Here they are! The 2009-10 E-Board Speeches

The 08-09  E-Board decided to spice things up a little bit this year and make videos of the candidates for E-Board.We hope this will cut down on time at the elections, and will also help you get to know the candidates a little bit more!

Each video is one minute or less, so take some time to go through and see what they have to offer? These are your leaders for next year, so let’s make a great decision together!

For President:

Debbie Ebalobo

Erica Holland

Lauren Rohde

For Creative Consultants Director:

Katie Pniewski

For PR Director:

Courtney Garmhaus

Sara Fon

Hannah Keating

Marah Lidey

Lizzy Nephew

Carissa Sinacori

(Lauren Rohde)

Caroline Smith

For Treasurer:

(Courtney Garmhaus)

Katie Hart

Amanda Herrington

(Hannah Keating)

(Carissa Sinacori)

For Secretary:

(Courtney Garmhaus)

Isha Ghodke

(Katie Hart)

(Amanda Herrington)

(Erica Holland)

(Hannah Keating)

Melanie Murphy

(Caroline Smith)

For PRecedent Editor:

Rebecca Holton

(Lizzy Nephew)

For Historian:

(Katie Hart)

(Erica Holland)

(Amanda Herrington)

(Marah Lidey)

(Carissa Sinacori)

Ally Walls

For Webmaster:

(Isha Ghodke)

(Rebecca Holton)

(Lizzy Nephew)

Help Out the Athens Convention and Visitors Bureau

Our friends at the Athens Convention and Visitors Bureau are sending around a survey asking about internships we’ve held and our experiences with them. Please be a good citizen and fill out the survey for them.

It’s only eight questions and takes two minutes. Seriously, I’ve already done it.

Go here to see the survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=I_2bH_2bF9v_2bh9J4TWg7EFnj2A_3d_3d

Thanks for being great in general. I hope everyone has a fabulous weekend!

Public Relations in the Music Industry

By: Jami Houston, senior from Americus, Ga.

The following is an informational interview conducted with Michelle Roche, owner of Michelle Roche Media Relations, Athens, Ga. This company specializes in all aspects of publicity within the music industry. In addition to managing tour press for various musical artists and festivals, Ms. Roche also takes on promotional projects for DVD releases, such as Adult Swim’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

What do you find most challenging about your current job?

The most challenging part of owning my own company is the financial aspect, such as dealing with taxes and billing. It’s also a challenge deciding the most effective use of my time and maintaining a balance between work and a personal life.

What are the most and least rewarding aspects of your job?

The most rewarding is definitely being my own boss and having the opportunity to travel whenever I want. I usually travel five or six weeks each year. It’s also nice to have respect within the community as a local business owner. The down side of owning my own company is that no one pays for my vacation time and benefits.

Do you have any special words of warning or encouragement as a result of your experiences?

Internships, internships, internships! I think you should have several internships while in college because employers are looking more and more for graduates to have real world experience. Also, I would pay close attention to the length of the internship and the knowledge that can be gained from it. For example, if your internship was only two months, I know that you only received two-months-worth of experience, as opposed to a longer opportunity that would allow for more hands-on experience.

Meeting Tomorrow…woop woop!

Hey everyone!

Get ready for an awesome meeting TOMORROW, Wednesday, April 1 (this is not a joke, even though it’s April Fools) at 6:30 in SLC 101.

We’re having Kaitlin Tenery from Cobb Energy speak to us, and we should get some great information.

Plus, there’s a 50/50 chance we’ll have a Skype date with Eddie Garrett, the VP of New Media for Porter Novelli’s office in D.C. He’s in NYC right now teaching Pepsi executives how to Twitter, so we’ll see if they can make time for us.

Hopefully we’ll see you tomorrow!

Whooda Thunk It? Twitter Analytics: 7 Ways to Analyze Twitter Streams

In a blog post I read on Social Media Today, I found some extremely interesting information relating to how to analyze people’s Twitter accounts.

Haven’t you ever wondered how to compare people’s accounts? Who posts the most? Who has the most followers? Who’s a faithful Re-Tweeter? All of these programs help answer those questions.

As communicators, we want to reach those who will make recommendations to their friends about whatever we’re trying to promote: a band, a new drug, a Coke product, an anti-wrinkle cream…you get the picture. So, naturally, we want to find those influencers and see how we can persuade them to persuade others to use or buy our product (or support our company, or whatever).

