Thursday night I was invited to the Toronto launch party for the Samsung Instinct phone thanks to @theinstinct. I’ve never been to a product launch party before and was pretty excited to see how one is organized.
We arrived at The Social and were greeted by very a friendly (and not obnoxious) Samsung person telling us about the party and how we could go to the back of the venue and have the opportunity to play with the Instinct. I was very impressed with how pleasantly we were greeted. I used the phone for only a short time but it has some pretty neat features like GPS navigation.
We were treated to a performance by Woodhands which was a surprise and very enjoyable to me and maybe two other people there actually familiar with their music.
The phone seems like a good deal, and if I wasn’t locked into a contract with Fido I would consider buying one.
It’s being launched around the same time as Bell’s rebranding campaign. You may have noticed those ads in the subways stations that just have the letters ER, the first teaser part of the campaign.
Overall, I was very impressed with the event. I thought it was well done, although the balloons were kinda unnecessary. I thought The Social was a good venue for this type of event and the demographic they were appealing to. I’m not entirely sure what they wanted to achieve out of the event but they could have done some publicity to create some buzz around it so more people would have found out about it.
In any case, I was very impressed with how well we were treated at the event and told many friends about the experience. I hope to get to go to more events like this in the future!
Categories: Pop Culture · Public Relations · Reviews
Tagged: launch party, samsung instinct
I’m still trying to figure out the direction of this blog. What my ‘brand’ is, what I’m going to write about, etc. I want this blog to be about my likes/dislikes/ramblings/rants - not just PR Sarah.
I love fashion, although I don’t read as many magazines or watch Fashion Television as much as I used to. My most recent purchase is my first pair of Birkenstocks. OK I’ll admit they are hardly new or fashion forward, but they are timeless and comfortable. I’ve admired April’s pair and decided to imitate (best form of flattery, right?) her style and get some of my own.
My friend tipped me off that Soft Moc was having a sale so I popped over to the Eaton Centre during my lunch break yesterday and was treated with pretty good service.
I wore them last night for the first time and now have some blisters on my feet, which everyone previously warned me about so it didn’t come as a surprise. I’ve been told it takes a few wears for the Birks to conform and mold to your feet. I’m impatient and can’t wait until I’ve broken them in.
Categories: Fashion · Trends
Tagged: birkenstocks, Fashion
I love Facebook and am OK with myself to be able to admit this to the world wide web. I have a
somewhat “modest” number of friends compared to some people who add every person they’ve ever looked at. But my list of friends suits me well.
My love affair with Facebook
I’ve been using Facebook since it was first available to Canadian university students. Back then it was called The Facebook. I had barely any friends on it, but preferred its cleaner layout over MySpace.
Since joining, it’s been an easy tool to keep in touch with friends from university who now live in different cities and to get in touch with cousins who live across the globe. It proved to be quite handy for my Corporate Communications and Public Relations classmates in that it allowed us to quickly and easily contact each other about school cancellations from this wonderful winter we’ve just survived, get clarification on assignments we had due, organize out of school get togethers, and the like.
The reason Facebook is so easy is that user accounts don’t change. Everyone’s e-mail addresses change from time to time and often it’s hard to keep up. Facebook eliminates this problem, as long as you log in to your account on a regular basis. So this is why it makes a lot of people lazy when it comes to communicating through other means; most resort to good ‘ol Facebook.
I don’t know why I’ve always had a fascination with how people use this specific social networking site. Part of it comes from my nerdy enthusiasm for the internet and my curious nature about how networks of people work stemming from my sociology background.
I often reference Wikipedia, as you will get to know from reading my blog, I’m always interested to read Facebook’s wikipedia entry or to check out what’s happening at the Get Satisfaction site.
FacebookCampToronto
As I’m always interested in all things Facebook related, I was excited to learn about FacebookCampToronto. My friend Meighan wrote about it here and summed up the event well. A lot of it reinforced information I already knew, but I did learn some interesting facts.
- Harry Potter is the number one listed book in nearly every network
- There are about 8.4 million Canadian Facebook accounts, that is A LOT
- Less then one year after allowing developers to create applications, there are now about 30,000 apps. Facebook had projected there to be about 5,000 one year after the launch
- Facebook is the largest photo hosting site on the web, hosting 6 billion photos with 8 million uploaded per day
Besides for those tidbits of info, the audience listened to three case studies of interesting Facebook applications. You can check out what Meighan has to say about them.
