This Friday I had a chance to attend PR Real World, a conference hosted by the Georgia chapter of the Public Relations Society of America to provide seminars and networking opportunities for college students. The event was very well organized. I learned a lot, made valuable new connections, and caught up with many people.
On the way up there I was very sleepy, so as soon as I got to the hotel I skipped the breakfast, and filled a cup with black coffee. During the first session, I knew I was at a PR event because I kept hearing jargon words and lots of references to social media. Hashtag this… trending that. In fact our hashtag #RWPR15 did “trend” that day. There were two large slideshows beside the stage showing our live tweets of the event. My friend Stephen Brown conducted the first session. As he talked about “networking for success”, the fire alarm began to ring. It was interesting; the fire alarm had a voice. With the ringing a voice said, “Warning there is a fire on your floor. Warning there is a fire on your floor.” For a moment most of us looked at each other in disbelief then calmly headed out of the conference room towards the exit. I remember being upset about this because it was a very cold morning, and I didn’t want to freeze while standing outside. Thankfully the hotel staff explained that the alarm had been set off by mistake.
As the day went on, I absorbed a lot of knowledge. Besides PR, I also started thinking about paralanguage. I noticed similar forced cadences of people networking. I noticed the cheery tone of the mediators, and the way that the presenters spoke. I was not the only one noticing the sounds around me: one of my friends, whom I met in D.C. at a conference last year, came up to me and said that she knew I was there because she recognized my Brazilian accent when I asked a question during one of the presentations.
Kat Cole, president at Cinnabon, was the featured speaker at lunch. She told a compelling story about her upbringing in a trailer park with a single mom and alcoholic father, her prodigious endeavors at Hooters, and success with Cinnabon. Many times her phrases sounded like sound bytes, and many of the attendees quoted her in tweets. I got a lot from her insight as well as her oratory skills. During lunch I began to feel uncomfortable as the coffee wore off, and I began to focus on the hundreds of silverware clinking and clacking in the same room. But thankfully, we were offered more coffee after lunch. After the event, Kat Cole’s oratory skills were praised by most of the people I spoke with. My friend Natasha said she got teary eyed because the story was inspiring.