Digital Impact Conference - How It Can Help You

The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) is an organization that brings professional public relations organizations together in order to help them network, gain professional recognition, learn from each other, gain intelligence from published works, and job search within the industry. PRSA has a conference coming May 5- 6 in New York, NY called The Digital Impact Conference. This conference will update attendees about the changing trends and technologies within public relations, to acknowledge social media traps, update about new social media outlets, and other topics.

This conference is important to the music industry because we live in a fast paced, technology driven world. Promoting online is important, but the campaign efforts can get lost among the thousands of sites. Yet, people gain a large portion of their information from the Internet, so public relations campaigns need to drive their customer base to their site over competitors. Also, Smartphone’s are an important part of today’s technology, giving people access to the Internet at all times. According to Sarah Perez in her article Social Networking Now More Popular On Mobile Than Desktop, she states, “more people are using the mobile web to socialize (91%) compared to the 79% of desktop users who do the same. It appears that the mobile phone is a better platform for social networking than the PC” (Perez, 2010). This has become true because social media is easy to use and easy to follow. Plus, it provides information within seconds keeping pace with people’s “I need to know now” mentality. Learning how to effectively get people to follow your social media sites is an important promotional tactic. Also keeping their attention so they continue to follow you is important as well.

Going to conferences, such as the ones PRSA supports, is a great way to keep on track with today’s evolving world. For anybody interested in promotions, PRSA provides useful information. Visit http://www.prsa.org/ to find out more.

Resources:

http://www.prsa.org/

Perez, S. (2010, Feb. 18). Social networking now more popular on mobile than desktop. Read Write Web. Retrieved from

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_networking_now_more_popular_on_mobi

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When You Reach The Top...Then What?

Everybody has been creative at some point in their life. Sometimes the creativity has come easily, other times it has been a struggle to find even the smallest ounce. People may think that they are just having an off day, that the right side of the brain has taken a vacation, or their "creative juices" have all been drunk by the previous days splurge of brilliance. Yet, I have been inspired to think in a new direction after watching a TED speech by Elizabeth Gilbert. Gilbert is the author of Eat, Pray, Love. It wasn't until Eat, Pray, Love that she became a household name. But why wasn't she well known before? Gilbert credits it to a genius. I'm not talking about another person of high intelligence, but rather a creative force beyond our "realm," like a higher power, or a muse.

I was listening to WJRR 101.1 Sunday night and they were playing a half-hour devoted to Cage The Elephant to promote their upcoming release Thank You Happy Birthday. I caught part of an interview with one of the members who was asked about how the band felt about people expecting their sophomore CD to be as good as their freshman release. The member stated that it was difficult to live up to those expectations because the band deals with that self-concious feeling that the CD won't be good enough.  Even if you don't believe in a higher power as Gilbert hints toward, her overall message is still one that everybody can learn from. Gilbert wants us to accept that sometimes we hit a creative peak where, like in her case with Eat, Pray, Love, we are successful. We may never reach that level of success again, but we should not quit our job and fall into a depression over it. We should just continue to keep writing, dancing, drawing, etc.

Her speech inspired me because not only did she make a strong argument about altering our way of thinking about our own creativity, but you could tell she was passionate about the subject. Gilbert did her research to prove her point. She used historical references from Socrates, and the Greek and Roman way of thinking. She also incorporated modern stories from people she interviewed. Ruth Stone, an American poet, is one such interview that supports Gilbert's argument. The flow of the speech, sprinkled with bits of present examples and humor, kept me engaged with her telling of the genius and how she believes it should be viewed. Using the idea that after we have reached the peak of creativity and we should continue to live out our days as is normal, is inspiring because we should not live in fear of meeting a standard. Rather, we should live knowing that we have produced a solid piece of work and let it stand at that. That single piece of creativity was given all of the effort, and maybe a little help from a genius, to be what it became, a success.