Press Conference 2.0

What’s “2.0” supposed to mean anyway? Well, according to Urban Dictionary, it means:


“Marketing catchphrase/buzzword than, when attached to a name, implies an "improved" or "superior" product than it's predecessor.”

There’s actually a great book called PR 2.0, by Deirdre Breakenridge, I’d recommend checking out. I’ll actually be coming to the concept of PR 2.0 after talking about the Press Conference.

First off, it’s tomorrow…tomorrow evening to be precise. This came about after our ED considered our Publicist’s recommendation at having one in the morning, but the decided to do it the evening.

It’s not a matter of being different, per se, or raging against the “machine” because that’s Fringey, but it just made more sense, not only in planning, but in having the press and preview run in one smooth evening.

And I’ll be assisting with MC’ing with the event. Not that it’s a surprise, but there’s definitely plenty to due at Capital Fringe. And as some duties wind up, others are just getting started. Which is great, because it’s keeping this ADHD intern too busy to worry about how busy he is.

So with the press conference being tomorrow, most of today was spent getting the Press Kits ready, which include some Capital Fringe facts, Bios of key personal, a Press Pas, instructions on how to use the Press Pass, two drink tickets, and everyone member of the Press will be receiving a Flash Drive with all the PR images we’ve received, along with the Capital Fringe Festival logo.

You probably surmised correctly if you thought I had to take care of the flash drives. However after getting the materials ready, my fellow intern, Emily, took care of stuffing the folders. After which I re-learned rule #1 of managing other people: be explicit in telling other people what you expect. Although she did what I told her, I ended up going through each folder to make them consistent and spread the info out between both pockets, as opposed to putting them all in one.

So we’ve got the Press Kits ready to go, the Preview line-up all set, and we’ve also got our first Meetup. Now if you’re not familiar with this…think of it like Facebook, but it mandates face-to-face interaction in place of cyber wall comments and the like. This is from the site’s About page:

“Meetup's mission is to revitalize local community and help people around the world self-organize. Meetup believes that people can change their personal world, or the whole world, by organizing themselves into groups that are powerful enough to make a difference.”

Pretty neat. There’s a three month option, which we started back in April and it’s been an experiment to see how various Web 2.0 sites can help bring people to the festival. We’ve definitely got Facebook and MySpace covered, but Meetup is uncharted territory so far.

So it should be interesting who will come out through the Meetup event page.

Anyway, that’s about if for now. It’s going to be a long day

Until next week,

JR


Next Week: Getting Ready for the Opening and how the Meetup went