Tech Affect » PRSA-NY

Award #WINNING

Brittany Bevacqua — Fri, 27 May 2011 18:51:40 +0000

Last night, our team had the pleasure of attending the always (PR) star-studded 2011 Big Apple Awards, hosted by PRSA New York. Aside from showing support for our very own Sandra Fathi, who delivered the President’s remarks and graciously gave out awards for deserving campaigns, we were also contenders for a few honors ourselves!

The Big Apple Awards is recognized as one of the industry’s toughest peer-judged programs, so we were ecstatic to learn that campaigns for two clients – Omni Hotels & Resorts and dealnews – were selected as finalists.

After much excitement and anticipation, Affect walked away with two honors for the night – a big win for our ‘Omni Understands’ meeting & events social media campaign, as well as honorable mention for our dealnews 2010 holiday shopping season PR efforts.

Events like this are always a good reminder of just how hard people in our profession work in order to generate fantastic results for clients. As we witnessed last night, a little planning, creativity and teamwork can go a long way. Congrats to all the winners!

Our Big Night at the PRSA-NY Big Apple Awards!

Katie Safrey — Mon, 31 May 2010 22:15:50 +0000

It’s been an exciting week for Affect Strategies! On Thursday our team attended the PRSA-NY Big Apple Awards at the Hudson Theatre. The Big Apple Awards recognizes public relations professionals and campaigns in the tri-state area. We had a great time at the awards and enjoyed hanging out as a team after business hours. It was also extremely inspiring to celebrate the industry with other hard-working PR practitioners.

Now for the big news – I’m excited to say that Affect won a Big Apple in the Integrated Communications: Business-to-Business category! We won the award for the lead generation campaign that we executed with Regus in Q4 2009. The campaign was a public relations, marketing and social media campaign designed to raise awareness and drive demand for Regus’ business-ready solutions in Manhattan. You can see the full list of Big Apple winners here. Congratulations to all!

And finally, on a personal note, I want to say how proud I am to be a part of the Affect Strategies team. I’m continuously inspired by the creativity, dedication and passion of my colleagues. Congrats, guys!

Slides from Digital Immersion Workshop 6/25 for PRSA-NY

Sandra Fathi — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:24:09 +0000

If you were in attendance at yesterday’s Digital Immersion Workshop on behalf of PRSA-NY, you’ll find the slides and links here. Hope you found it useful. I look forward to linking, friending and tweeting you Feel free to share your feedback in the comments.

Digital Immersion Workshop for PRSA

View more presentations from Sandra Fathi.

Blog Hosting:
www.wordpress.com

Blog & SM Monitoring:
www.radian6.com
www.yahoopipes.com
www.tns.com
www.dna13.com

Communities:
groups.google.com
groups.yahoo.com
www.ning.com

Photo & Video Sharing:
www.youtube.com
www.vimeo.com
www.schooltube.com
www.flickr.com

General Twitter Resources:
www.twitter.com
http://help.twitter.com
http://mashable.com/category/twitter-lists/
http://twitter.pbworks.com/

Twitter Applications:
www.tweetdeck.com
www.hootsuite.com
www.twitiq.com

Finding Journalists on Twitter:
www.journalisttweets.com
http://prsarahevans.com/mediaontwitter/
www.muckrack.com
www.wefollow.com

Sharing Widgets:
www.addtoany.com
www.tweetmeme.com

Other:
www.compete.com

Twitter 101 Workshop for PR & Marketing – Slides & Links

Sandra Fathi — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:27:03 +0000

Last night I presented a workshop for PRSA NY entitled Twitter 101 for Public Relations & Marketing Professionals. We had a great turnout with 90 attendees and an incredible view thanks to our hosts, Bloomberg. We wanted to share the slides as well as the links to sites that we discussed during our session. Although the presentation is not completely self-explanatory, it will give you a general feel for what we discussed.

Twitter 101 Workshop for Public Relations and Marketing Professionals

View more Microsoft Word documents from Sandra Fathi.

If you’d like to see what folks tweeted about the event, just search for the hashtag #tweetny: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23tweetny

General Twitter Resources:
www.twitter.com
http://help.twitter.com
http://mashable.com/category/twitter-lists/
http://twitter.pbworks.com/

Desktop Application:
www.tweetdeck.com

Web-based Application:
www.hootsuite.com

Mobile Applications:
www.twitterberry.com
www.twitterfon.com

Co-Tweeting
www.hootsuite.com
www.twitiq.com
www.cotweet.com

Images
www.twitpic.com

Case Studies:
http://www.imediaconnection.com/printpage/printpage.aspx?id=23151

Finding Journalists:
www.journalisttweets.com
http://prsarahevans.com/mediaontwitter/
www.muckrack.com
www.wefollow.com

Various Twitterers/Brands:
www.twitter.com/jetblue
www.twitter.com/southwestair
www.twitter.com/skydiver
www.twitter.com/mashable
www.twitter.com/pcmike
www.twitter.com/carontreatment
www.twitter.com/sandrafathi

Other:
www.compete.com
www.yammer.com
www.jaiku.com
www.plurk.com
www.techaffect.com

If you were there, and are now tweeting, leave a comment with your twitter handle! @sandrafathi

PRSA-NY Honors Sandra with Big Apple President’s Award

Leslie Campisi — Fri, 22 May 2009 13:49:36 +0000

Yesterday was a big day down at the Affect Strategies homestead. Our beloved Sandra Fathi was honored by PRSA-NY at the 2009 Big Apple Awards.

Current PRSA-NY President Deborah Radman gave Sandra kudos for working tirelessly to help the chapter embrace technology in the practice of PR.

