By: Samantha Conti In PRSSA news, an upcoming event is taking place on October 30 called the Bateman Competition. This national case study was established in 1973 and named after Carroll J. Bateman. The Bateman Competition is a premire case study for students in the public relations field. Any student member of PRSSA is eligible to compete. The competition allows students in small groups to create a campaign for a public relations situation that deals with treatment options for young cancer patients. The competition evaluates the student campaign creations and picks 3 finalists to showcase their work. Prize money and trophies are awarded to the top 3 finalists.
The overall goal of the competition this year is grow awareness for With Purpose, a foundation invested in educating more people about childhood cancer through the group campaigns. In addition to growing awareness, the competition also has a goal of challenging students to come up with real campaigns for actual situations. Does this opportunity sound interesting to you? If so, you can be a part of the Bateman section of STC 359! Each semester Miami takes applicants for this special section of 359. Look out for an email later in the semester for more details!
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By: Grace Wells It’s no doubt that in this day in age social media is making its mark on the professional field. With such a wide range of tools at our disposal, how can we best get our message out in the world? Social media allows us to form this connection with consumers. This visual network can be used to promote events. Creative eye-catching pictures combined with catchy hashtags can draw people in by leaving the audience with something to talk about. You can celebrate milestones or promote awareness for sales or discounts to gain exposure. Great network to publicize news, blog posts and even videos. You can even live tweet from the event using a hashtag created just for the occasion. Retweeting what others have said about your company is a way to attain credibility. Snapchat Give viewers something to look forward to with sneak peaks posted in the story of your upcoming product. Brand your platform specifically for your target audience and even have a special snapchat filter or location tag for your big events. Promote awareness for social issues on the platform to get your message out into the public eye. By: Tyler Madsen The recent revamp and move of Miami Career Services from Western Campus to Armstrong came with a useful tool not known to many, called “handshake.” Handshake is a database similar to LinkedIn, however, it is more tailored to the internship hunt. The site is fairly easy to use, and is divided into four different tabs:
By: Kaya Speros Advertisements have taken on an entirely new role as of the past few years. Instead of hoping to reach the desired audience and attain the needed sales goals through TV commercials or print, social media has made advertising a much more prevalent part of our everyday lives. You want to reach a mass audience? All you have to do is post on your social media account and boom, 1,000 people see it within 24 hours. Companies have adopted this idea and developed the role of Brand Ambassadors. A Brand Ambassador is generally someone hand-picked by the brand who embodies the imagine they want to portray to the public. That individual then instantly becomes an advertiser for the company. Social media has made it possible for brands to constantly have their products in your feeds. If you are a retail store and your target audience is young girls, what better way to engage them than with someone they can relate to? Someone they look up to within their own group! According to oncampusadvertising.com, people are four times more likely to make a purchase if referred to by a friend. Brand Ambassadors are successfully bringing the brand to the level of their audience through people they trust. By Claire Logsdon
2017 has seen many PR missteps and while it is only October, there are plenty of stories regarding the past 10 months. The story garnering most attention was Pepsi’s controversial ad starring Kendall Jenner, where they were accused of trivializing the Black Lives Matter movement. Though Pepsi eventually stopped using the ad, they initially refused to and then issued a public apology statement to Jenner instead of angry protesters. The next scandal on the list occurred during the aftermath of a video release of a passenger being aggressively forced off a United Airlines plane. First, the company refused to apologize for their actions, but after protests and boycott threats, they released an apology. However, the damage was done and United Airlines is facing a ten year all time low in sales. Cosmopolitan’s insensitive article put a positive title on weight loss that was the result of cancer, incensing people over the magazine’s poor word choice. Worst of all, the magazine has not issued an apology and refuses to acknowledge this issue. These are only several of the top stories regarding public relations mishaps this year; hopefully the country will see better PR in the year following. Torossian, Ronn. “The Biggest PR Crises Of 2017.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 30 Aug. 2017 By Sarah Emery (@sarahemery1995) I would consider myself a Twitter aficionado. I’ve even been granted access to 280 characters, although I spend the majority of my time on Twitter reading and learning from what others have to say than posting my own content (unless it’s about my love for desserts). Here are four Twitter accounts any up-and-coming PR professional HAS to follow: 1. @APStylebook Whether you love it or hate it, AP Style is here to stay in the media world. The AP Stylebook Twitter account is highly active and the weekly #APStyleChat will update you on everything from fake news to punctuation 2. @PRNews PR News calls itself the “hub for communicators,” and I’d definitely agree! The account has a healthy mix of top headlines, communication tips and media trends and is a great way to see the world from a PR professional’s perspective. 3. @Hootsuite A strong understanding of social media and digital marketing is paramount for the 21st century PR professional. With informative infographics and links, I find myself bookmarking Hootsuite’s content all the time! 4. @PRWeekUS If you’re still hungry for PR-related posts after reading our blog, make sure to follow PRWeek US for trending stories about successes and snafus throughout the public relations universe.
