Discipline.....

So here it's been over a week and I haven't posted a darn thing, I can't keep up with messages on Facebook and who the heck has time to tweet all day? This is going to be the biggest challenge of this all....being disciplined enough to create some new communication habits.

I attended a technology summit last week as part of the Texas Travel Industry Association conference and the speakers were great. One of the speakers is a friend from San Antonio, Steve Atkins. Main takeaway from him: The foundation of any successful communication effort is the website. EVERYTHING CONNECTS HERE. Invite. Excite. Capture. Communicate. Another speaker spoke about all the tools now available and how they must be layered to create an ecosystem that supports all communication efforts. I liked the use of the term ecosystem in this context...it resonated strongly. Another speaker advised to start with the back end - analytics, metrics and ROI. And still another spoke of the importance of acting green. He tossed out an idea of custom downloadable brochures that can include any element the customer might want. Of course we post pdfs on our website...but that seems quaintly archaic when I think about all the other applications we have not begun to explore.

We'll be posting the new TPWD web position next week....I think our timing is going to be perfect and I know we'll attract some real talent. It's going to be exciting to explore this new frontier. Also exciting - looks like we've got a nice pile of money to use for the remainder of this fiscal year to really upgrade state parks web pages. That's going to be a great project..and it's fabulous that we actually have some resources to work with.

I met Omar Gallaga from the Austin American Statesman the other day at Texas State. I was on a panel with him and Chris Ruiz from the KSAT web team. The panel was about our experiences as Hispanics in the media and PR world. It was an interesting discussion. Omar amazed me with the amount of writing he does online and all the technology he uses on a constant basis. It underscored for me how different the younger generation consumes and processes information. I need to connect with him on Twitter and follow his tweets and check out Chris' work on the KSAT pages. (In my spare time of course...)

I also need to get off the stick and begin exploring communication theory to support a master's thesis.

Better do that now......