Cape Town is Changing

I’ve never been to an Annual General Meeting (AGM) before, so this was my first one this evening which was held by PRISA: the Public Relations Institute of South Africa. I wasn’t sure what to expect as what I know from AGM’s, they usually tend to be quite boring and unnecessary. This however, proved for interesting and and a learning opportunity for us all.

 We arrived at the City Hall in Cape Town at 5pm for registration. We entered into a room that was untouched by modern architecture and still kept its original look. It was beautiful and turns out it’s only R200 to rent the room out – so anyone interested in having an event, function or paty, have a look into hiring the room in the City Hall.

 

The first speaker began with the meeting agenda and minutes from the last meeting, giving us an overview of what was discussed. She mentioned that when an AGM was to happen, participants/members had to be notified 21 days before the event. We were then presented with the chairperson of the Western Cape region for PRISA, Aloysious Gowne. He added that the Western Cape was voted region of the year 3 times in a row but unfortunately experienced a decline since last year in terms of membership and participation, especially after the leader left. He described the scenario like this:

 

The Captain of the “plane” decided to parachute out and left the rest of the group on the plane with the turbulence that they were experiencing. The group had two choices: to parachute out of the plane too or to take control. They chose to take control of the flight and be the catalyst of change.

 

Since then they outlined the goals for the coming year:

·         To revive the region

·         To save the organisational structure first

-          To do this, they met with members. They asked the questions such as what can PRISA do for you? What were the threats? They also conducted a SWOT analysis.

-          PRISA decided to focus on different individuals challenges and needs.

-          They wanted to see continuity and movement forward and wanted to look for partnerships.

-          They wanted to increase the value of membership for very member. This was the main strategic plan for PRISA last year.

 

We were then graced with the presence of a guest speaker by the name of Alayne Reesberg, CEO of World Design Capital 2014. She spoke to us continuously about the World Design Capital in which Cape Town won the bid for in 2014. It originated from Montreal, Canada. The event looks at how design changes and reminds consumers of what they can and can’t do.  Cape Town was seen as being able to offer creativity and ingenuity. The main question we ask ourselves from this project is: How is Design Having Social Impact? This is where you look at things such as the transport system in the city and how we can design it better to make it more feasible and efficient.

Throughout the year next year, there will be 6 events hosted by the World Design Capital within the mother city and its going to be amazing. The launch is going to be in the beginning of December when the city lights are switched on, and they are hoping to involve the whole of Cape Town in on the event. They will have a thing known as “Design Weeks” every week which showcases designs from a different country each week. They will then have a gala dinner and then extra things such as exhibitions, workshops and try to integrate something into the infamous Jazz Festival that happens every year.

 

The public plays their part in submitting suggestions of things that were started here in South Africa and have made a name for itself overseas. The second round of submissions is in July. Once they have a list of submissions, the team needs to shortlist them down to 200 ideas.

 

The public relations people of the city give the voice to the voiceless. It’s a profession where you have to work on crafting messages. Reesberg wants us, as PR practitioners to go and find the stories. Go and find areas that need improvement and let the World Design team know: give a voice to the voiceless.

 

 

Are companies waisting their time with social media profiles?

With the rapidly changing environment that we’re in today, there’s no doubt that social media has and will continue to dominate. Almost everyone has some form of social media account, whether it is Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn or more.

 

 

Because of the success of these platforms, Facebook and Twitter in particular, it’s no surprise that businesses have decided to combine and create social pages. In my opinion, I don’t think any business is wasting their time by having a social media page. Social media reaches hundreds to thousands within minutes and for free with relative ease. The idea that a company can for example, advertise on their Facebook page about their new product, once posted online, word about it will spread like wildfire. Social media is very good at creating “fires” and can sometimes take quite some time in “putting them out”.

 

Of course though, the business needs to put some work in too and gain followers or likes to their pages or Twitter accounts otherwise everything they say or do won’t be exposed to anyone. This needs to be done through thorough research, persistence and aiming at the right target audience.

 

Brands that are already successful and well-known will not usually have too many problems with gaining an audience on their social media platforms. Studies have shown that many small businesses feel like they’re wasting their time on social media. Many don’t seem to see a return on investment when it comes to their activities. Sometimes small businesses just can’t keep up with social media and they only joined in the first place because of peer and media pressure, even though they don’t know how to get the most out of it.

In my opinion though, social media might be a waste of time for smaller organisations but for bigger companies, it is an opportunity to gain extra publicity and to be able to engage with their customers. It's not a waste of time, given they manage their accounts and reputations on these sites properly.

