Special Olympics Held Last Saturday

Special Olympics athletes from all over northern Utah competed in track and field events last Saturday at Sky View High School.

Many athletes from Utah State, Weber, and Davis County, among others, showed up Saturday to enjoy some warm weather and compete in their respective events. Many volunteers also showed up from Utah State to help time, record numbers, and award medals.

Said Eric Lund, a freshman majoring in economics, "I just came for class at first, but it was actually really cool! I liked helping with it a lot more than I expected."

Chris Axtell, sophomore in entrepreneurship, said that he tries to volunteer at the Special Olympics whenever he can. "It's one of the best feelings in the world to feel like you're here supporting the athletes and what they can do."

More information on Special Olympics volunteers can be found here.

The Special Olympics has been giving people with intellectual disabilities the opportunity to succeed since 1968.

The Special Olympics is held many times a year, with over 30 sports available to compete in. Utah State hosts the State Indoor Games competition every year.

Twitter

The past few weeks, I have been exploring this new phenomenon: Twitter.

Background info on company: http://bit.ly/UFP2o

I don't care what the haters say... it is excellent for information transfer. It's all about your subscriptions. A plethora of fascinating people are beginning to get into it, including a ton of recording artists and other celebrities.

Oprah got it last friday: CS Monitor article CNET article her actual twitter page

Another discovery: Larry King. His Twitter page has actually been way informative... I love CNN!

If Twitter grows like Facebook has, it could be amazing for the networking capabilities. Go ahead, laugh at me, but it's all about the information! Twitter used an example explaining direct messages that I found useful. Say a friend tweets "at jamba juice. love the mango-a-go-go." If you were about to meet up with that person, and you wanted them to grab you an orange dream machine while they were there, you could easily reply back in a direct message and say "d joey grab me one too?" Or you could just call him, now that you know he's there. Either way, you wouldn't be without that sweet smoothie without twitter.

Say your favorite bakery gets on twitter and tweets every time they pull different baked goods out of the oven. You'd know exactly when to head over and pick up that deliciously warm and flaky croissant based on Twitter's capabilities.

Users can subscribe, unsubscribe, get mobile updates, or turn off mobile updates at any time they wish for any particular person at any time. Yeah, the power!

Going to be interesting to see if this twitter revolution gets bigger... or if it hits the maximum point on the parabola in bit and then starts to die down. Very interesting.

Cool!!!

After what Pete said about Google searches, I was quite curious about where I was on this so-called-golden triangle.

Turns out if one types in "Lauren Hong Public Relations" into Google.... my blog comes up as its very first listing!!!!! Cool!!!!!!

I know that doesn't necessarily mean anything. I mean, it's not like people are going to type (or even know!) my name right off the bat when they're looking for public relations people.... but you know what? Maybe someday they will!! 

How exciting.

Links from the Utah PR Conference

Pete Codella's keynote slides can be found at http://news.codellamarketing.com/uploads/1/multimedia/images/Codella-SocialMedia-SearchMarketing.pdf 

This pdf link was grabbed from this article in his newsroom: http://news.codellamarketing.com/newsrelease-cid-1-id-10064.html 

Codella on twitter: http://twitter.com/codella

Richter7: 

http://www.richter7.com/

http://twitter.com/richter7

Intrepid Hybrid Communications (Chris Thomas, afternoon breakout session): http://www.intrepidagency.com/

Hope you find these useful! 

PR Conference Takeaways

I learned so much from this conference. I got to go to the afternoon speakers, and they were awesome! There is a ton of information, so I'll post what I learned here, and then links from the presentations in another post. We'll go with bullets to be most efficient. 

Chris Thomas, Partner, Intrepid Group

Nile Easton, Senior Public Information Officer, UDOT 

• Knowing how to write is huge. Fundamentals in PR won't change even when the media and other things do change.
• PR is a crowded field. When looking for an internship, remember that networking and background experience are two of the biggest things that will get you the position. 
• Solid writers and strategic thinkers are hard to find, because usually they will get snapped up quickly and then stay where they land. Those are the people that employers are looking for. 
• In communications, most people will pay their dues at some time in their careers. One has to be willing to work for free and still be willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done--and get the job done well. 
• Give every job 100%. Even if you aren't getting paid, you could use the experience!  
• Overall, employers are looking for people that are creative, hard-working, and strategically-minded. People that are solid writers, and people that will give the client every dollar's worth of work that they are hired for. 
  

