Caryn Eaves

Caryn Eaves oversees and provides strategic direction to the Tournament President and Executive Committee, in-house public relations department and its agency-of-record for public relations counsel. She has been instrumental in launching marketing and promotional events designed to heighten the Tournament of Roses worldwide interest including an award-winning website and the lively media announcements that have become a key aspect of the Rose Parade. Eaves also oversees the writing and publication of all media materials and serves as an official media spokesperson for the Tournament of Roses. In addition, she is the staff liaison for many of the Tournament’s volunteer committees that incorporate public relations aspects including Queen and Court and Television & Radio.

Q. What role does PR play in the shaping of the Tournament of Roses Parade brand?

A. Public Relations has everything to do with the Tournament of Roses brand. The festival actually began in 1890 as a public relations tool to lure visitors from the mid-West to visit Pasadena and purchase property. The newly settled Midwestern transplants used the parade as a means to show the world that they had roses blooming in January while their friends were frozen in their homes.

Today, the brand has taken on a life of its own. It is a world-renowned festival known as the largest New Year’s Day parade. Watching it has become an annual tradition for many American families. The main public relations tactics used today are focused on protecting the brand and working to keep it evolving and remain relevant to today’s audiences.

Q.  The Rose Parade has developed a sizeable international following over the past few decades, what are some key differences in the role that PR plays when dealing with the influx of international media interested in sharing the the New Year’s Day tradition with an international audience?

A. Aside from language and geographical barriers, working with international media is not much different than working with the domestic media. As most outlets are, international media outlets are interested in their local angle. Members of the media from Asian countries generally like to focus on entries with Asian angles just as Latin-American media focus on the entries with a Latin-American angle. We do our best to accommodate every request, but sometimes the best tactic is to provide our list of entries with press contacts and let the media choose what is most interesting to them.

Q. While the Parade has always been a social experience, the rise of social media has added a new layer to the experience. How has the Tournament of Roses leveraged social media to improve the viewer experience?

A. The Tournament of Roses has many moving arms. The association is made up of 935 volunteer members divided in 31 committees each responsible for a certain piece of the festival. We have a small support staff, which the PR department is a part of. An organization with so many moving arms is difficult to mobilize into one joint effort, but we have managed to create a social presence for both the Rose Parade and Rose Bowl Game. We’ve found that fans of the Rose Parade and Game use the social media venues as a place to create a community and share memories. Social media helps create dialog between our fans and brings out the brand’s evangelists.

We are definitely looking further into additional social media offerings and looking to our audiences to see what they prefer. If no one is
interested in watching a live webstream with no commentary, we won’t put effort into producing an additional broadcast when the ones provided by KTLA and our other broadcasters make our audiences perfectly happy.

Q. The Rose Parade began as a promotional effort by Pasadena’s distinguished Valley Hunt Club to promote Southern California’s mild climate at a time of the year when a large portion of the country is experiencing winter weather. Nearly 123 years later, what message does the Rose Parade communicate today?

A. The Rose Parade is annually seen as message of hope and new beginnings. Even through difficult times of war and economic crisis, when it was questioned whether the Rose Parade would be seen as a waste of roses and flowers, the parade was never cancelled. Instead of being seen as a frivolity, the public sees the Rose Parade as a symbol of hope and community.

Adam Carolla, recapped it nicely for us… “When you watch the Rose Parade, it really makes you think all is good in the world. There are different cultures, different colors, different religions, different ethnicities, different EVERYTHIHNGS, but everyone is just marching together to celebrate. The jets are flying overhead, the bands are playing, and everyone is decked out and looks good. It’s always a spectacular day. The streets are clean, there’s no graffiti and you think, ‘Yes! The Rose Parade! This is our country. This is what we do.’”

The Rose Parade is a major, world-wide festival organized by volunteers. Each float is decorated by volunteers. Communities get together to raise money for their floats or to send their bands to Pasadena. It is truly a symbol of people working together for a common cause.

From a commercial standpoint, the Rose Parade provides corporate sponsors a united and positive message to align their brand to.

Q. The 2012 Rose Parade is scheduled for January 2nd, due to The Tournament of Roses policy of never holding the Parade on a Sunday. Are there any challenges in terms of keeping interest in the Rose Parade in those years when it does not occur on New Year’s Day?

A. Most businesses also close on the second when January first is on a Sunday. It isn’t as difficult to move the Parade over as one would
think. From a positive standpoint, viewers are not as likely to be up late celebrating the New Year the night before and we may have a larger early morning audience. The extra day also provides more time for decorating floats.

I know this through first hand experience…

Trying to edit or add content to Wikipedia’s arcane style and coding can be, at the very least, challenging and enormously time consuming, enough cause to stay away thereafter.

And that’s the reason why the better part of half of the active contributors are under 22 years of age and that most of its content has become skewed toward geek topics, featuring more articles on technology, science fiction and military history, than on the humanities and social sciences.

There is no question that in its first decade Wikipedia’s crowdsourced platform has successfully captivated and engaged masses of people. Just consider that it is now ranked as the fifth most-visited site in the world and yet, of the 400 million users who visit the site every month, according to Wikipedia’s own estimates, only 0.02-0.03 percent of visitors actively contribute to articles. Its stated vision, “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge,” has yet to be achieved.

So what have been the barriers for participation?