After following these great accounts, make sure you’re following @miamiohPRSSA to stay up-to-date on what we’re doing! Happy Tweeting and Reading! By: Claire Bowman Have you ever crafted the perfect tweet, but then you’re suddenly forced to delete an apostrophe or abbreviate a word to fit Twitter’s 140-count limit? Well, those painful days are over, as long as you can contain yourself to 280 characters from now on. Recently, social media giant Twitter has upped its character limits for tweets, making some excited and leaving others wondering why. Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, tweeted about the change as a problem solver and said it would still maintain the social platform’s “brevity, speed, and essence.” There has been some speculation that this change will also attract older users. Because these users are usually more active on Facebook where they have no limit on what they can post, this increase in limitations may make Twitter more appealing to them. If this is the case, companies who heavily use Twitter to advertise may need to think about changing up their game plans. For a platform that has seen most of its popularity with a younger crowd, marketing has been largely targeted for them. So if the audience starts to change, public relations teams will likely need to alter their strategies if they want to appeal to multiple groups. Lastly, it will be interesting to see if companies start to take advantage of more characters. When it comes to advertising, shorter typically means sweeter, so it may be beneficial to focus on changing up content instead of length. By: Alyssa McKoy It’s clear that social media has taken a huge turn in recent times. In the Public Relations and Marketing industry, it is more important than ever! You may think that your Instagram is just for your friends to see and like your pictures, or Twitter is just to tweet about how your day went, but these platforms can actually be used for a variety of reasons. I’m here to tell you a few of the most important reasons that social media is used today. 1. Everybody is on it Whether it’s Facebook or Snapchat, there is a wide range of people that use social media in their everyday lives. In fact, studies show that one in every five minutes spent online is on at least one social network. This means that potential employers, clients or customers are everyday users of social media. 2. A tool for marketers and PR professionals Let’s face it, you see the newest products on one of the many forms of social media. Well, that’s because marketers and public relation professionals use these platforms to their advantage. They specifically target their audience in order to increase their brand’s reputation and customer relations. According to growthgurus.com, 78% of small businesses use social media to attract new customers. 3. A new way to access news Because social media can spread vital information so rapidly, the ability to reach current news is easier than ever. Each of the platforms have their own “spin” on how their users can see current events. Whether it’s snapchat’s “featured stories” or Twitter’s “Moments”, we see a whole new way to gather news. Rather than waiting on a story to be released on television, information can be publicized at the simple touch of a button. By: Allison Haworth As rising seniors are job searching to enter the workforce, it is imperative to be knowledgeable in multiple types of media platforms to put you ahead of the competition. In my last internship, I used all five of these tools ranging from email, social media and sale pipelines, which gave me a jump on the latest trends in the PR world. 1. Hootsuite: Hootsuite is a social media management platform in which you can link all of your social media accounts to one dashboard, rather than sending out the same tweet 10 times on different social medias. Now more than ever, being able to manage a business’s social media presence is a challenging task in itself, but this platform allows you to auto-schedule, draft and reply to any message on social media in one place. 2. Constant Contact: Constant Contact is an email-marketing tool that allows you to create campaigns, polls, emails, newsletters, events and much more. With email being one of the main methods of communication nowadays, it is very likely that your future employer utilizes this tool day in and day out of the office. 3. Hubspot: Hubspot is software that is very useful for inbound marketing and sales. While it has many functions, one of the most important features is tracking your marketing and sales pipeline from certain clients. Being able to create leads to your contact list is a sure sign of an increase profit for your future company! 4. Weebly: Weebly is a website builder that allows you to drag and drop pieces of your website to create content. With many different themes, tools, media and pages to choose from, it is a very useful skill to have as everything is being digitized in today’s world. Being very user-friendly, in my opinion, it is one of the best ways to attract visitors to your webpage. 