Last week in my Design Process class, we had a guest speaker come in–PR is his game and Martin Waxman is his name. The mini lecture was based on new media and more specifically, social media and blogs.

Martin brought up lots of good points about how new media is gradually becoming an integral part of our daily lives. For example, he looked at tools like Facebook and Twitter have totally changed the way that people communicate and get their information. Gone are the days of  “can I get your number?”, now it’s more like “do you have Facebook?”. Now, the social aspects of these new media tools are wonderful, but things go further than that.

“Social media is a democratic transparent and conversation way for
people and organizations to interact and build relationships and
communities of mutual benefit – usually online.”

Martin outlined a very important use for social media. Getting your name out there. Things like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Deviantart all give you the chance to share your works and meet new people. Both artists and designers can take advantage of these services to extend their viewer base. For example, I can post my work for here at home in Toronto, and someone all the way in Japan can check it out, with almost no effort. It’s really interesting how we can do that in this day and age. Not to mention useful.

A large part of Martin’s talk was about how online relationships can be really powerful. Now, I’m not talking romance here. I mean business. Really. With the power of things like Twitter you can easily wind up talking to the biggest designers in the world; a chance you would probably never get offline. It really is something to think about there.

In all, I really enjoyed Martin’s presentation. He had lots of great things to say about PR on a big scale as well as smaller scale personal PR. It was quite a treat.

To find out more about Martin Waxman, check out his website! It’s worth a read. http://martinwaxman.com