Nettie Hartsock Rocks Mass Comm. Week

To be honest, when I was first assigned to blog about the event "PR Trends: How to incorporate blogs, wikis, and social media into your campaign" I was turned off. Not because of the speaker Nettie Hartsock, I didn’t know who she was initially, but because it was a PR event. I’m a print major, not a PR major so I didn’t have any interest in hearing anyone speak about PR. In addition to that, the title of the event has the word "campaign" in it which turned me off even more because I thought it was going to be about a political campaign. (This shows just how ignorant I am about PR matters because obviously the presentation was about PR campaigns, not political ones. I’m an idiot.) Anyway, I didn’t think that I was going to get much out of it, but I’m really glad that I went because almost everything mentioned was relevant to journalism as well as PR and Nettie Hartsock seemed like a lovely person.

She is a mommy and a techie which I found to be really cool. "Can you believe that I’m a mom from San Marcos who does all this other stuff? she said. And I still go to HEB and nobody knows me!" Nettie started out in journalism and then crossed over to the "dark side." Her words not mine! She said that in reality lots of people start out as journalist and then make the move to PR. Being a journalist gave her the ability to tell a story. Her job is chiefly to help individuals convey their message to the world. Some of the publications she contributes to are eWeek and PC Magazine.

According to Nettie by the time you get out of school you will find that the movement in PR is towards transparency. PR doesn’t work traditionally anymore. Getting people to understand that the new web is totally transparent is hard to do. She warned that if you are doing marketing tell the truth because bloggers will find you out. Get a blog now and start practicing was her advice because you are going to need to know about blogs to be competitive. Wordpress and typepad are blogs she suggests using. You make a blog because you want people to be able to have an open conversation with you. Nettie said that this can sometimes be scary for PR people because they want to control the conversation. She warned that is really important to be aware that the bloggosphere reacts immediately because they aren’t bound by editors. Whatever they want to write they can post to their blog. Her advice is to "Be brave, tell the truth, be honest be transparent. You will be surprised at how many people on the web want that."

Nettie also mentioned the importance of social networks. She said that social networking Website Linkedin is important when you’re still in college because groups connect together on it and post jobs that you otherwise wouldn’t have known about. She also mentioned Twitter which is similar to facebook and myspace only twitter seems to have a little bit more staying power because they control the advertising on their site. Twitter is a real time social networking tool. Nettie talked about Animato which will enable you to make a multi- media presentation and then post it on a blog.

You will see more and more that podcasting is being used as a way to push out a message. Nettie urged that we learn how to do it now. The cool thing about podcasts is that you can create them for virtually free. Blogtalkradio is similar to xm radio because people can subscribe to certain channels but it’s free. As a company or an individual it’s a unique way to get your message out.

Pictures coming soon hopefully. I only got the chance to take two before I broke my friend's camera...