Disclaimer: I usually don’t do this, but I’ve copied and pasted each description of the programs from the original blog post. I thought he could do a better job of explaining it than I could. Plus, it’s early in the morning, and I haven’t had my coffee yet.

#1: Twitalyzer

“provides activities analysis of any Twitter user, based on social media success yardsticks. Its metrics include (a) Influence score, which is basically your popularity score on Twitter (b) signal-to-noise ratio (c) one’s propensity to ‘retweet’ or pass along others’ tweets (d) velocity – the rate one’s updates on Twitter and (e) clout – based on how many times one is cited in tweets. Its Time-based Analysis of Twitter Usage produces graphical representation of progression on various measures. Using Twitalyzer is a easy; just enter your Twitter ID and that’s it! It doesn’t require any password to use its service. Speed of analysis is depending on the size of your Followed and Followers lists.”

#2: Microplaza

“offers an interesting way to make sense of your Twitter streams. Called itself “your personal micro-news agency,” it aggregates and organizes links shared by those you follow on Twitter and display them as newstream. Status updates that contain similar web links are aggregated into ’tiles.’ Within a tile, you can see updates from those you follow and also those you don’t. Another interesting feature is ‘Being Someone’, which you can peek into someone’s world and see their ’tiles’; designed to facilitate information discovery. You can also organize those you follow into groups or ‘tribes’. You can create, for example, a knitting ‘tribe’ to easily what URLs your knitting friends are tweeting. In addition, you can bookmark ’tiles’ for future reference. Its yet-to-be-released feature, Mosaic, allows users to group together the bookmarked ’tiles’ and turn them into social objects – for sharing and discussion. At the time of this posting, MicroPlaza is still in private beta.”

#3: Twist

“offers trends of keywords or product name, based what Twitter users are tweeting about. You can see frequency of a keyword or product name being mentioned over a period a week or a month and display them on a graph. Select an area on the graph to zoom into trend for specific time range. Click on any point on the graph to see all tweets posted during a specific time. One can also see the latest tweets on the topic. Twist also allows you do a trend comparison of two (or more) keywords. Its graphs are embeddable on any website. A simple but effective tool for trending, similar to what Google Trends is doing for search queries.”

#4: Twitturly

“tracks popular URLs tracker on Twitter. With Digg-style interface, it displays 100 most popular URLs shared on Twitter over the last 24 hours. On Digg, people vote for a particular web content, whereas on Twitterurly, each time a user share a link, it is counted as 1 vote. This is a good tool to see what people are ‘talking’ about in Twitterville and see total tweets that carry the links. Its URL stats provides information on number of tweets in last 24 hrs, last 1 week and last 1 month. It also calculates total estimated reach of the tweets. Another interesting site is Tweetmeme, which can filter popular URLs into blogs, images, videos and audios.”

#5: Tweetstats

“is useful to reveal tweeting behavior of any Twitter users. It consolidates and collates Twitter activity data and present them in colorful graphs. Its Tweet Timeline is probably the most interesting, as it shows month-by-month total tweets since your joined Twitter (TweetStats showed Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, started tweeting since March 2006; 80 tweets during that month). Twitterholic can also show when a person joined Twitter but not in graphical format. Other metrics include (a) Aggregate Daily Tweets – total tweets, by day (c) Aggregate Hourly Tweets – total tweets, by hour (d) Tweet Density: hourly Twitter activities over 7 days period (e) Replies to: top 10 persons you’ve replied and (f) Interfaces Used: top 10 clients used to access Twitter. In addition, its Tweet Cloud allows you to see the popular words you used in your tweets.”

#6: Twitterfriends

“focuses on conversation and information aspects of Twitter users’ behaviors. Two key metrics are Conversational Quotient (CQ) and Links Quotient (LQ). CQ measures how many tweets were replied whereas LQ measures how many tweets contained links. Its TwitGraph displays six metrics – Twitter rank, CQ, LQ, Retweet Quotient, Follow cost, Fans and @replies. Its interactive graph (using Google Visualization API) can displays relationships between two variables. In addition, you can search for conversations between two Twitter users. This app seems to slice-and-dice data in more ways compared to other applications listed here.”

#7: Thummit Quickrate

“offers sentiments analysis, based on conversations on Twitter. This web application identifies latest buzzwords, actors, movies, brands, products, etc. (called ‘topics’) and combines them with conversations from Twitter. It does sentiment analysis to determine whether each Twitter update is Thumms up (positive), neutral or Thumms down (negative). Click on any topic to display opinions on the topic found on Twitter. In addition, it allows people to vote on topics via its website or mobile phones. The idea behind this app is good but still has some kinks to work out.”

