Hello friends, I am Autumn Kwiatkowski and welcome to Creating a New Perspective in Public Relations!
I am a wanderer, who is excited to share my stories and passion for public relations and advertising. I am here to learn with you on how to use media platforms to connect people and cultures to better serve our communities. Bringing people together through information, images, and branding creates a common language to understand each other and how we can prosper. Through this blog I hope to create a learning and knowledge-based community that supports using public relations and advertising to unify humanity on a global scale.
Media platforms connect people from diverse backgrounds around the world. This speaks to me deeply as I am an avid explorer who loves to travel, meet new people, try new cuisine and have new experiences. As a self proclaimed wanderer, I believe that it is not only magical to discover new places but also incredibly important. When we travel to new places we are able to meet people from all different backgrounds and experience cultures different from our own. When traveling I like to keep an open mind so I can experience as many new things as possible, even trying home-brewed beer in a tiny, remote hut in the middle of the Ecuadorian rainforest. When I keep myself open to new experiences, I create opportunities to meet people from all different walks of life and celebrate life together. It is important that, as a society, we are able to accept all people regardless of our differences and to truly embrace those differences as the things that make us who we are. Throughout all of my travels, the people you share your experiences with are sometimes more important than the experiences themselves.
While these are the pieces that motivate me, I have learned that by experiencing new cultures it helps give you a better perspective on how to target diverse markets. In addition to physically traveling to different locations, one can also experience different cultural perspective through social media. As society continues to change and absorb information differently, we see an increased rate of gathering knowledge in small bites. By using a mixture of words and images we are able to convey our messages to large demographics quickly. This form of connecting allows you to communicate immediately and intentionally across vast space from anywhere; the comfort of a living room, a cafe, an airport terminal, or between agencies for professional purposes.
When I am not traveling to far off destinations, like Peru or Italy, I like to take mini trips, and get to know the nooks and crannies around Michigan. Those tucked away places, close to home, that are off the beaten path can bring just as diverse an experience as travelling abroad. My favorite part of these mini vacations is that you are able to be a tourist in your own town. Because I am a full time college student in Grand Rapids these mini vacations are perfect during the middle of the semester to help spice things up during the long stretch when you feel like winter will never end…They are the perfect opportunity to visit a new restaurant on the other side of town, or maybe the chance to visit a neighboring city that has a museum you have been wanting to check out. I think that mini vacations are so important because it gives us the opportunity to find the beauty within our surroundings, and embrace the diversity that your next door neighbor has to offer. We often tend to overlook the beauty in front of us, so it is sometimes important to take a vacation in your own town. Social media helps bring awareness to what is available in your own town, neighborhood and abroad. That’s why it is so important to have effective social media platforms and an understanding of how to utilize tools such as instagram, facebook, yelp, etc. to reach the highest number of clientele.
In addition to maximizing the use of media, it is integral to know your target audience. For example, I am a vegetarian. Whether someone is a vegetarian or not, it is still important to know how people make decisions and what makes them tick. I grew up as a vegetarian, but made the decision to be one from a very young age. My parents never forced me to be vegetarian, instead they always taught me about what was being offered in regards to food, so I could make informed decisions. Public relations and advertising guides people in a similar way, we can guide people in ways to help them make informed decisions. Social media is one of the most vastly used platforms when it comes to informing people, which is why it is a crucial marketing tool.
As my knowledge of marketing tools, public relations and advertising continues to grow, I hope to have a better understanding of the world around us and what makes people tick. As a public relations and advertising professional it is our job to understand trends and figure out what engages certain target demographics. With this knowledge, we are able to diversify messaging across a wide range of media platforms to communicate and motivate society in effective and prosperous ways to improve our culture, environment, etc.
I want to be able to understand the motives of certain consumers when they are at the grocery store, while they are online shopping, and what makes them click on a certain link. I think to fully understand peoples’ motives you need to understand humans, their similarities and differences, cultural backgrounds, religious status, political affiliation. This is one of the aspects I like the best. Through the exercise of sharing blogs within this class, I hope to be able to understand diverse perspectives and how to reach folks who think differently than me. If we can understand people and their motives, we can tailor information in a way that brings communities together.
Creating a New Perspective in Public Relations 