The Facebook Redesign
There’s been lots of chatter over the past few days about the slow roll-out of the Facebook redesign. A few days ago I logged into new.facebook.com to check out a preview of what my profile would look like and it’s dramatically different. It’s going to take time for loyal/obsessive users to get accustomed to the new look. I predict there to be intial backlash much like when Facebook added the mini-feed function. But in the end, the new layout will hopefully take away a lot of the clutter that is clogging up profile pages.
Love it or hate it, there are good and bad things about Facebook. It seems like with the numbers still growing, it’s going to be here for longer than many “experts” have predicted.
Categories: Pop Culture · Social Media
Tagged: facebook, facebookcamptoronto, redesign, social networking
Get Satisfaction
The Get Satisfaction website is a helpful tool for users to come together and share comments, questions and complaints about a topic, company or product.
The good
Aesthetically the website looks very nice with large buttons and uses relatively large fonts, presumably to make it easier for users to navigate the site.
The site does a good job at organizing the content, differentiating posts as: questions, ideas, problems and discussions. It is further sub-categorized between topics that are latest, recently active and unanswered. Accessing the terms of service and about section of the website is a bit tricky to find at first, having to scroll down to the bottom until you found the links. Most websites have a link to the about page right at the top making it easy to find when first browsing a webpage.
The bad
Despite the large fonts and buttons, it is somewhat difficult and not intuitive to navigate. I find the design and layout of the site a bit too “cartoonish” which takes away from the content.
pbwiki
pbwiki has what is considered a very active account on Get Satisfaction with 1,444 posts and 24 company representatives monitoring it. Just quickly looking now, I only saw one post that hadn’t been responded to by a rep and that was posted a couple hours ago. All other posts were answered at least once by a company rep acknowledging the suggestion or providing answers to a question. The company reps reply in a very friendly and informative manner. The reps always answer follow up questions resulting in appreciative and thankful users. I suspect the overall positive tone towards pbwiki is because of the prompt response users receive when posting a query.
Facebook
The Facebook section on the Get Satisfaction has a very different tone than the pbwiki section. The Facebook section has zero company reps answering questions and complaints. Their lack of customer engagement has resulted with comments written with obvious resentment and anger towards Facebook. The majority of the posts are by users who feel they have been unfairly suspended from Facebook for violating the terms of use. Most of the users suspect they are getting suspended for overusing the site and incorrectly appearing as spammers. The one thing you will come away with after reading this section is how frustrated the customers are with how difficult it is to get in touch with Facebook’s customer service.
Use in PR
As a soon-to-graduate PR student, and one that wants to specialize in social media no less, I envision Get Satisfaction growing in popularity and usage. We learn that good PR is about maintaining good relationships with targeted publics, as can be seen with the success of pbwiki. As a result of company reps actively engaging in conversations with users, they will then spread the word and tell their friends and colleagues to use their service. This is why companies need to be actively engaged with their users. It’s really not very time consuming-just takes a little bit of effort and you’ll see the difference in attitude among your customers.
I hope that Get Satisfaction gains in popularity and enters the mainstream forcing Facebook, and others with zero reps, to get involved and start listening to what is being said about them.
Categories: Public Relations · Reviews · Social Media
Tagged: conversation, engagement, facebook, get satisfaction, pbwiki, Social Media
Disclaimer: These thoughts come from a non-hockey person.
A lot has been talked about CBC losing the rights to play the ‘Hockey Night in Canada’ theme song. The proposed solution: have a song-writing contest for a $100,000 prize.
Everyone’s upset, calling composer Dolores Claman greedy or the CBC cheap for not wanting to pay for the song. They’re screaming it’s as important as the national anthem. However, it’s only been since 1993 that Claman started to get decent money for the composition. After reading that article, I would argue with anyone calling her greedy. She’s 80 years-old!
I heard one of the DJs on 102.1 The Edge encouraging listeners to write in and complain about the matter. He sounded very upset and very serious. There are a number of Facebook groups popping up with hundreds of hardcore hockey fans lamenting about how watching hockey just won’t be the same listening to the tune on TSN.
This article mentions Liberal critic Denis Coderre demanded Heritage Minister Josee Verner break the deadlock and keep the song alive.
The Hockey Night in Canada theme is a part of Canada’s culture that goes beyond sport,” said Coderre. “If the minister wants to show that she cares about Canadian heritage, this is her chance.
