2.0 is a marketing term, and I think you've just invented Web 3.0"

I think what he is saying is that we the public, expect natural progression, the next best thing. If we stop thinking about the future we become in danger of losing our sense of reality, we miss opportunities and become naive.

The rich and famous predict future, who will be the next Mark Zuckerberg?

Is Web 3.0 a reality or are we just being ridiculous?

My money is on 3D graphics, some sort of AI interface that we design ourselves and talk to in order to access our internet.

All I need is a billion pounds to develop the idea and I’ll be a millionaire by Christmas.

With the New York Giants winning the superbowl last night they have now become "World Champions". Strange for a team to become world champs when the competition is only held in the US with American teams. A one hour game lasted just under four hours, with fireworks, pre-match entertainment, half-time show, and a finale of parades of mascots and celebrities.

Each advert between plays cost's £1.5 million pounds and the game was watched by over a billion people in 232 countries.

It seems as though America do everything to deflect away from the actual sport itself, which seems to lack any real excitement.

I'm not really sure what this has to do with anything related to PR, or anything at all really, it just makes me cross. I think America is quite odd, I must go back again soon to really make my mind up.

Honesty Is The Best Policy

I'm learning that when it comes to major problems that occur instantly to an organisation, and PR steps in to help, the ability to "Spin" isn't always the best course of action.

Crisis Management is an area of Public Relations that I have yet to study, however I have read around the subject and come across some basic principals. There seems to be a lot of reference to the ability to "Spin", which I decoded as mostly being very well trained in lying. (Most of the time).

For example the Virgin Rail crash which I mentioned as my highlight of the PR year was one such example of PR crisis management.The crash wasn't the story, the heroic driver was the story. Similarly the recent BA crash at Heathrow imprinted the vision of an amazing pilot gliding an underpowered 200 ton aircraft to a relatively safe landing, rather than a plane crash!

Another thing I've picked up on these types of crisis, is that with the BA crash for example, BA were advised to show exactly what went wrong. Initially I thought this was a disaster move by BA, allowing the public to know which engine failed at which particular moment. Passengers don't want to know what can go wrong.

Or do they? Because say for example they did not provide any information at all. People would become more sceptical about aircraft, they may think up their own ideas of what went wrong and why. They also might think that the pilot was just poor quality raising questions about the person flying the planes in the first place.

So by stripping away the spin and spaff that comes with crisis management they may have saved their business.

The PR Year

While I wait for my washing at the laundrette to finish I thought I'd pop over to my local internet cafe and quickly jot down some thoughts on this year.

Briefly.

I think it's been surreal this year. The number one stories dominating the news this year were either about a missing girl in Portugal, or a man missing in a canoe. We like drama, sex, drugs and rock' n roll and that's why Amy Winehouse has had such a fantastic year, although tragically she seems weeks away from the publicity killing her.

We watched as Facebook dominated the world even though it still continues to grow, if I were Mark Zuckerberg I would sell up fast before it becomes the next Myspace.

PR struggled this year in my opinion. Bite PR got the Facebook account, successfully proving that something that has become so successful without PR, is now preparing for a dark era where expert help will be needed to keep the advertisers interested.

My favorite PR this year has to be - Richard Branson flying in at the scene of the Virgin train crash. Pure genus and pure Branson. I remember watching it live and he stood there and defended his trains, the heroic driver and Virgin. I distinctly remember thinking that I had no quarrels getting on a train of any description afterwards, and that certainly Virgin was still safe.

My PR low was the amount of coverage the Simpson's Movie got. The PR stunt was to draw a picture of Homer in a cliff edge, not very moving, didn't get me thinking about the movie, and it just left me thinking how much money wasted, and the limits the PR team imagination stretched too when offered such a large scale budget.

What next? Google will retain the crown, no doubt with the demand for mobile media to go global. The iPhone was slick, but I see Google doing something truly different and far superior. Too sum up, which I don't think could have been done better than Jeff Jarvis - "This may have been Facebook's year. But so far, it is still Google's century."

Marketing debate

I found myself in a very interesting conversation the other day whilst manning my bar that I work in. A man called Simon Filler who is a freelancer who's roles include, Head of Marketing for Arc Inspirations and a few other companies based in London. He sat down on his own, I recommended him with a drink and he sat down at the bar and we started to chat. Soon after we were in that typical debate about PR being part of the marketing mix and the limits with PR according to the greater scheme of things.

I was surprised to the level to which I was standing up for PR, maybe I'm really getting stuck into it. I even silenced him once or twice with points about product placement being advertising, to which he thought was PR. Then his friend arrived sat down cottoned on to what we were talking about and laughed. Simon looked at him at they both started to laugh, seems they were surprised to be going out to a bar and finding a bar tender who new a thing or two about their profession. The other guy, forgive me I didn't get his name, was high up in marketing for the NHS.

The debate thickened mostly around product placement, the wider marketing mix and the role PR has in the modern world. Apparently PR is dying. Anyway there isn't any real ending to this post, except to say that I finally feel like I've grown up a bit, and that these academics and practitioners aren't as scary as first thought. We all have views that have validity and it doesn't matter how much experience someone has there is always something to learn from another.

Fizzy and new, or old and Flat

Pepsi have now joined facebook. They pay to advertise their product on a profile where others can become "fans" of the product. This then shows up on the profile of the "fan" showing the world that they are indeed a little bit partial to a bit of cola.

Along with a few thousand companies so far, Pepsi have decided that there is just cause to pay for this honour to be on facebook. I don’t see why.

I was brought to this by an article in Broadcast magazine which I was flicking through whilst at a music video the other day, and even became a "fan" of Pepsi just so I could officially write on the wall, which went a little something like.....

"Using facebook as some sort of advertising platform is very silly. People don’t really care about these pages, they aren't secure, impossible to monitor its effects and are open to criticism. You spend millions elsewhere and for the person who set this up, I would advise you think carefully how you use this particular media."

Am I right? Is this the cheapest if not tackiest form of product placement?

What ever the components of this equation of advertising or however you wish to classify this form of communication are, the answer will always be the same.

COMPANY (Pepsi) pay £?,???’s to have facebook profile.

TIMES the amount of companies who think this media is worth communicating through ?,???,???'s

EQUALS - Mark's early retirement comes even earlier, and the next 1.6 percent goes for twice as much.

PR Credibility

I happened to stumble across a very interesting poster at uni the other day advertising a guest lecture featuring Anne Gregory entitled "PR ands its struggle for credibility".

Interesting as PR students we weren't told about this directly, personally I would have loved to have gone. Maybe we are not been invited in case we would not enjoy the content, it seems to me that we spend a lot of time listening to why advertising is "dying" and marketing is similar but not as "dependable" or "efficient" as PR, we should be able to view all aspects of what we study otherwise we will become even more naive and ill mannered in our ways towards "rival" disciplines.

Fight night PR vs Marketing vs Advertising now that sounds like a plan. I can already imagine the mayhem. HA!