#8: Tweeteffect

“matches your tweets timeline with your gain/lose followers timeline to determine which tweet makes you lost or gain followers. It analyze the latest 200 tweets and highlights tweets that coincides with you losing or gaining two (or more) followers in less than 5 minutes. This application simplistically assumed that your tweet is the sole factor affecting your gain/lose followers pattern. But, in reality, there are many other factors involved. Nevertheless, TweetEffect is still a fun tool to use; just don’t take the results too seriously.”

So you’re thinking about running for office…

Hi, everyone!

I hope all of you are staying dry amidst this nasty weather. My hope is they’ll turn on the fountain on Herty Field now that we’ve had enough water to last a while!

Anyway, all the officers have written little blurbs about what qualities or skills a candidate might need to have for the specific offices.  I’ll post them in a couple of different posts, so stay tuned for more updates. Our first two today are the offices of secretary and PRecedent editor. Yay!

So you wanna be the secretary…

As secretary of PRSSA, email routine and organization is key.

I serve as a representative and recruiter when students inquire for more information.

It is my job to devote love and attention to my email inbox! <3

Within this responsibility, I nurture the listserv (appropriate information without flooding), organize and send the Web master internship listings, answer questions and serve as a well-presenced liaison, as well as direct any other questions I may receive.

The main project as secretary is collecting membership applications, then organizing and sending a document of all members to PRSA Nationals.

However, all semester you work hard and help serve as a cohesive part of the e-board.

In return, you build wonderful relationships with your future partners, meet and dine with active professionals and add a wonderful experience to your resume/career - all while becoming an email wiz

Good luck with elections!

- Lauren Rausch

So you wanna be the PRecedent editor…

Think you want to be PRecedent Editor? I’m here to give you the good, the bad and the ugly!

If you love graphic design and editing, you’re the one for the job. The best editor is one who can pace themselves – no procrastinators here! You’ll be responsible for getting people to write on time, so you can design on time and have it to Dr. Jones on time… you get the picture.

Your biggest challenge will be finding writers. Be prepared to visit classes to recruit writers – don’t be shy. For the first few months, I wrote 2–4 articles for each issue. All that said, I couldn’t say enough about what I’ve learned over the past year, and the PRecedent is a fantastic way to gain experience.

- Leslie Emanuele

To see a complete listing of the officer descriptions, click here. (It will take you to another page, and you’ll have to click on “click here” again. Why? I don’t know…)

…and this time, we’re taking orders!

That’s right, everyone!

The Great PRSSA Biscuit Sale is once more coming to a campus near you.

…and this time, we’re taking orders!

From 8:30-11 a.m. this Friday, March 20, we’ll be at the Arch once more selling plain and chicken biscuits from Chick-fil-A to passerbys and offices on campus.

If you’d like to place an order for your office, please e-mail prssabiscuits@gmail.com and include the following information:

• number of biscuits (plain= $2, chicken= $2.50)
• liaison’s name
• office name (where you are on campus, so we can find you)
• delivery time (between 8:30 and 11 a.m.)

Sound good? If you have any questions about it, just include it in your e-mail.

For all you on-the-fly buyers, we SOLD OUT last time, so hurry and get them while they’re hot!

We hope this chicken biscuit sale will be even more successful than the last one, but it’s up to you to make it happen! All the proceeds go towards our professional in residence program that will help compensate a public relations professional to come speak and hang out with us for a week…a different kind of learning!

We hope all of you will turn out for the GREAT PRSSA BISCUIT SALE!!

P.S. If you’re wondering about the picture of Donkey, the phrase “and this time, we’re taking orders” reminds me of Donkey’s line, “and in the mo’nin, I’m makin’ WAFFLES!” Thought you’d find it funny.

Better late than never.

I have been so busy the past couple of weeks that I totally forgot to update everyone on the results of our Chick-fil-A chicken biscuit sale.

In a few words, it was very successful. We had to put in a second order, and we sold out by 10:15! I seriously think it was the apple butter that drew in everyone.

I’d like to give a special thanks to our biggest contributors, the offices on North Campus. Before 8:30, we had a few people come and make orders of 10 biscuits! That’s where the money is, people, and you better bet we’re going to hit up those offices the next time we sell the tasty delights.

