Popature » Popature is where my passion for food, drink, travel and technology converge online to serve as a informational and somewhat interesting list of ideas, resources, fun facts and mild insight.

Homage to the Frugal Traveler [specifically the NY Times one]

by Alexandra Posted on December 12, 2011

Thank you NY Time frugal traveler for pointing out some fabulous academics and and their studies in a recent blog post. As I may have mentioned once or twice or twenty times I am still struggling to figure out how to begin a career in the travel and tourism industry that is as glamorous as I want it to be. I don’t know how I get to be the NY Times frugal traveler or a writer for Rick Steves, so I am starting with what I do know, academics.

I have been stuck on how to exactly approach a thesis in travel and tourism for two reasons:

Travel and tourism research lies decidedly outside of public relations research.
Every idea I come up with is a massive undertaking regardless of the fact this is for a thesis, I may need to re-think my populations.

Thanks to the Frugal Traveler’s brief commitment to travel and academics I am starting to understand how I may be able to link some of my ideas with theory. Simply put, I have been invigorated to start working out some more ideas in hopes of turning my ideas into something workable and more importantly, testable.

Posted in culture, public relations, tourism, travel | Tagged nytimes, public relations, thesis, tourism, travel | Leave a comment

I love twittering, twittering’s my favorite

by Alexandra Posted on November 20, 2011

I joined Twitter on November 19, 2008. I followed my cousin who in turn instructed me to follow Dave Matthews and Stefan Lessard in hopes of a shout-out during the concert season. I left for a semester abroad in Italy, tweeted a few more times and fell out of the twitter-verse for a while.

The problem was and still is—my non-nerd friends (and lets face it, I am a nerd among Fonz’s at the jukebox who are never joining Twitter) weren’t on it. I had to find a new way to work Twitter into my online social life.

When I began to read Catharine Taylor’s piece about Twitter via MediaPost yesterday I thought she was going to suggest Twitter was on its way out, but it actually ended up being a fairly interesting read.

In public relations education we are always talking about one-way versus two-way communication, but largely lump social media into the latter without delving into the details for individual platforms.

Twitter is so powerful because it is asymmetrical communication, as this article suggests. This is something I am very interested in—is the simple act of following someone on Twitter enough engagement to satisfy the average consumer? The teenagers I talked to said yes—even though the communication was not direct, unless some celebrity re-tweeted a fan, there was still value in the simple act of following and Taylor Swift tweeting to the masses.

I am constantly regaling my non-nerd friends and family on the multiple uses of Facebook. Of course you can tweet at each other I say, but you can also follow the local news, get WSJ updates, peruse job listings and get up-to-date information on my ICM class assignments. She references another great post by Bill Gurley who sums up the thought beautifully, “Just as Facebook is symmetric in terms of its poster-reader relationship, Twitter is highly asymmetric. The majority of the tweets on Twitter are posted by a small sub-set of the users. And the majority of the users get value from “reading” or “listening” to the tweets from these core influencers. Once again, for most users it’s more about what you hear, learn, and find than the fact that you can tweet.”

Posted in social media, technology | Tagged elf references, social media, twitter | Leave a comment

What? Over? Did you say ‘over’? Nothing is over until we decide it is!

by Alexandra Posted on November 19, 2011

Six times a day, every day I come across a blog post, article, tweet or LinkedIn post with tips for blogging. They usually all say the same thing—don’t over do it, check your spelling, stick to one topic, blah, blah, blah. By now, most professionals know what to do, but we still don’t always do it. I finally came across a great, clever list with all the essentials that I am happy to bookmark and refer to. This MarketingProf article managed to get me with the sassy title “10 Ways to Make Your Blog Less Sucky” and didn’t disappoint all the way through.

My favorite lines (and me giving credit where credit is due to Ms.Rodabaugh):

“It’s amazing—and embarrassing—how much you can forget about a language that you daily speak and write in.”
“Just because you find information online doesn’t mean it’s free for you to take and paste on your blog.”
“You’re a lawyer? Cool. You want to share your perspective on the latest controversial legal case? Awesome. You expect me to know what an a priori assumption is and its implications on evidence submissions? I’m checking out.”
“Posting quality information that’s written well is worthless if the headline is too boring to attract readers. Would you have read this article if the title had been “10 Tips to Writing Better”? I sure wouldn’t have.”

Posted in updates | Leave a comment

They think he’s a righteous dude

by Alexandra Posted on November 18, 2011

I want to pass along this fabulous interview from Mashable with the CEO of Jetsetter, Drew Patterson. His well-organized social media and marketing team is focusing on all the right things—communication, trust, confidence, establishing and maintaining community and mobile initatives. In fact, can I have a job Drew Patterson, you sound awesome. We should all strive to make our social media communications as streamlined and strategic as the team at Jetsetter.

Jetsetter has managed to take a model like that of TripAdvisor and evolve it into a more exclusive sort of brand. TripAdvisor reviews—including anything from hotels, excursions or restaurants become so convoluted and frankly, obnoxious, that they begin to loose any real intrinsic value.

Jetsetter combines both personal and professional reviews while still negotiating deals on behalf of the traveller in a way that manages to persevere the value—you feel you are getting a first person perspective that has also been verified by some professional standard. I love it.

Posted in food, social media, technology, tourism, travel | Tagged deal, jetsetter, mashable, social media, tourism, travel | Leave a comment

What is this, a center for ants!

by Alexandra Posted on November 11, 2011

Throughout my undergraduate career my favorite classes always had to do with technology and media literacy. Most media studies students were more in favor of classes that allowed them to lecture on the evils of media and technology (there was this one kid who was an outed Republican….boy did they not want to hear from him.)

One of the most popular topics of discussion was how media and technology were destroying our youth. Their social relationships are suffering, they can’t write, they can’t spell, they spend all day online..yadda, yadda, yadda. Unfortunately, this is what most academic research seems to focus on. I recently had the opportunity to conduct an informal focus group with my 16 year old brother and a gaggle of his friends.

The purpose was to talk about social media, explore why they use and if they were interacting or engaging with large corporations or brands. (My professor consistently informs me you can’t actually engage with a brand—but you know what I mean.)

A recent Harris Interactive study via Media Post suggests that teenagers (12-24! I’m a teenager—please no) find the most powerful social media brand, is Youtube. This is surprising as a reasonable consumer would probably anticipate Facebook or Twitter to be the answer. Personally, I think giving youth the power to create and share media is an incredible opportunity. They learn about production, authorship, audience and technology. There are obvious concerns, but those are another matter.

The group of teenagers I talked to certainly used YouTube as well as Facebook and Twitter. They also were heavily involved with the blogging platform Tumblr. Teenagers are tricky, but masters at navigating the digital landscape and I am always interested to hear how they create and maintain their presence in the digital space. It is important for those in the communication industry to understand the ease in which digital natives interact with media and hope to mirror that with their communication.

Posted in social media, technology | Tagged social media, youth, youtube | Leave a comment

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