Teaching PR

The event planning team for Connect presented their campaign to Diane Murray (Grady public service and outreach) and Karen Andrews (Grady event planner) today. They created a very cool PowerPoint presentation that used black-and-white versions of Josh Hallett's Flickr photos for their slides, and all in all their presentation went smoothly.


Among other things, their post-conference evaluations showed:

• 83% of attendees who filled out the post-conference survey say they will use blogs and 75% say they will use social networks and social media news releases in their professions (PR or education)


• Respondents would be highly likely to recommend students to Grady (6.6 on scale of 1-7)


• Two-thirds of the respondents planned to keep in touch with someone they met at the conference


• More than 70 media outlets and more than 600 individuals received information about the conference


• More than 50 blog posts discussed the conference (not including the UGA Connect blog itself, which had almost 1,000 visits in the month surrounding the conference), and 63 people followed Dr. Kaye Sweetser's class Twitter stream


• 45 people attended the Friday night dinner and 65 people (including speakers and committee members) attended Saturday's sessions.

All told, the team quite rightly concluded that they had met the conference's goals of promoting Grady as an expert in social media, teaching professionals and educators about social media, and providing networking opportunities for attendees.

After the formal presentation, I asked the students to sit down and discuss what went well and what didn't (including the fact that we were over budget by $907). We also brainstormed what we would do differently if we did it again. Will we?

Labels: conference, measurement, social media