Two weeks ago, I took a couple of days off from work, so I could travel to Florida — just outside of Jacksonville — to marry my long-time girlfriend. It was an incredible wedding, and it has created countless memories that my wife and I will have for the rest of our lives.
So now, I know what you’re thinking: What does a wedding have to do with public relations? Why should I care about your marriage? How does this apply to your general concept at the Big Mouth Blog?
Well, let me put it to you this way: Social media is changing not just the way we interact but the way we remember, the way we plan for special occasions, the way we document our lives. And seeing my wedding through the lens of social media, surprisingly, taught me something about content public relations.
One of the most remarkable aspects about my wedding was that as soon as we were hitched, as soon as I said my vows and put the ring on my wife’s finger, our friends and family started to share their photographs on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram; you name the social media site, our photos were there. And instantly, right after the wedding, I was able to see photographs of my beautiful wife. Most people have to wait weeks for the wedding photographer to share their photos, but for us, we had a sneak peak into the way we will remember our special day.
But that’s when I started to think about the long-term trajectory of these Facebook photos. Let’s assume that Facebook never dies, and it’s around for the next 100 years: does it become a sort of street-smart census? A primary historical document? When I have grandchildren, will I bring the little whippersnappers over to a social-media platform to reminisce rather than a photo album? And how will these photos age? Even though they’re digital, our technology will (hopefully) advance? Maybe all our future photographs will be holograms?
It’s hard to know exactly what is going to happen with the way we remember, but social media is certainly changing the tools we use to connect to those distant time periods — or relatively close ones. Take for instance this Vine created by my friend Clayton Dean. How will my grandchildren interact with this six-second video? Will it last? Is it capable of being archived?
Great vine of Heron and I getting married RT @cdeanseo: Bianca and Joe officially married vine.co/v/brvJK1ePbzd”
— Joseph A. Lapin (@JosephALapin) February 15, 2013
Clearly Facebook, Twitter and Vine had an influence on my wedding, but there was another social-media platform that had an equally substantial role: Google+. For me, Google+ clearly has the best upside out of all the social-media platforms, and you can read a great post by our former intern, Marie Ebenezer, which outlines the benefits of Google+. Now let me tell you how it impacted our wedding.
For must of my life, I have been a musician, and I started a band in Miami. Our bass player was married almost a year earlier, and we surprised his wife by playing on their big day. I knew my wife was expecting something similar. So I came up with a plan to play “Stand By Me” at the wedding with my band, but here’s the problem: I live in California; my band is scattered throughout Miami and Massachusetts. How in the world was I going to pull this off?
Google+ became the problem solver. In a way, Google+ has handpicked all the elements from other social-media sites they liked and put them into one place. For example, you can follow people similar to Twitter; you can watch a news feed and “Like” a post; and you can share links and stories with friends (except you have circles you can create to pick who you want to share certain documents with). So for the band, I used one of their features — Google Hangouts — which allows users to connect through live video feeds. It was strange, but our band eventually ended up practicing through Google Hangouts, and we pulled off something close to cool. Check out the video below.
In the end, social media isn’t just an important tool to sell our products or build our brand; it’s a tool that is influencing the way I remember. And knowing that as a professional PR person helps me understand that our social-media presence isn’t just a bunch of tweets and posts that mean nothing; it’s a creation of our companies memory, our characters, our archive of the days and hours we spend working that may be forgotten but potentially never lost.
