Year in Review

Over the past semester, I have found this class to be very beneficial. Having public relations major I expect to use many of the skills that I have learned in this class. Many of the assignments in this class will help me in my future line of work. Learning to use publisher to complete the newsletter will be a good skill to have in the business world. I also really enjoyed making the Facebook fan page. As prevalent as social media is becoming in our society and the business world, knowing your way around the social media site is another great skill to have. My Facebook fan page is for the Kettle Moraine Figure Skating Club and has so far been a great success among its members. The prevalence of social media was also apparent through the social media case studies. I looked over the success of the Harry Potter Tweets campaign. I also had a great time at the BMA event. It was really refreshing to do some learning outside of the classroom, meet new people, and get some good feedback on my resume and interviewing skills. Blogging was also an interesting experience. I had never blogged before, but I surprisingly found it to be a lot of fun. I don’t think that I had a favorite blog over the semester. I just enjoyed reading other classmates points of view on topics that were being discussed in class. Overall I really enjoyed this class.

Comet Branding

When listening to Sarah Meaney’s presentation, I found out that she had a lot of great public relations information to offer. She spoke a lot about how get your company out there and how to properly use social media to do that. The main focus of her presentation was how to format your online writing to effectively reach your audience.

One of the points that she stressed was to be concise in your writing, and to get to the point FAST. It amazed me to see how what areas people look at on a website, and how much time they actually spent looking at it. This time is very minimal so some tips she gave us were:

• Write in inverted pyramid style, in which the main idea and most important information come first, and the details follow.
• Highlight the keywords
• Use digits rather than spelling out the numbers
• And, Use bulleted lists :)

Another important thing to think about, not only when writing online, but for all writing in general, is to clearly define your audience. With a specific audience in mind, it is easier to keep them interested because you can use specific language to target them. When writing for your audience, keep in mind tone, format, voice, flow, content, and length.

Finally, looking over Sarah’s website for Comet Branding, I really enjoyed it. It has a fun layout, and has many tabs relative to the objective. However I think working links to all of their clients sites would be a great addition!