For starters, in its present state, Wikipedia deters content creation and editing by those who are best qualified to do so — the educators, who spend more time criticizing it, (usually for some minor error as in a typo), than engaging in it. If it is to serve this generation much like the Encyclopedia Britannica did the many generations that came before us, it needs to attract a new generation of knowledgeable editors that become comfortable with how to cite sources, provide references, validate the information they are adding and understand shortcuts that can be taken to provide an internal link in lieu of using the full html address for a forwarded article.

The good news is that it is now being addressed with the launch of a pilot project by the Wikimedia Foundation that includes several public policy initiatives on university campuses. Basically the initiatives will ask Professors at public policy programs in universities in the US to participate by first asking their students to better some existing articles and eventually include knowledge of navigating the Wikipedia as to edits and content creation in college curriculums. The Foundation plans to form Wikipedia Campus Ambassadors and Wikipedia Online Ambassadors who will help train these new Wikipedians. There will also be a Wikipedia Teaching Fellowship program to accompany the Public Policy Initiative programs.

In the end it’s like everything else. With training and mentoring in place, a new generation of editors should blossom and Wikipedia will finally achieve the status that once belonged to the venerable Britannica Encyclopedia. However, it is poised to reach the billions that the older encyclopedia never even envisioned.

The missing link has always been knowledge and willingness to adapt. With the expected batch of new editors resulting from the mentoring and training programs. Wikipedia’s founding vision of “freely sharing in the sum of all knowledge” can finally be achieved.

There is something to be said about the choice of words, or put differently, the art of wordsmithing.

The full page ‘sorry’ ads taken out in the major British newspapers by Rupert Murdoch over the weekend, certainly seem inconsequential in light of the calamitous series of consequences that resulted from the illegal practice of phone hacking employed, approved and accepted as normal policy by Murdoch’s top level journalists and editors. For goodness sake, laws were broken and private and public lives were exposed, hurt or damaged, political favors were encouraged,sought and won — all in the pursuit of scooped news.

Sorry? Just doesn’t do it.

The resignations are piling up by the hour and just Sunday it included, of all people, the head of Scotland Yard. The unfolding story of intrigue and back room deals has embroiled politicians, police and, in essence, brought into question the very ethics of the UK media industry. Trust in journalism has been chipped, or tainted…

And you get a ‘sorry’? It just won’t do.

‘Sorry’ described as apologetic in the Thesaurus, is too flippant a word in this case. You say sorry when you bump into someone in the mall or when you spill something during a meal or if you forget the wine for a hostess. Nobody cares right now if Murdoch is sorry. It’s too late for that, for the incredulous story has spiraled out of control. It is akin to the example of running a red light while driving and inadvertently killing someone. What does one say to the family, ‘sorry’?

A ‘sorry’ won’t rehire the 600 employees who lost their jobs on the spot with the closing of the 168-year old tabloid. A ‘sorry’ won’t hide the collusion of politicians and police who silently acquiesced or participated with the phone hacking scheming. A ‘sorry’ won’t save those senior executives and editors who stumbled and mumbled in the immediate aftermath something about “not knowing anything” or “not having anything to do with such policies,” — those same ones that were arrested over the last few days and carted away,

In Murdoch’s own words in the ad, an apology is not enough. So what is?

Immediate indignation might have served him better. Murdoch would have done well to invoke President Truman’s favorite line, “The buck stops here” instead of offering a ‘sorry.’ He could have said, instead, that he takes full responsibility for whatever policies were set by his executives, for whatever practices were implemented under those policies, for the little oversight that allowed and perpetuated the illegal behaviors, for the damages that these caused and that he will personally ‘promise’ (a better word than ‘sorry’) that the ethics of journalism will be reset at all his publications with strict checks and balances in place.

A ‘sorry’ is too meaningless to save his Empire. Maybe nothing will. Time will tell.

This tweet showed up recently: “The Uni of Iowa is offering a $37K scholarship to its b-schl fr the bst tweet by a prspctive MBA student.”

Strange to see this from an academic institution… It makes the “de rigueur” misspellings that are so intrinsic to the Twitter format seem OK.

Still, if the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business wanted to break through the clutter and get attention from potential business school candidates, it certainly got what it wanted, for this tweet went viral with a whirlwind velocity. Why not? Seems an easy and quick way to vie for a full scholarship. Even business publications were all over this including Bloomberg, Business Insider and BusinessWeek blog, as well as the French publication Atlantico, albeit the latter promptly declared that this would attract mediocrity rather than motivated students.

Not necessarily.

It will also attract savvy students wishing to compete on a creative level rather than just on their background information. It also fits in very well with Tippie’s need to get more aggressive in finding students to fill their school’s full-time MBA program, considering that they only had only 307 applicants. Moreover, it keys in with the school’s admissions officers’ increased curiosity in knowing a candidate’s social media voice in addition to their academic achievements.

It’s a creative pioneering gesture to interest applicants through a medium that really belongs to that generation. But the required tweet to compete for the $37K is in addition to the regular application form and resumes, not instead of, and that seems to dull the ”newness” of it all. So, armed with all the traditional information required, except for the usual 800 to 900-word essay, just how much weight will the tweet carry when it comes to in winning the scholarship?

There is something that I do not quite get…. I am thinking of all those spelling bees that kids try so hard to win over their early years, only to have a college give permission to misspell as a lure to apply.

It’s a clever attention grabber, but a stunt none-the-less, one that does not seem to be on message for an institution of higher learning…or is it “hier lrning.”