It is here.

My first big project of my first semester as a public relations graduate student is here and I’m excited to dive right into it. The only problem is I need your help.

I will be conducting a single case study research on the topic of digital media and organization management. Specifically, I would like to study an organization that has seen its internal organizational structure change due to the addition of social and digital media-related functions to the organization’s communication department.

• Have organizational hierarchies shifted?

This is cross-posted on Communi-K: A KGBTexas Blog

Yesterday at retweet frenzy o’clock we heard about the latest news from Facebook. The social network will soon support @mentions within our beloved status updates. Only a few hours later, Mashable’s Ben Parr published a post in which he listed the following five ways the new @mentions on Facebook could impact Twitter.

1. More of the conversation moves to Facebook
2. Users could update Twitter through Facebook instead of vice versa
3. Facebook becomes more attractive to big brands
4. People move to Facebook for breaking events
5. Developers flock back to Facebook

To mean to or not to mean to, that is the question

During my first class as a graduate student at University of Maryland, Introduction to Graduate Study in Communication, we discussed articles defining the field in general written by George Gerbner, Gerald Miller and Thomas Nilsen. Miller’s work in particular stirred the class into intense conversation about intentional and unintentional communication and whether the latter should be considered communication at all.

I’ll save you the suspense and say that for the purposes of communication research, the answer is mainly no.

*It's a blog!*

That’s the WordPress default title for the sample post that comes published with every new WordPress account. On the surface it’s a rather generic, upbeat greeting. Underneath the surface it’s an open invitation to allow yourself to run wild and to unleash your inner blogging beast all over your brand new, endless white canvas.

If you scroll down you’ll come to realize that this is not my first post. And yet it is.

What used to be “Andi Narvaez: Down and Across” is now “Andi Narvaez: Re-learning PR.” Welcome to my refreshed blog.

Don’t act like you’ve never sat at home on a lazy Saturday night and given into watching whatever movie was on TV.

Tonight I’m watching Men in Black for (I’ll admit it) at least the fifth time and, once again, I came to the conclusion that one of my favorite scenes in the movie is when Will Smith shows up for MIB traning. During the simulation of a neighborhood under an alien attack the other trainees unleash a shooting frenzy, meanwhile Will Smith holds his fire – until a cardboard cutout of an eight year-old girl rolls out that is. Here is the quote from IMBD:

I was watching an episode of The Office where Michael quits Dunder Mifflin and recruits Pam and Ryan to start a new paper company. In this episode, Michael tries to get his former Dunder Mifflin clients to switch over and buy paper from his new company. In an effort to thwart Michael, Dwight tells him, Pam and Ryan to meet him for lunch and then sneaks into their empty office to steal Michael’s rolodex with all his clients’ information.

Pam mentions that she had spent months entering all the contact information into Michael’s Blackberry so that he wouldn’t have to use the rolodex anymore but I’ll save that for another post. Moving on.

Oh hey!

I just read an article on BusinessWeek about eating a healthy diet to live a longer life.

Those with the best diets reduced their risk of death by up to 25 percent over a 10-year follow-up, said study author Ashima Kant, a professor of nutrition at Queens College of the City University of New York.

And this goes double for your RSS feed.

I am at Podcamp San Antonio 3.0. So far I have seen people in jeans and t-shirts, army uniforms and sequin coats and hats. And, as one would expect based on the eclectic mix of people, the sessions have covered a diverse set of topics all under the social media sun.

A recap:

Coworking

@firecatsue talked about coworking, which to me is a perfect example of how we can take social media offline and into the 3-dimensional world that all of us are familiar with. Coworking is heaven-sent for people like me who need distractions to focus and feed off other people’s energy and unique passions.

Check this out to get a sense for how coworking is taking off all over the coutry and, if you are in San Antonio… check out C4 Workspace, follow @coworkingsa and hey, why not take a day to actually try it out?

Journey through social media

@TXconflictcoach talked about her journey into social media. She talked about Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, BlogTalkRadio, blogging and MySpace (no, wait… take that back. MySpace is apparently where all the porn is). The thing to highlight about this session is the importance of experimenting and – one of my favorite words – TINKERING with different social media networks, channels, approches, strategies… in order to find the one (or ones) that fit you and what you do best. I highly recommend you do it. Hit the ground running and don’t be afraid to trip and fall – you’ll get back up. I promise.

I just realized that Seth Godin’s URL is http://sethgodin.typepad.com. I guess I never gave it a second thought and assumed that every time I typed “Seth Godin” in the URL address bar I was being redirected to http://sethgodin.com, which turns out to be more like his online kiosk, booth, what have you. Typepad must love that man. I wouldn’t put it past him to be one of the first people to have a http://sethgodin [dot] blog URL if he wanted to.

Yesterday I caught a guest blog post on TwitTip (some great Twitter 101 gems in this blog by the way) about Twitter backgrounds and why I should change mine. I had intended to update my Twitter background some time ago but I never got around to doing it because I wanted to list some of my other social network accounts; however, due to the nature of social media, I have yet to come up with the ONE list of my social networks. Since Twitter backgrounds are JPG images, I didn’t have to go back to Photoshop every time to update my ever-growing, ever-changing list of social networks. I think I’m not alone in this.