Category: PR
March 20 2009
Design / PR / Things / Thoughts

Twitter’s tweet-scape, twop, twil, twhat?

I use twitter, I like twitter, and like many early adopters of twitter, I’m getting wary of the  “new twitter landscape”. I know it makes me sound snobby, but at the same time, I am. My issues with twitter aren’t about the people who tweet about every moment in their lives, because those people have always been there and will always be there. It’s the new comers who just want to make noise to show that they’re there.

Nowadays, I feel like that being on twitter is like automatically earning a boyscout badge, but instead of knowing how to make a fire, you just have to have an email address. Now, not everyone who is new falls into this category, but there are a bunch that do. With that said, I’ll probably twitter about this post.

On the bright side, I look forward to using Twitter and it’s “addicts” to market in incredibly innovative ways!

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March 16 2009
PR / Thoughts

Where Does Internet Lingo Go To Die?

I was talking to a friend of mine and he mentioned how he was still friends with his ex but “she’s not in my top 8 or anything.” Top 8? That sounds familiar.  Top Chef? No. Top Model? No, it’s not a TV show. It’s a pop culture reference, an ironic pop culture reference. “Top 8.” Hmmm. Oh that’s right… being in some one’s top 8. It’s old Myspace lingo. Remember Myspace, that ancient social network monster?

For those who were never “cool” enough to be a part of the optional site (unlike the socially mandatory Facebook), or you who skipped the heavily spammed and widegitized mess all together; “Top 8″ were the profiles that were linked directly from your site to a chosen 8 friends. (There were originally 8 spaces, which switched to other larger amounts.)

Top 8 was something that made or broke friendships. There were countless parodies on the gravity of putting someone in or taking someone out of a Top 8 slot. It was the equivalent of earning street cred, digitally. In fact, who and what was in your top 8 defined who you were.

But now “Top 8″ and “Myspace Me” are things of the past. They’ve been put in a metaphorical shoe box and filled away into a dark closet. We’ve traded “Top 8″ for links on LinkedIn, or  a more strange notion of digital “friending” on Facebook or a even more disturbing term of “following” someone (via Twitter). At least Top 8 was something unique to the site, not adding a new meaning to an existing word.

But only 4 years ago, Top 8 slots were a prize to win on celebrity myspace pages. Top 8 slots were something to fight, bite, cry and vie for. Now, it’s an ironic term to refer to an ancient notion only left for the digital savvy to say, to be, well, savvy.

And while everything has a shelf-life, some catch phrases make a reappearance. And when they do, it says something great and nostalgic about their birth place. But how exactly do they die? Born online, die online and buried in an ironic cemetery, then?

Could the “ironic” and “vintage” usage of a site’s lingo mean it’s old and buried and no longer relevant and current? And in this day, age and digital space, once you lose current status, what’s left?

Image sources: Mtoz’s Flickr, Mynicespace.com, Photobucket,

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March 12 2009
PR / Thoughts

Why PR?

I’ll tell you why. If you checked out my bio page, then you already know that I am a PR major. I chose public relations as my path and as a career. But since studying it in school, I became discouraged that maybe PR wasn’t really what I wanted to do. So I went out on my own to find exactly what I wanted to do in a field that could really be morphed and moved into any industry.

From there, I found digital PR and have been as happy as a clam since then. But since reading Seth Godin’s blog post “The difference between PR and publicity,” I put some more thought behind why I chose PR and why I stuck with it.

Think about it, when you are 18, you have to choose a school and soon after choose a major. And you don’t really get the full picture of what this major entails until the 3rd or 4th class. And all these lessons are being taught along side of the life lessons involving moving away from home, being independent, and all of that other coming of age stuff. I know, l know, life’s soo hard, blah blah blah.

Basically, PR from my basic pre-college understanding of it four years ago was building a story of someone or something, being able to mold something out of nothing, making something worthy of true attention all through communicating through various mediums and connecting to people that otherwise would be disconnected. That is what I thought it was. I thought it was both protecting and promoting reputations through communications.

Now, in retrospect, it’s obvious that digital PR was my end game, but at the time I just became frustrated. Class after class, we wrote fictional press releases and backgrounders in a systematic way.  Some stories were told, but those stories have been told.

Godin’s post differentiates between publicity and PR and sometimes that line is blurred without a second thought. In class, publicity was what I learned, in my internships and general interests, stories and PR is what I yearned and ultimately learned.

Twitter, especially in its stage as being mainstreamingly new, is reverting PR professionals back to being publicity hungry. Creating company Twitter accounts that just spews out links is annoying and wrong. Twitter can be a great storytelling tool. Except, each page is 140 characters long. As a heads up, I have a feeling I’m going to be ranting and raving on Twitter a lot more in the near future, so brace yourselves.

Image Source: Druss101’s Flickr

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