Graduation 2013

Yes, I know this is delayed but congratulations to classmates who graduated last week Thursday.

I've been stuck with Victoria since Grade 3.

The day finally arrived and we couldn't be happier as it's just been (what felt like) a really long 3 years. Lots of ups, downs, lack of communication, hilarious lectures, dramatic lectures but all in all, 3 years we will never forget.


The people within the class who returned every year, I salute you. It's been tiring but we all stuck together. I'm sorry I didn't get photos of everyone else so all I can include in this post is the pictures of the infamous "white group" as we're known to be.

Much love PR3. It's going to be sad for everyone to part ways at the end of this year x

Twitter - the success (and failure) when it came to the Boston Bomber

As I'm sure everyone has heard by now, the Boston Bomber who was on the run for 4 days has been caught and what a lead up it was!

Now that Dzhokhar has been captured, many people have looked back at his social media during the time he was at large and before.

Friends of Dzhokhar confirmed that his account was @J_Tsar. Some of his tweets included "Ain't no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people" hours after he set off the bombs in the city. At this stage, no one was sure of yet who was the bomber. Two days after the event, he also tweeted "I'm a stress free kind of guy". I don't know about you but it's pretty scary and crazy how he can set off this bomb, kill 3 and injure 180 and then easily just sit there and continue to tweet. Although, then again, he decided to set off a bomb and then have a getaway plan that led him 10 minutes from the site - maybe more like a lack of a getaway plan?

 

 

Oddly enough, there were two or three people who made hoax account claiming to be the bomber - why, I have no idea. These imbeciles would then tweet to @BostonPolice and say "I will kill you as you killed my brother". I suppose this was just some people's way of getting a little excitement and entertainment in their life. Very stupid though!

Also, via Twitter during the day last Thursday, it became a big manhunt to find Dzhokhar and while avidly following each new update, I came across an application that you could download where you could hear the correspondence between police officers via their radios. This was mentioned on 2OceansVibe.com. Of course, the top radio that everyone was listening to was that of the Watertown police, Boston Police and EMS and Cambridge Fire and Rescue.

The problem that came about this though was everything the police were saying, everyone was tweeting. Police had to urge the public not to tweet what was being communicated via the radios. It was very exciting though as the police were honing in on Dzhokhar after they discovered he was hiding in a boat in someones backyard. As the police were planning on catching him, he's Twitter account were literally gaining thousands of followers each second. In the space of 10 minutes, he gained over 75,000 followers.

We sat up at 2am, police radio on the ipad, live streaming of them going in for capture and twitter on in the background - it was like an FBI headquarters in our room and I never felt so much adrenalin over something so far away from us.


The unfortunate thing though, Twitter isn't fully controlled and people nowadays are beginning to believe everything they read on Twitter - I mean if a lot of people are talking about it, surely it's true?

TweetDeck vs. Hootsuite

If part of your job is social media updating or you just simply want to manage your social media all together, the two recommended applications are TweetDeck and Hootsuite.

As part of our media assignment, we were told to make use of both these platforms and compare.
In terms of similarity, they have similar layouts - they have dashboards with separate columns for you to organize your streams, mentions, messages and trends. You can also add as many columns as you like and scroll between them all.

Initially, after the first 10 minutes, I was immediately drawn to TweetDeck much more than that of Hootsuite. While Hootsuite offers all the same things as TweetDeck does, I found it more confusing to navigate myself around it and much of the time, it would display "error message" in loading streams. This is probably due to my internet browser or something but regardless, TweetDeck never gave me that error.

It seems that with Hootsuite you can cover the most social media networks and it offers analytics. It doesn't allow me though to see if anyone has retweeted me and can sometimes be quite slow.

With TweetDeck, I enjoy the fact that I am able to download the program to my computer directly and receive notifications that pop up whilst it's minimised and I am busy with other work. TweetDeck also seems to have the most options when it comes to sharing images which I like because I'm all about images. The con it seems though is it has the least features.

It is easier to navigate with TweetDeck but I suppose that's because of its lack of many features and simplicity. The only downside is that when I click on a link in TweetDeck that is attached to a Facebook or Twitter post, it won't direct me to it whereas Hootsuite does.

Still, I'm happy with having Facebook open in one tab and Twitter open in another but if I was to need to make use of a social media manager, I would definitely side with TweetDeck, especially at the moment as I don't need so many features. If I took up a career that needed me to manage my social media 24/7, I would most probably move to Hootsuite.

