This is an archived blog from when I ran Conscious Public Relations Inc. from 2008-2018. Excuse the potential outdated-ness!
Through the magic of Twitter re-tweeting, I learned about a PR meetup and Q&A with The Province reporter and DGTV blogger, Dana Gee. Katie Dunsworth Reiach of Spark PR and Smart Cookies re-tweeted a message from Sara Pereira of Pereira PR about an event that was happening last Thursday, November 19th at Level on Seymour.
I had no idea about how much I would learn both about Level and the ‘new world’ of journalism according to Dana Gee. Let’s start with Level.
Level is not just a condominium, which I had initially thought it was when I used to walk by from the Skytrain enroute to my sister’s place on Davie. It is a furnished apartment living space that accommodates long-term visitors (including Twilight movie stars), at 40% less than the cost of that term’s stay at a hotel. Level’s General Manager, Daniel, was kind enough to take all of us on a little tour to check out the space.
Level has a few meeting rooms to rent at $500 & under, including A/V support. There are 58 different floor plans and rooms are equipped with as much as walk-in closets, washer & dryer, a dishwasher, and king-size beds. A nice sleep indeed.
The gym is HUGE – lots of equipment, and each dressing room has a sauna.
After that, we got to sample some dishes and wine while we picked Dana’s brain about her world in the media. For those of you who are not familiar with Dana’s work, she was a long-time TV columnist for the Province and now does video blogs under “DGTV” along with a weekly movie pick segment on Global TV and CKNW’s Christy Clark show.
Dana made a great analogy about print media being in the state of how record labels’ CDs were 10 years ago, with the threat of the digital music onslaught.
As we talked in length about how Dana prefers to receive information (one release with visuals via links/low-res photo/DVD clips, little to no calls), we started to talk about Twitter and “Twit-pitches”, which Vancouver Sun’s Gillian Shaw is known to like. Pitchengine.com is a great US-based site that will formulate twit-pitches and send links back to the social media release online, which can get great online exposure for your story.
Katie, who is now on the Smart Cookies show on the W Network, gets many pitches from companies, and tells them that they can have a mention on her show if they can give a money-saving tip with an actual dollar value – and it’s surprising the small amount of responses that come back.
The great thing about this meeting is that it didn’t have such a structured format and Dana really made the effort to give us insight not only on the stories she loves to work on but also what it’s like to be in the newsroom of a major paper- a very different environment than going in and out of a station and doing video pieces out in the field.
This year I have been to so many PR-related meetings – both good and bad – and for the most part, the content has always been repeated. What was great about this particular meetup was that the conversation flowed organically and I felt that I got answers to questions that even I wouldn’t have thought of asking. That’s the beauty of having a community of PR people around you that are in the same boat and aren’t just in it for the pitch, but who really want to help improve how we communicate our story to the media and how they can help us in return. Even though the group hasn’t been called anything official yet, I am really looking forward to being a member of this valuable group in the new year and learning more from both diverse media reps and the established professionals that attend.
Thank you Katie for the photo on Facebook and to Tyler for tagging me. Follow these great folks on Twitter:
- @SaraPadidar, @NicoleHall and @TTara – Tara Padidar of Pereira PR
- @Katie_Dunsworth & @BethBoyle of Spark PR
- @Dana_Gee
- @VLitwin – Val Litwin and Judy Brooks of Blo Dry Bar
- Malania Dela Cruz of @DelaCruzPR
Twitter on!