Some other people who came by were Professor Kristin English, friend Erin Gentry, and some Creative Consultants members. Yes! We all got a big kick out

of everyone’s smiles when they saw we were selling the biscuits. You could tell who the people were who had hurriedly run out of the house without breakfast.

Service with a smile, we had, and made lots of money…for that we were glad.

Here’s a fun fact: we had an alum stop by who saw Dr. Russell’s tweet about our biscuit sale! Believe it or not, she’s from NYC and had been in Atlanta for the week and just so happened to come to Athens to check out the place before she left. Good thing she saw Russell’s tweets! The Grady network is strong, friends.

So, watch out for our next sale! We’re predicting it to be the Friday we get back from Spring Break. What does that mean? Save $2.50 and come support us. We’d love to greet you with smiling faces.

Happy SB09!

18 Georgia Desperados On Our D.C. Journey

Well, we just finished the second day of our D.C. journey, and I’m just now mustering up enough energy to write a post about it!

So far, we’ve visited Valerie Elston at Levick Strategic Communications, Carolyn Tieger at Porter Novelli, Senator Johnny Isackson at the Capitol and Erin Caldwell at Edelman. Our schedule has been super busy, but we’ve been loving every minute of it!

Washington D.C. is a city you can easily fall in love with. I’ve never been in a place where I feel a part of something so much bigger than myself. Everyone’s dressed to the nines; the streets are clean; important conversations are going on EVERYWHERE, and everyone is always talking about politics.

Now, I like to consider myself a concerned citizen of America, but I am by no means a self-proclaimed politics lover. I was worried about not being obsessed with politics if I moved to D.C., but Mrs. Tieger told me not to fear. I figured it was something you’d learn more and more about the longer you lived here, but she helped calm my fears about it.

Ah, yes. What have we learned so far?

After consulting with my roommates, @mturner21 and @carlyed, these are the lessons we feel we’ve learned from each place we visited:

• Levick: “Ask stupid questions intelligently.” Gene Grabowski, Senior Vice President, told us this, and we all enjoyed the breath of fresh air. He said that sometimes interns are afraid to ask questions, but if you ask all your questions intelligently (even if they are a little stupid), people will be glad to help you. We were so excited to have Gene grace us with his presence. Britney Watson had even listened to a podcast he recorded about A-Rod earlier in the week and told him he was like a celebrity to her. So cute!
• Porter Novelli: “Not every blog is influential, but every influential person has a blog.” YES! All of us wanted to stand up and say, “Amen, brother!” when Eddie Garrett, SVP of Digital Marketing at Porter Novelli’s D.C. office, told this to us yesterday. It’s so true, though! We were talking about how to reach people through social media, and he connected it just like that for us. Eddie is a “Double Dawg.” He has an ABJ from Grady and an MBA from Terry. Needless to say, Georgia people are SMART!
• Senator Isackson: Success is about relationships. Senator Isackson told us that if you care about a person for who he or she really is, despite race, color, ethnicity, background, or whatever you can come up with, you’ll be truly successful in life, and people will trust you.
• Edelman: As an intern, it’s SUPER important for you to always ask your superior what the “next step” is after you’ve completed a task. Normal people do only what’s required, but Edelman interns (and Grady students) are expected to go beyond the call of duty. After all, if you are hired full time as an account coordinator and don’t know what to do after writing a press release, you’re not going to get anywhere. Common sense, y’all.

That’s pretty much it for our adventure so far! D.C. is amazing. Grady is awesome. Weather is cold. Sleep is lacking…but we’re learning so much.

Go dawgs!

Coach C!

I thought this e-mail was so awesome that I couldn’t help but post about it.

Cheer on “Coach C!”

All Grady and pre-Grady students are invited to stop by the Dean’s Office and pick up your free tickets for Thursday night’s Lady Dawgs game, where Grady Dean Cully Clark will serve as guest coach as the Dawgs take on the LSU Lady Tigers.

Dean Clark will be one of four deans “coaching” at the 7 p.m. game. The dean who brings the most people to the game will win a Nike warm-up and four tickets to the 2009 NCAA Women’s Basketball First and Second Rounds at the Gwinnett Arena in March.

Dean Clark, who now refers to himself as “Coach C,” is hoping for a large Grady College student turnout to support his coaching debut.

Tickets from the Dean’s Office will entitle bearers to halftime refreshments in the hospitality room, located under the video board. All Grady guests must sign-in during halftime for “Coach C” to receive credit for their participation.

Stop by the Dean’s Office today!