The Glitz, The Glamour & The Grind

On Monday April 6th, as part of a school class, I had to hold an event. All of my class was split up into groups and each group had to put on a seminar type of event with a theme. My group decided to focus our seminar on entertainment PR.

We put together an event that we cleverly titled The Glitz, The Glamour & The Grind: The Skinny on Entertainment PR. We held the seminar down at Toronto's Second City Theatre. The whole thing was a great success.

We had three speakers come to talk to the students that attended. Anna Von Frances of Pink Mafia, a full service PR firm in Toronto that specializes in entertainment events. Daniel Shehori who does PR for The Second City on top of other live comedy shows, and Nick Poireir who is a recent graduate of my program and currently is doing communications for LuminaTO: Toronto's Festival of Arts and Creativity. The speakers spoke about their experiences in entertainment PR, gave the students advice on what to do, what not to do, trends in the business and then answered questions from the audience.

On top of that, to add some entertainment value to tie in with our entertainment theme, The Second City kindly donated us some of their cast to do some improv for us. They went over as a hit, and we got to make an ass of our teacher on stage.

Overall, I think the whole thing was a success.

Here's some pics from the day:

Lot's of pics today so no music video.

I'm out.

40deuce

Irony At Its Finest

Last night was opening night for the Blue Jays 2009 season. I was lucky enough to be one of the 48,000 people in attendance. The game was amazing with the Jays blowing Detroit out of the water 12-5, but something was wrong.

I couldn't get any service for my cell phone during the game. No phone calls. No text messages. No internet for surfing, emails or twitter. That didn't just happen with my phone. Everyone around me seemed to be having the same no service issues.

Does anyone else find it kind of ironic that I was in the ROGERS center and my ROGERS cell phone wouldn't get service??

Just a thought.

That is all.

40deuce

THE NUMBERS DON'T MEAN JACK (NOT A LOST POST)

For the past couple of weeks (aside from not writing any blog posts here) I have been lucky enough been taking part in the beta trial of an online app that has a connection to Twitter. Now, I'm not at liberty to speak the name of said app, but that's not the important part.

What I want to talk about is a certain feature this app I'm beta testing has. Technically, I am not giving anything away about this specific app because this function is not native to just this application.

A lot of websites are popping up these days to help people build up their Twitter communities. Some of these allow you to look for people who may be tweeting about things you're interested in. These sites usually allow users to categorize themselves and then be sought out. Some sites I use for this for this are We Follow and Just Tweet It.

On the other side are sites or apps that do what my beta test app does; they will automatically do a mass follow of people for you. All you have to do is click a button and and the program will grab hundreds of of random people and add them to your Twitter follow list.

Here's my beef; I just can't figure out why anyone would want to do this????

Sure some people out there may be playing the numbers game in Twitter, but to me that defeats the whole point. Sure, I'm not the most popular person in the Twitterverse, but I'm ok with that, because most of the people I follow I followed for a reason. I follow people who I'm interested in. People who I think I can have a good conversation with. People who I won't ever talk to, but still like to hear what they have to say. I follow a few different news aggregating accounts on different subjects. Sometimes even a celeb or two because they can be cool or funny (I highly recommend checking out Kenny Powers from Eastbound and Down. F'n hilarious!). But, I never follow someone just in hopes that they will follow me back.

I'm not interested in becoming the guy with the most followers on Twitter (although I probably wouldn't be upset about it if it happened). I'd rather connect with people and have meaningful conversations and start friendships.

Social media should be about actually being social, not looking the coolest. And that's all I have to say about that.

40deuce