Pete Codella

Codella Marketing

• The corporate web site is no longer the web site that people go to to find out more information on you. Google is. 
• Ever heard of the Google golden triangle? It's where the reader's eyes automatically go on a Google search page of results. I attempted to put it in this, but I think I'll just send you to the slides instead. (It's page 12 of the 44.) Codella used this illustration to show the three most important links of any company. From what I got out of this, it seems that those links inside the Google golden triangle are going to give the reader his first impression on the company. Try to influence which links pop up first. 
• Everyone approaches things differently. Ideas are going to be different. Different is not bad, because as long as it succeeds, why does it matter? There is no magic bullet! 
• Be strategic. Though technology and all of its different services can be incredibly useful, it doesn't mean that one has to use every single feature to be successful. Use what will be useful to you! 
• New technologies don't necessarily replace old technologies, and aren't necessarily "better." TV didn't replace radio. They fulfill different parts of media and information transfer. Again, use what will be the most beneficial to you. Some companies will have no use for flickr, while other companies will thrive off of its visual benefits.
• Diversify! Put eggs in as many baskets as possible. (See slide five) 

   Social Media Tools

• RSS feeds - pull vs push. The media has gone from being pushed upon us to us pulling the information we want and/or need from the media. Codella mentioned Newsgator and Feedburner as two things he likes to use to manage feeds and things like that. 
• Blogging and Microblogging. Things like blogspot (blogging) and twitter (microblogging) are incredibly useful for a company. Bill Marriott's blog has drawn thousands of people to marriott.com's site! 
• The most underutilized tool ever: Online Newsrooms. An additional basket to put information about your company, information that you can control for other people to see, and more information that google can pull from in its search results. Frequent publishing, or certain keywords are two things that draws google to your web pages.
• Social (virtual) networking, such as Facebook.
  
• Multimedia sharing.  = Youtube! 
• Wikis. User generated content. (Wikipedia is one example of a wiki. A wiki is not necessarily an encyclopedia, as some may think.)
• Key takeaways: New technology has forever changed the role of public relations practitioners. Utilize social media tools to secure top search placement. 

This conference was awesome... AND!!! According to usuprssa on twitter... 

"Utah PR Conference just won 08-09 PR Campaign of the Year! YAY! Congrats!!"

I feel that this recognition was well deserved. Congratulations to the USU PRSSA team. 

I'm there!

I just registered for our PR Conference coming up on this Monday!

I can't wait to see what I can learn from it. I think the networking lunch is a way sweet idea.

I'll definitely blog about how it goes next week!

two more reasons to love gmail: april fools + UNDO SEND?!

I love it when I can see companies have a sense of humor.

Did anyone else see Gmail's April Fool's joke this year? I absolutely love how they do one every year. It makes me laugh so hard. This year's was pretending to be an application called Autopilot that one could add that would custom build one's email to sound exactly like the person sending it, depending on the settings it was put to. So, for example, a quick note to your workout buddy would sound very different from the email that this app would compose as a memo to your boss.
Two of my favorite toggles were "brevity" and "emoticons."

Oh my.

So funny.

(Link here)

Originally this post was titled "One more reason to love Gmail"

Okay, make that two reasons. Check out this sweet development I just found on the gmail blog. UNDO SEND?!?! NO WAY! Yes way

Check it out.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-in-labs-undo-send.html

Free Fonts!!

I love the word free. Who doesn't? It's the college student's favorite word!

In class last week, we found some awesommmme free font websites. It had never completely occurred to me that if the fonts on your computer were not enough, you could go online, find one you like, stick it on your computer.. and voila! Your new favorite font.

I would definitely recommend exporting your finished work as a pdf file so that everyone can appreciate your new font, as most computers will take your custom font and turn it into something ugly that came with the default settings... but yes. Anyway.

Who knew it was so easy to get just one font? I had always supposed new fonts just came on gigantic cds with hundreds of new fonts for big bucks, and were therefore not really high on my priority list... but that's why I go to college. I find out new stuff every day!!

Before I start sounding like some plastic advertisement, I'll just give you some of the sites we played with.

My favorite URL is the first one. Totally brings me back to middle school... the era of "da bomb." Gotta love it.

• dafont

• creamundo

• urbanfonts

• 1001freefonts

Enjoy the freeness of it all!!!