What is public relation?

     This time I'm going to talk about something out of swimming and film but a guest lecture about the public relation (PR) practice from a PR co. stakeholder, Tina Wong.

     Before I study PR and listen to this guest lecture, I think it is just a very simple thing which is only promotion to different parties and the creativity is the key for every practice. However, I'm totally wrong with this concept and PR is really important to the success of different events.

     At the beginning, the understanding of the nature and detail information of the event is essential because it needs a very clear mission to set the position in the market and it is directly related to the success base on the market need and competitiveness.

     Taking care of every parties' need may be the difficulty in the PR practice because it may consist the huge vary between the company boss, the sponsors, the audiences and the media, so understand the components of need in each party and strike the balance to create the further plan is not that easy as the wrong understanding or balancing will lead to the failure of the event with the wrong plan. No matter which side cannot be satisfied, the event will lost the supports.

     Even attracting the media to help spreading out the information requires a lot of techniques. It is because the media is uncontrollable, every piece of information they pick to report may not be the one you want to deliver but the level of interest of the public is the key to decide. Therefore, the PR co. always need to build up good relationship and communication with them and catch up the characteristics of those media, such as their patient, focus, needs etc. When to have the press conference and release and how to arrange to fulfill the needs of different parties are always base on the experience of the PR co. as the longer and better they run, the more success they can perform due to the grasp of comprehensive information.

     If anyone who think PR is an easy thing to do like I was, it is totally wrong and it is a good chance for you to re-understand this complicated but interesting topic.

Be inspired from the old film: The Social Network

     Actually this film isn't very old like the last film sharing one month ago, it's picking the book written from Ben Mezrich as the reference and converted to be the film that directed by David Fincher in 2010. The story is about the establishment of Facebook, one of the most popular social network platform around the world, by Mark Zuckerberg who was still at the stage of being an university student of Harvard University but already a genius in program writing.

     

     There are quite a lot of points for me to reflect on in the film, some are related to my school learning and some are about the friendship handling and commitment things.

     One of the subjects in my learning talks about the public relation of the sports organizations and sometimes the concepts may just be the concepts for me only because what I can do is to analyze the present practices of some sports teams and I can't put myself into them to understand more. However, watching this movie help me realizing the concepts in my lessons more. Mark create the Facebook and become so successful is because he knows what are the needs of his targets so he can combine all the elements and design for them. What's more? He has a clear mission and objectives to help him get in the progress of his business, and he stay focus of the mission without being distract from other thing, such as the profit. That's why he becomes success!

     However, it's just a pity that the only friend of Mark, Eduardo Saverin, which is the co-founder of Facebook, sue for the compensation from Mark due to the betray action. How hard is it to have a friend to support you and your idea without asking to much but Mark just focus on his business and he didn't care or respect the feelings and effort of his friend. Finally he's successful with his business but lose his only friend who just trust him. Is it worth?

     Mark promised the Winklevoss brothers to help them write the program for another social network platform, Harvard Connection, but he broke the promise instead building his own website without noticing the brothers. I personally think that's a big problem because it must be fulfilled once the promise has been made or what is the point of the saying? Most of the relation build on trust and if there is no trust between the relation anymore, it'll just simply break.

     Maybe you will have a different view from me after watching the movie, The Social Network, base on different life experience and I'd love to listen from yours so leave a comment and tell me what's in your mind about this movie. Also, try to figure out what do you want from swimming and set up some goals to help you learn and enjoy it=)

Why swimming?

     Some people may have a confusion that why we should swim and why we should start learning it from zero. I can understand these kind of questions since I've also asked myself about that before I started to learn. There are numerous of sports which are beneficial to us to enhance health but why I have to learn something that I don't familiar with? However, there's no doubt that swimming really bring us lots of advantages and let me show you how good it is.

1. Strengthen the cardio muscular function: the blood circulation is faster and the oxygen can be provided to the muscles and organs faster, then go back to the heart again. After a period of time, the loading of your heart will be reduced due to the increased efficiency of each pump of blood.
2. Enhance the immune system: frequent swimming with the water temperature as 26-28 degree can help your body to adapt and balance the heat by the nervous system, the metabolic rate can also be enhanced so the risk to get sick will be reduced.
3. Maintain the healthy body shape: every part of your body muscles are recruited and the body fat can be burned efficiently, therefore the body shape is comprehensively developed.
4. Strengthen the respiratory function: the respiratory muscle will be stronger and the lung volume will be increased after some time of swimming training.

     Swimming is definitely good for the elderly and pregnant women since they may have a higher stress on the knee joints due to the degrading and the excessive weight increment. Therefore, exercise on the ground may be the high impact one for their knee joints and swimming can solve the problem completely.

     Why confuse? Go to swim and practice more is definitely good for you!

The easy backstroke

     Backstroke is an easy swimming style after you familiar with the floating skill and have practice with the freestyle swimming since they share some similar characteristics. Therefore, it won't be difficult for you to learn it from zero acknowledgement!!

     No more air exchange is needed in this style cause your face will face upward for the whole process but you need to have a good floating skill and add up the arm pull and kicking as the whole set of movement. I can summarize 4 points in backstroke base on my learning experience, here we go:

1. Mind your body position. If you still remember the floating skill that I've talked before, keep the back straight and the ears should be under the water level.
   
2. The turn of your shoulder. Your body can slightly turn to the side which the arm is moving upward as a smoother movement.
   
3. Keep the palm pronated when the arm swing back to the water again and push the water for moving forward.
   
4. Do the flutter kick as freestyle but this time is a reverse one. The knees shouldn't be out of the water during kicking.

Reminder!!

• Practice with a partner and in a pool without too many people as you may not familiar with the distance so a partner can keep you away from danger.
  
• Maintain a slowly breath so the rhythm won't be messed.