Publicity through Technology

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For my job, I work on planning events for the University Activities Board. The next event that my committee is putting on, is the Rudy Currence concert, with special Guest Sunny Side up. This event will take place on Friday, October 23. The concert begins at 9:00 at the International Center, and doors will open at 8:30. Rudy Currence is R&B style singer who has written songs for Mya and has a song on the Minority Report soundtrack. Sunnyside Up, on the other hand, is an acoustic Indie-Pop duo, formed by Michigan State students.

Now that I have told you a little bit about the event, I would like to tell you why technology has made publicizing this event so much easier. We now have a UAB twitter and facebook page that will present information about this event. The facebook page, not only allows me to invite my friends to the event, but it also allows all of them to invite their friends, sending the invitation out to a much wider range of people than I could do by myself. Twitter essentially does the same thing by allowing anyone who gets our tweets to retweat the information to their friends.

We also have a UAB email listserv, which gets sent out once a week on Mondays. This allows those individuals who are on our email list to see the events for the upcoming week, with a little blurb about each event, and decide which ones they think that they might be interested in participating in.

In addition, I have learned to use Publisher to create posters that can be printed and posted around campus to pique the attention of students in the residence halls and on their way to class. We also use computer software to create the table tents that are placed on the tables in the cafeterias, in order to inform students of what events are taking place on campus each week.

Finally, we have a webpage that students can visit to get this information: uabevents.com. Using all of these different facets of media, we are able to use technology to get information out to a much broader group of studens. However, all of these ways of getting the word out involve computers, either to send out information over the web, or to design hard copies of posters and signs that will be distributed around campus. Therefore, it would be very difficult to reach such a large population of students without the use of technology!