Instagram giving us the ability to become a paparazzi

So firstly, I don't have an Instagram account because, well, I don't have an iphone. I would love an iphone, but only for the reason that it takes such amazing photos on the phone and then with the simplicity of Instagram you can upload the image straight away. I do however, have many friends and people I know that make use of this application and had a look at some background knowledge about it.

The thing is, it allows all of us to become like the paparazzi. It can make celebrities out of the ordinary Joe. "If Instagram is helping birth a new breed of paparazzi, we might need a new breed of privacy law to counteract it", says Derrick Harris, writer for website Gigaom. It just seems that it's becoming easier and easier for one to snap and publish photos of everyone and in a world where they can spread faster and faster.

The ease of sharing photos and not thinking of the implications can lead to people losing their jobs, ruining relationships and possibly even facing a jail sentence. The legal questions would come into play with self-publishing, social media and viral content raise. It seems that you can no longer go out in anonymity but risk going out and becoming "an Instagram post away from being part of the digital record and possibly the subject of public ridicule".

Times are changing and it seems that if you miss a step, you will most probably fall behind.

Oscar Pistorius and his online presence

Poor Oscar, ever since he shot and killed girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. he's not been able to hide from the media. That's one thing South Africa's media is very good at - getting as much of a story out as they can, digging up what they can and quite simply, not stopping till the truth is out and the story becomes boring.
Unfortunately for Pistorius, with his status, the media frenzy is not going to end for a while.

Within days of the shooting, Pistorius and his team appointed UK Spin doctor Stuart Higgins, changed Pistorius's official website and supposedly deleted tweets from his Twitter feed. I don't know about you but that's already something fishy that the court can pick up.

Having a look further, I found that Pistorius has trended not only on Twitter but throughout the Internet, worldwide. It was found that online searches for information on Pistorius overtook the amount of searches relating to information on Lance Armstrong during his doping scandal as well as that of Tiger Woods when his infidelity broke out.

I do find it amusing though that all three of these athletes are (or were) sponsored by Nike.

"Just do it" - or not.


Another unfortunate image that was posted of Pistorius was the one of him running with the slogan: "I am the bullet in the chamber". Whilst it has been removed, you can't help but get a slight tingle in your body asking yourself, "what are the chances?" and it's kind of creepy too.

The website it seems is where the Pistorius camp can now convey their messages and their side of the story. However, the case will not only be restricted to that website with constant news being fed via newspapers, radio broadcasts and social media platforms.

One thing is for certain, during the bail hearing of Oscar Pistorius, everyone became a lawyer on Twitter. While we wait for the trial to begin in June, people are able to sum up their facts and prepare their case.

The equality box spreads on social media

It's no doubt that social media is taking over. This can be both a good thing and a bad thing. In the case of this post, it's a positive.

A square box with thick pink horizontal lines (the mathematical equal symbol) has been doing the rounds on all major social media platforms. The image was organised by the Human Rights Campaign when the U.S Supreme Court was taking up arguments in key marriage right cases.

The Human Rights Campaign is the largest LGBT equality-rights advocacy group and political lobbying organisation in the United States. The organisation has more than a million members and supporters.Their logo consists of a yellow equal sign imposed onto a blue background. The logo was then subsequently changed to the colour of pink and red on the 25th of March this year in support of same-sex marriage.

The image has replaced profile pictures on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and elsewhere. The Campaign made it available in red for the colour of love and reached tens of millions of shares within 2 days.


Influential characters such as Beyonce to George Takei to Bud Light and Martha Stewart took part in posting and tweaking this simple image. Beyonce tweeted: "It's about TIME!! #EQUALITY #MarryWhoYouLove".

Other users tweaked the image slightly such as swapping matzoh for the pink lines as Passover begun or others added the Internet sensation known as "Grumpy Cat" with the text explaining that marriage equality would make him happy. Below you can see some of the examples where the image was used:

Peppermint Patty and Macie from the cartoon, Snoopy.

The Facebook "Like" logo.

The Beatles crossing the infamous Abbey Road

Ernie and Bert from Sesame Street.

Martha Stewart created this red velvet cake.

The popular series, True Blood, added fangs to the logo.

Regardless with how an image was tweaked or by who, the fact was that if one was to see this image, they knew today what it stood for and this was due to the fact that social media had allowed it to spread like wildfire to a vast amount of people in a short amount of time.