The End

Throughout this semester in my Social Media Principles class we read a total of three books, "Real-Time Marketing and PR", "Share This" and "Measure What Matters." All books touched base on different aspects of social media, with each book having a different focus. My favorite book from this semester was "Real-Time Marketing and PR" by David Meerman Scott.

In this book, we learned all about how to stay up-to-date in the PR industry and how it's always better to be ahead of the game and attack a problem before it becomes viral. Another point made throughout the book is taking a negative comment offline. When taking these comments offline, you are removing the negativity from your comment and in turn the individual with the comment is going to turn around and have a positive review of your company, since you handled the issue so quickly.

One of my favorite aspects of this book, was the stories Scott was able to incorporate into each chapter, while still getting a message across. My favorite story was with singer, Dave Carroll and his songs about how United Airlines broke his guitar. This story is a good example of how United should have dealt with Dave Carroll and his complaint way before it hit the Internet and was viral within days.

Reacting to situations in real-time, is a key concept of PR because you want to deal with a problem when it's smaller, rather than letting the problem escalate and become national news. The two main concepts I will take away from this class are to deal with problems when the arise and to take the problem offline because inturn the negative comment will turn into a positive about how fast you were able to handle the problem.

The Final Week

Week 15 has finally arrived, also know as "dead" week. This week for me, is one of my busiests weeks yet. I feels as though any assignment that could possible be due, is due in these next five days. This means there will be many late nights this week and little sleep to accompany those late nights. This is the week that every student not only dreads, but looks forward too, as it is the last week of classes for the semester.

Knowing this is the last week in the semester also means the following week is finals week, which for some students may be a positive because they only have a final or two, while for others they may be dreading finals week as they have five or six finals to study for. There is a light at the end of the tunnel though because once you finish all your finals, you then have a three to four week break with no school responsibilities. During this break, I tend to work and sleep as much as possible.

I am ready for the semester to come to an end and can't wait to go home and spend some quality time home with my family. These next two weeks might be rough, but all I keep thinking of is Christmas, New Years Eve, family time and good food. Fingers crossed I survive the next two weeks!