The HNIC theme is a part of some Canadians culture, not all. I have no attachment to hockey and don’t consider it to be a part of my Canadian identity. I feel comments like this are very narrow-minded. I don’t think I’m the only one who doesn’t like hockey. I’m sure there are millions of Canadians who feel the same indifference to it as I do.
I understand why fans are upset, I do. But I think it’s ridiculous how big of a fuss is being made. Does nobody watch the news anymore and see how many actual devastating things occur around the world? Actual real problems, and not just one about a song being played on a different TV channel? Canadians are lucky that this is the perceived worst of their problems.
But, there’s always Mike Myers to come and wave his ‘I’m a Canadian flag’ by featuring the song in his upcoming film The Love Guru, coming out on June 20. The timing of the movie release and this incident is suspicious or coincidental? Or is he just lucky to be able to jump on the coattails of this incident gaining publicity for his movie?
Go to about 3m30s in this clip to see Stephen Colbert’s take on one of the Arctic’s most prized treasure.
Categories: Pop Culture · Public Relations
Tagged: Canada, hockey, stephen colbert, theme song
Not so long after this happened does another story arise that sounds oddly similar. Even making news in the UK. This makes me wonder if there actually is bad PR.
In Tim Hortons’s case, I don’t know if that story tarnished their reputation. I personally don’t know anyone that said they would stop buying Tim Hortons after the way they treated that employee. It was all anyone talked about for about one week. I think that part of the reason is because this was an isolated incident at one location in London, Ontario and perhaps the public understands that. Or Canadians are so addicted to Tim Hortons, they can do no wrong.
The case of Stacey Fearnall is quite different. This involves a single restaurant in a small town and will cause much more harm to its reputation. This is definitely an instance of bad PR. It was interesting to read the thoughtful 340 comments on the CBC article. Most of the comments were from people speaking about how unfair the dismissal was and how difficult it will be for Nathaniels restaurant to recover. I thought this comment by KenBosveld was interesting:
Hey competing restaurants in Owen Sound — offer her a waitress job ASAP, and also plan a special promotion as a Cancer Society fundraiser — and I think you’ll be amazed to see how fast the community rallies to your support.
I think this would be a brilliant idea and I am curious if any restaurant will consider it.
Another way to help this situation is for the owner to apologize. According to the CBC article:
Nathaniels owner and chef Dan Hilliard issued a statement late Thursday saying Fearnall did not advise him that she was planning to shave her head.”Mr. Hilliard had indicated that this is an employer-employee matter and such matters are not to be dealt with in the public,” the statement said.
The commenters on the CBC site saw right through this and suggested she go to the Labour Board or Human Rights Commission. However, their reaction would have been much different if Hilliard would have handled the situation differently and apologized, rather than say it was an “employer-employee matter.”
The thing I find disappointing about stories like this is that they often make huge news, but it’s hard to find information about the follow up. I’ll try to keep an eye out if anything further comes from this story.
Categories: Public Relations
Tagged: pr layoffs timhortons
I’m not going to lie, it was a bit of a struggle for me to get through all of Brian Solis’s now well-known article PR Secrets for Startups. It was long, and mostly reiterating information we already learn about in my Public Relations program. But I did note some interesting things he said,
For those who confuse Social Media with online marketing, Social Media is anything that uses the Internet to facilitate conversations between people – it is not the practice of social marketing. I say people, because it humanizes the process of communications when you think about conversations instead of companies marketing at audiences.
On a number of occasions a good friend of mine has told me he thinks social media is just another tool for companies to reach markets and sell things. He calls it hype and a fad that will go away. Admittedly he is a late-adopter and hasn’t used many of these social media tools like Twitter or del.icio.us. I’ve explained to him that social media is one of the best ways for companies to listen to their customers needs and fine-tune their products accordingly. Social media and online marketing are different in this way: social media is two-way whereas online marketing is one-way. This friend studied business with a marketing major which might explain his perspective.
Loic Le Meur responded to Solis’s article by saying it’s rubbish and there aren’t any secrets to PR. I understand his point, but disagree. I think there are ways to master PR and with experience a practitioner would more easily be able to identify strategies and tactics that would work, probably quicker than I could as a PR student.
