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.

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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.

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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.

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Is Twitter the Next Great Search Engine??

I'm going to start this post off with a little story.

Today I was doing some research for ideas for an Online PR class that I'm helping my course director put together. While looking for some informative links to show him I came across a problem. I was looking for SMRs (Social Media Releases) to show my prof how different they are from old skool regular news releases. When I googled (do you capitalize that if it's being used as a verb?) "social media release" the top four hits were blogs and articles of peoples advice on how they think a social media release should look. Semi-helpful, but not what I was looking for.

I decided to try a different approach. Since I know that a lot of my Twitter friends work in and around marketing and PR, I decided to throw my query out to them. Within five minutes of me posting my question on Twitter I recieved six responses. Four of them were people on my list of friends with links and/or recommendations of people to talk to. The other two responses were from professionals who deal specifically with SMRs. One from Canadian News Wire (CNW) and the other from Marketwire, who each directed me to examples on their sites.

I don't know about you, but I find stuff like that incredible.

It also made me start thinking, is Twitter the next great search engine? Let's think about it for a minute...

- I was looking for useful information, and people I actually know were able to make recommendations on where to find this info. If you can't trust your friends, who can you trust?

- Professionals from all kinds of companies monitor sites like Twitter to see when people mention them. I'm sure that both the representatives from Marketwire and CNW had real time searches going for key words like "SMR" or "news release" so they could respond quickly. Other companies do the same thing. They search for mentions of their companies or products and respond to the people talking about them. I remember one time a friend had a problem with UPS, tweeted about it, and a few minutes later a UPS representative asked her via twitter how he could help make the problem right. Meaning, you can get any kind of info directly from companies themselves.

- You can see what everyone around the world has to say about a topic. There is now a plethora (I like that word) of Twitter search engines such as Twitter Search, TweetGrid, Twitscoop, and many more. On these search engines you can type in a key word or phrase and see what anyone in the "twitterverse" is saying or linking to about that topic. This is great for finding reviews and what people are saying about products and services, or even things like movies.

These are just a few reasons off the top of my head as to why Twitter is sometimes more useful than Google for finding things.

I'd love to hear what you all think about this, but I just added a new theme to my blog and the comments section doesn't seem to be working properly. I'm trying to fix that so please be patient. You can always tweet me your thoughts at @40deuce.

*UPDATE* comments seem to be working again, so please leave one.

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2 Posts In 1 - Both About Geeks Having Fun

The title rhymes. You like that? Thought so.

So first, I'd like to start off by admitting that I'm a terrible person.I made a promise at the beginning of the year to both you, my readers (if you actually exist), and myself that I would try to post more often here, and I have failed. All I can say is I will try harder. You can believe me or not, that's your call (I wouldn't), but I will try harder.

Now on to the real stuff....

I'm going to try something a little different in this post. First, I have two things to talk about in one post because of my slacking. And second, this will be a very photo heavy post. I borrowed a few pics from some people and want to share them with you.

On February 12th I took place in a really awesome event called the Twestival. This was a global fund raising party that happened in 180 cities. All 180 cities had a party where people, most of whom are Twitter people, got together to meet their Twitter friends in real life and raise money for Charity: Water, a charity that helps those in the world that don't have access to clean water. 

I went to the party in Toronto, also known as #TwestivalTO. Toronto's party was held at Circa night club and was a fantastic party. I got to meet a lot of local people that I speak to on Twitter for the first time beyond my computer screen, and it was just a generally fun party. These geeks knew how to party!

Overall the entire Twestival was a success. The Toronto party alone raised over $10,000, and worldwide $250,000USD was raised for Charity: Water. 

On a side note, I also made the news while at the party. Check it out here.

The second geek oriented event I attended this month was PodCampTO.  PodCamp is what's known as an "unconference." It was an event where a whole bunch of geeks got together at Ryerson University for a weekend to discuss all sorts of topics revolving around online media. The entire event was put together and run by volunteers and was free to attend. 

This was a great event where I again met a bunch of local people that I only knew online previously, but more than that I learned a lot. For two days straight I attended half hour sessions about all kinds of different topics ranging from how to build a brand on Twitter to the future of social media in Canada. I also got to see a live taping of the Inside PR podcast which I listen to all the time.

If you happened to miss the event, most of the sessions were recorded and should be up on the PodCampTO website in the next few days.

Here's some pics of the weekend in no particular order:

One last note before I finish this gianormous post: This will be the last time you see my blog with this look as I'm currently on the hunt for a new theme. See you next time with a different look.

Twestival Pics Courtesy Of:

Rannie Turingan aka @Photojunkie (http://www.rannieturingan.com/)

& Shawn Hawaii

PodCampTO Pics Courtesy Of:

Dave Fleet (http://davefleet.com)

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2009 = The Summer to Re-Live My Childhood

This weekend the Super Bowl had me on the edge of my seat. Which is unusual, since I'm not really a huge football fan.

For one, the game was awesome. Even as a guy that only watches football when he's with other people that want to watch it, I have to admit it was a really exciting game.

The second reason though, was because someone had shown me something the night before the game. They showed me leaked Super Bowl commercials for two movies I've been waiting for, and I wanted to see them in hi-def, not the digitally looking blurry versions I saw the night before. Unfortunately, they didn't show either of them in Canada. Thank god I saw them already.

Two of my favorite cartoons from my childhood will both be making comebacks as live action movies this summer.

First, since we've seen them before, is Transformers 2: Revenge Of The Fallen:

Second, for the first time ever in live action, G.I. Joe!!

(I hope Sgt. Slaughter makes a guest appearance in that one)

And just to finish off this post, for anyone who cares, this was my favorite Super Bowl ad this year:

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When Will the UFC Meet the ACC?

I'm a big fan of watching guys beat the shit out of each other. It's even better when it's a sanctioned fight and not just two dudes outside a bar (although I enjoy watching that as well). I even considered going to Montreal last year to watch UFC's first ever fight in Canada.

Unfortunately, it was really hard to get tickets to that, and I didn't go. But not for a lack of trying.

We wanted to go to Montreal because they allow fights there, while here in Ontario, the sport is not allowed.

Anyways, last night while I was watching Georges St. Pierre fight BJ Penn, I heard Joe Rogan mention something interesting. He said that GSP was named the Canadian Athlete of the Year for 2008.

After a quick google search I found out that it's true. Don't believe me? Check here.

With that said, it made me want to know when the Ontario government will change their mind and allow the UFC to come and hold events here? If GSP is the Canadian athlete of the year, that must mean that ALL of Canada voted him in, not just Montreal.

There's obviously a market for the sport all across the country. The sport has gained so much popularity over the past few years, and other markets across North America are starting to see that MMA is a real sport and not just dudes beating the crap out of each other (although technically it's both). I want the Ontario government to realize this as well.

Dana White, owner of the UFC, said that he will be making a big campaign on Ontario to sanction the sport this year.

Let's just keep our fingers crossed.

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