5. Google Drive: Google Drive is a file storage and synchronization service that allows you to keep all your documents in the cloud. While there are numerous amounts of apps, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides and Google Forms are my most popular apps. With the ability to share files with an infinite amount of people, this allows the document to be updated to the most recent file automatically after anyone who has access makes a change. By: Madeline Marshall This Wednesday, October 17, the CEO of 12 Stars Media, Rocky Walls, will be discussing entrepreneurship and videography in the Armstrong Pavilion. Rocky is a Purdue alum and has been working in video communications for over ten years. He is a professional speaker, speaking to large audiences around the country about how to communicate more effectively through video. He was also an executive board member of Indianapolis Social Media for 4 years. 12 Stars Media is a broadcast and media video production company located outside of Indianapolis. They work with clients globally to create videos to connect with audiences through real and simple communication. This past August, 12 Stars Media just celebrated their 10th year in business. Aside from all the success Rocky Walls has had in his career in communications, he is also just a really cool person. His family takes annual trips to Disney, he loves to cook and he just built a brick pizza oven in his backyard. If you’re interested in any career in the media and communications industry, I recommend checking out 12 Stars Media’s blog. They are constantly providing content about what’s trending in the industry, plus various tips to improving your skills from the basic to advanced levels. Rocky himself recently wrote about Spiderman: Homecoming in “How Sneak Peaks Have Gotten Sneaker, and Why You Should Too.” We hope to see you at this awesome speaker event on Wednesday! By: Isabel Mayoras Most people at some point think to themselves “my Tweets are so creative and unique I don’t know why I don’t get more retweets/likes?”, I know I have! We all see friends of ours who get a lot of Twitter interactions, and we wonder what they’re doing right. I’m here to tell you exactly what it is they’re doing, and how you can adopt those techniques for yourself! 1. Optimize your Twitter’s look People are very drawn to aesthetics. That being said, the first things your potential followers see are your profile photo, your header photo, and your bio. 2. Be #Searchable Hashtags may seem “lame” because it shows you’re trying to promote your Twitter, but it actually really helps! Doing it in silly ways that still make your tweet funny without begging for attention are key. 3. Be Relatable People love when a tweet describes themselves to a tee. Make sure your tweets aren’t too “you specific” and instead talk about daily struggles that many people can relate to! 4. Keep it Straight and to The Point! Most people on Twitter aren’t trying to read an entire 140-character tweet because that’s too much work. The best tweets are short and sweet but still get your point across. 5. Use Visual Aids Images and videos are widely popular on Twitter, even if they aren’t YOUR photo! There’s a reason Twitter has a feature that lets you search gifs while you’re writing your tweet… because they make the tweet better!!! Don’t be afraid to search for a gif that provides a visual representation of your tweet! Photo Source: http://blog.nycdatascience.com/student-works/twitter-scraping/ By: Claire Bowman This weekend, the popular soap brand, Dove, received backlash for a racially insensitive advertisement. It featured a black woman who removed her brown shirt and transformed into a white woman wearing a light shirt. The company has since deleted the post from their Facebook page, but not before online users began to criticize them. People have been offended because the post insinuates that black skin is less clean than white skin. Though Dove has publicly apologized on their various social media accounts, we must wonder where this company’s public relations and advertising teams were trying to go when developing and approving the advertisement. Dove is a company that has been a large proponent of showing off diversity in the past, so this has left some dumbfounded. Their quick response to the post’s negative reception shows they care about how their brand is received, but what does it say about the brand and people of color? If Dove really wants to be seen as having inclusive products, then they need to keep a much closer eye on what they post in the future. Otherwise, their reputation with the public is going to deteriorate, as we’re living in too divisive of times for brands to be making mistakes like these. Photo Source: www.thewrap.com |
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