Le Meur argues against Solis’s Secret #9 Get a Spokesperson by stating the best person to represent a startup is its founder, not a spokesperson. He even cites Mark Zuckerberg as a good example being a “PR machine.” Zuckerberg is neither passionate nor interesting to listen to. I’m sure there are many instances that the founder would be the best spokesperson, but there are also many occasions it would better be left in the hands of a pro. I don’t think there is a hard and fast rule for selecting the best spokesperson, each case will be different.
Categories: Blogs · Public Relations · Social Media
Tagged: brian solis, loid le meur, mark zuckerberg, pr, Social Media
Along with billions of other women, I saw Sex & the City this weekend with two friends. There was one lucky, or perhaps unlucky, male in the entire theatre. It was a very enjoyable movie and surpassed my extremely low expectations. I only have problems with how it ended, but I won’t share my opinion until everyone has seen it to not spoil anything.
A thing that I tend to notice a lot more than most is product placement in TV shows and movies. I notice it so much I get distracted from the actual storyline and focus my attention on the strategically placed product. Reese’s Pieces was one of the first deliberate attempts of product placement in a Hollywood movie back in 1982. I remember being about 10-years-old and my mother rented E.T. for my brother and I to watch and bought some Reese’s Pieces so she could teach us about product placement. Not every mother does that for their kids.
I found the product placement in the Sex & the City movie to be very obvious and distracting. Vanity Fair has provided a full list of the product placement in the film. I didn’t even notice half of the products on the list, maybe because there was so many I tuned them out. I understand the justification for all the product placement: companies pay big bucks, and who in their right money-making mind would turn it down?
My question is this: how much is too much product placement?
A movie that I thought cleverly used product placement was Talladega Nights, an underrated film in my opinion. I thought it was brilliant for them to use so much product placement while poking fun at how brand driven NASCAR is. A good move on the film producers part to be reaping the monetary benefits of all that product placement but apparently that wasn’t exactly the case,
To top it all off, none of the brands had to pay integration fees for their placements—an increasingly common occurrence as brands seek more prominent roles in entertainment content. With Ferrell and Talladega co-writer and director Adam McKay writing Wonder Bread, Perrier and dozens of other brands into the script to poke fun at the over-the-top corporate sponsorship in Nascar races, the filmmakers needed the brands’ involvement just as much, if not more, than the brands wanted to be in the film—a rare occurrence in the branded entertainment space.
I can’t seem to recall a specific instance of product placement working on me. It must have at some point or another, but was so well placed I didn’t even notice. I didn’t go run out and buy a Louis Vuitton purse after seeing Sex & the City, but probably a lot of people did.
So, moral of the story is don’t sit next to me at the movie as I will probably bother you and point out every product that I notice.
Categories: Pop Culture · Reviews
Tagged: brands, movies, nascar, product placement, sex and the city, talladega nights
I enjoy live music but don’t have the chance to go to as many concerts as I used to. Mostly because I’m a student with a dwindling bank account and concerts are not cheap. So far this summer I only have tickets for:
Reading this article about an R.E.M. show recently in Vancouver made me very excited for the show. How neat that Douglas Coupland was in attendance.
I’ve been considering going to The Rogers Picnic as I really enjoy Cat Power, Animal Collective, Vampire Weekend, Chromeo, etc. But the issue is money. And even though everyone is bashing the lineup, I do want to go to the Virgin Festival as it has bands that I used to love long ago like: Oasis, Foo Fighters, Stereophonics and Spirtualized. Also with Wintersleep, MGMT, Constantines and more TBA. But the price tag is really expensive, $87 per day of $159 for both days. And I can guarantee Oasis will suck, but I will always like them anyway.
I’m going to wait and see how my financial situation will be come internship time and if I will be earning a wee bit of money I may go to these. I went to the second day of the festival the first time it was in Toronto and it was pretty fun, but of course it being Canada it was a freakishly cold and windy day on the island, which made it pretty uncomfortable.
My real dream is to go to this year’s Lollapalooza in Chicago, August 1-3. You can read the really good lineup here. I would love to have the opportunity to see Wilco in their hometown of Chicago. Tickets are $190US for 3-days, which is really good considering the price of the Virgin Festival’s much weaker lineup. This would be the best end of school present to myself, but I don’t know anyone who wants to go. I might seriously consider going if landing an internship goes well.
Categories: Music · Toronto
Tagged: concerts, festivals, Music
Thursday night I was invited to the Toronto launch party for the Samsung Instinct phone thanks to @theinstinct. I’ve never been to a product launch party before and was pretty excited to see how one is organized.
