9.0 First Thoughts and Public Relations

Today started a little different from my normal Sunday. After driving to Dallas, finding parking, and climbing on top of a security booth, I got a very unique view of the unfolding events for PAC-WE. This was quite an experience, and an hour, several scratches, and a leap of faith later I had essentially witnessed around a hundred people in yellow ponchos form two distinct shapes in a parking lot.

Of course, there was significant meaning behind the event, but all that information can be found on the website. This is about the experience, as well as communication and responsibility for new media. Or it will be when I get to that.

I honestly had not heard the phone story listed in the beginning of Here Comes Everybody before. That experience seems like the ideal outcome, with so many people rallying behind one issue, motivated by some virtue. Well, aside from the off-topic forums.

And PAC-WE seemed like something along the same lines. I heard about the event less than a week before it took place, but after searching around I found that the event had a Twitter feed, a Facebook page, and had been covered by a KERA blog. Sometime before the event someone mentioned the expected turnout for the event, which incidentally was a bit larger than the actual turnout.

The event had been a work in progress for about a month, which is a bit more than the ten day miracle performed to recover a lost phone. Given, this was an exceptional case, but what was to keep PAC-WE from being one as well? Bad timing? Networking issues? There are more variables than I could possibly imagine, but I still wonder what could have made things even better and hope to see a similar event inspired by our campus' art program soon.

All the planning and communication for this event was well organized from what I saw, which made me think about the end of the cell phone story where Evans gets a new job in public relations. This tripped an alarm in my head about the destruction of the public sphere. Given, I haven't worked in PR, though this comes up quite a bit at the office for the newspaper I work at since most writers should try to not sound like PR. I work in advertising and have come to understand that distribution does not equal our number of readers.

Assuming there is some large, typical company with PR distributing information on the company to various sources and advertising paying others to display their product or service, where does Facebook fit in? Or Twitter, for that matter? Perhaps this is an obvious question, but it seems that the people who have large followings in social networks could be making a mint through companies in two ways. They know how to get a following and could probably create a network of individuals interested in the company's goods.

The other way these people could help is more indirect and quite possibly more effective. If you see a movie star drinking a sports drink on the big screen, the scene screams "product placement". If you see that same movie star tweet about drinking that same drink while kicking back and watching a sports game, it's not product placement; it's a personal promotion from an individual who isn't being paid to support that product. Or, we assume isn't being paid to support that product.

Twitter manipulations aside, assuming we should, who should network a company? They're not paying to promote, but is it still advertising? There's no mouthpiece in the form of other people to spread the word, but is it still public relations? Or is this something that could become a part of everyone's job? Most of us have these accounts for social networking, so technically we could all be funneling in resources for our businesses. If we should, why, and if so, who? Something I'll be pondering while finishing Shirky.