Caffeine bubble dreams

In context: Using Deirdre Breakenridge's article PR 2.0: A Communicator's Manifesto, as well as social media experience in Social Media class, I have put together a (hopefully) comic take on the changing ways of public relations.

Find out how PR Guy saves the day for Businessman. Not once, but twice!

I admit, I have hopped on the bandtractor and taken it straight to Farmville.

"Canada is the sixth biggest country in terms of the number of visitors to FarmVille." - CP 24.

Mindless time wasting aside though, I want to focus on what the creators, Zynga Games, are doing to bring people together. I feel that the underlying message in Farmville is one of community. In the game, you have to rely on friends to help you succeed. You must also help friends in order to unlock certain achievements.

With that in mind, it really touched me when Farmville reached out to help Haiti. A few days after the earthquake, Farmville offered a new crop for planting, White Corn. This was a paid item you could only purchase with FarmCash. The response was phenomenal. Many farmers spoke out in support of Zynga's Haiti Relief Fund.



White Corn costs about $5 in real money. When you donate, the crops will be accessible to you for a week, and would never wilt. As a token of appreciation, Farmville offered everyone who donated a gift of a Haiti flag.



To date, Zynga's Haiti Relief received $900,000 in donations. Farmville promises a special surprise for farmers, if the number goes up to $1 million by the end of today.

If a silly game can bring so many people together to do good, it can't be a complete waste of time. In a social media rich world, this is the best way to mobilize the masses to support for a cause. Good job, Farmville. My straw hat goes off to you.

Can a blast from past, such as LiveJournal, still capture the interest of today's social media savvy partakers? More importantly, can LJ's free version fulfill the needs of a PR professional?


In a nutshell, LiveJournal is an online community that links people through their diaries. You can write a journal, add friends, search for other users’ journals, and join communities based on your interests.

First impression of LiveJournal? Cute. However, therein lies the problem. Blogging is a way to share our personal brand with the world; and we want to be taken seriously. Pink backgrounds and bouncy kitty emoticons will not do.


LiveJournal does connect to more popular social networking outlets, like Facebook, as well as utilizes your cell phone. This is pretty cool seems like a game of catch-up, for an online community that is already 10 years old.

I leave you with three LiveJournal fails:

• In exploring LJ for the purpose of this review, I landed here. Somehow, my journal account directs me to Russian LiveJournal on certain links. I don't know how to change this; I can't read it to find the English button. (LiveJournal is now owned by Russian company, SUP, run by LiveJournal Inc.)


• LJ allows you to create a ScrapBook to store online pictures. Why use ScrapBook? I’m still unsure. I investigated and clicked through journals at random, hoping to find the answer. None of them used ScrapBook; I’m sure no one uses it I didn’t use a good representative sample.


• Finally, the text everywhere on LJ tells me to upgrade to a paid account. Even while signing up I was informed that LiveJournal is better if you pay for it. It's frustrating not to be able to access certain features, like browsing communities by region.

Maybe that’s the main problem. LiveJournal becomes the community you want if you dish out the $19.95/year for a paid membership. So I will never know what treasures lie within.

I suspect with more customization options, LiveJournal can probably become more useful to a PR professional, perhaps for community-building purposes or networking. But generally, LJ is pretty dated; there's too many blogging options available now. LiveJournal started out as a source of entertainment, and I think entertainment it will stay.

I wish LiveJournal a happy 10th birthday and give it 2 out of 5 bouncy kitty heads.




Please see Aasana's blog on a different take of LiveJournal.

The amount of information found on the Internet can be overwhelming. You don't have enough hours in the day to sift through everything, let alone absorb everything. As future PR practitioners, we need to be able to absorb everything. So what if there was a way to bring this information to you?

The answer lies in a tool called Google Reader. With no software to download, and nothing but a Gmail account (or any e-mail account, for that matter) to start; it's very user-friendly.

Google Reader makes it easy to gear the Internet towards you. It brings the information of interest from all the World Wide Web to one convenient location.



Using the link, Add a subscription, you can subscribe to any website that offers an RSS feed, ie. blogs, online newspapers, magazines, etc. You can also look for the orange RSS icons to subscribe to a particular page’s feed while viewing the page. (See my RSS link on the right-hand side of my blog.)

Everytime a page you've subscribed to gets updated, the update is sent directly to Google Reader. You no longer have to visit multiple pages for updates!

Google Reader also allows you to share interesting links with friends, and star information to compile a list of your favourites. Cool!

In Public Relations, we need to have information easily accessible to us. An RSS tool like Google Reader is the key to bringing all the Internet has to offer to a convenient place where we can view it as easily as we do our Email.

We can all be Google Reader Rockstars! "How to" information provided by: “How to: Use Google Reader Like a Rockstar” by Matt Singley. Read it here!

For further reviews of Google Reader please see blogs from: Brian, Catherine, and Ginger.

For more "How to" please see Humber PR students' collaboration of links.