We had an amazing time at The Rainbow Room (which, sadly, may still be closing) at the top of Rockefeller Center, drinking bellinis and rubbing elbows with the other winners.

We also had our own Affect-style celebration a few hours earlier, featuring cookies and a champagne toast.

If you know Sandra, you know she’s never one to make a big deal about her accomplishments. But please join me in congratulating her on this much-deserved honor!

I’ll link to the official photoset from the event as soon as it’s posted. In the meantime, you can get a taste of the festivities from our Flickr stream.

YAY, SANDRA!

To Tweet is Sweet: Content from Yesterday’s Twitter Immersion Course with PRSA-NY

Sandra Fathi — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:59:05 +0000

Yesterday we had more than 100 people attend a ‘Twitter Immersion Course: From Novice to Expert in a 2-Hour Workshop’ produced by PRSA-NY and hosted by MS&L. I led the first part of the program that was a Twitter 101 tutorial of sorts and was joined by panelists David Binkowski, senior vice president, Word-of-Mouth Marketing at MS&L Digital, and Thomas Barritt, partner and associate director of the Global Food & Nutrition Practice at Ketchum.

We covered Twitter basics from creating a user profile to using hashtags to make tweets searchable to the Twitter community. David provided attendees with case studies on how MS&L has used Twitter to generate buzz for clients, while Thomas explained the unspoken ‘rules’ of engaging in social media. To read the tweets from this event, simply search for the #tweetNY hashtag on Twitter. If you’d like to follow us on Twitter, you can find us here: @sandrafathi, @dbinkowski, and @culinarytypes.

Here is a copy of my presentation. It can be viewed here or downloaded from SlideShare.

Twitter Immersion Workshop: From Novice to Expert (PRSA-NY)

View more presentations from Sandra Fathi. (tags: twitter prsa)

Also, here are some of the links to sites/programs/articles that we referenced during the presentation:

Top Twitter Apps:

Twitter Search – For searching Twitter and monitoring trends

TwitterVision – To view tweets from around the world on a map

TwitPic – To post pictures straight to your Twitter account

Twitdom/TweetRank – To view top ranking folks on Twitter

Who Should I Follow – To help you find suggested folks to follow

What the Trend – Find out what topics are trending high on Twitter right now

TweetDeck – To help organize/prioritize your Twitter usage and monitoring (Desktop application)

Reference Materials:

Twitter FAQs

Top 20 Twitter Tools

Common Craft’s Twitter in Plain English (Video)

Brian Solis: Twitter Tools for the Community

Pistachio Consulting: Twitter for Business

Caroline Middlebrook: The Big Juicy Twitter Guide

5 Top Twitter Presentations

Twitter Text Commands

Hope you find it useful!

UPDATE 2/27: David Binkowsky’s presentation for this event is now available on SlideShare

Guest Blog: PRSA-NY’s Tips on Big Apple Award Submissions

admin — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:53:13 +0000

In the eye of last Tuesday’s snowstorm, Matt Wong from the Affect Strategies PR team and I trekked over to the “Big Apple Awards Helping Hand Seminar” at Ruder Finn. The seminar was hosted by PRSA-NY and was led by Ruder Finn team members Emmanuel Tchividjian, Senior Vice President and Executive Director of Ruder Finn’s Ethics Consulting Practice, along with Ellen Schaplowsky, an Executive Vice President and Director of Training.

Matt and I walked into the seminar armed with knowledge of the how important a solid awards program is for our agency. Affect Strategies is getting ready to re-launch with a brand new logo and website, and major part of our strategic marketing plan for 2009 is to focus on and expand internal public relations and marketing efforts. As a former coworker and friend once told me, “The best PR is the PR you do for yourself.”

The seminar was extremely focused and helpful. Emmanuel and Ellen are more than qualified to provide tips for awards submissions, having won awards for their submissions over the years and serving as judges for the Big Apple Awards along with the prestigious Silver Anvil Awards.

Here are a few of my key takeaways:

Follow the Rules: Award submission guidelines are critically important. Oftentimes judges will check over the format of submissions before they dive in and begin reading. A great entry could potentially lose points or be discarded simply because it wasn’t laid out and submitted properly. It’s important for every award submission to be textbook quality, and this means paying careful attention to details like fonts, margins and size.

Tell a Story: Your submission should tell the story of an extraordinary business challenge that your agency overcame by utilizing the power of public relations. Remember that your word choice is extremely important. Make sure that your entry is written clearly to explain the entire process of your public relations campaign.

Research is Key: All award entries should have a section that clearly states the research that was conducted for the campaign. Your research prior to the execution of your campaign demonstrates to the judges that your agency saw a need that your client had, and did the research and work that was necessary to address that need. And, when you think about it, can a PR campaign really be executed properly without preliminary research?

Impact Trumps Tactics: In the end, the impact of your campaign is more important than the tactics that you used to get the results. Make sure that the impact and results of your campaign are clearly defined and well-worded.

Support Every Point: It is critical that every point in your summary is supported in your supplementary materials or binder. Provide as much support material as allowed, including memos, plan overviews, meeting notes, and interactions with the client and/or media. Make sure that all supporting materials are clearly organized and labeled.

I think that the most important takeaway for me was Ellen’s reminder to get back to basics. The main thing to keep in mind when submitting for an award is that you are simply trying to communicate how your agency used the discipline of PR to successfully over come a client’s problem.

A big thanks to PRSA-NY and Emmanuel and Ellen! We hope to see you soon at an awards banquet!

-Katie Safrey