Friday, April 30th

Mike Whelan and Matthew working out 'the shot' of Brad Fitter, with Ian Cull of KAPP (ABC-Tri Cities) looking on.



We’re on our way to the National Main Streets Conference!

It’s going to be a very exciting time as we learn about Main Street and what others are doing, but also to meet new friends.

Let’s rewind for a moment first, and talk about the last few days in review.

This past weekend we started gearing up for the trip. The first order of business was to make contact with several people we wanted to speak with on camera about the complexities of Main Street.

We’ll introduce each person as we shoot the interviews, so stay tuned as we progress through the conference.

After that we prepared for filming our first segment with Brad Fitterer of Fitterer’s Furniture, and coincidently our first news pickup with KAPP-TV (ABC affiliate) out of the Tri-Cities.

The shoot with Brad went well. Mike Whalen, who is our lead film student on the project setup a great shot using existing lighting in the store to maximize the scene, and we put together a small interview portion for Brad.

To introduce Mike a little more, he’s been working on a documentary film being put together for Anderson Hay Company, and is winding down from that project just in time to wind up in ours.

Mike has a variety of experience in film ranging from shooting news stories to corporate video documents. We’re very excited to work with Mike and we think he will add a very audience-centered point of view to the shooting.

Directly after the segment was shot, Ian Cull from KAPP interviewed us about the project and what our experience has been in putting it together and how do we personally feel about Main Street.

It was great to see the interest in our project, and Ian did a good job of capturing our view of Main Street.

Later that day we planned our days at the conference out with Timothy Bishop from the EDA. One of the subjects that is always stressed to us in the classroom is how we are using social media. Professors talk about personal use, but more so the use professionally. In the field of public relations, the use of social media for clients is important.

The majority of the conversation revolves around being able to evaluate which applications to use, what kind of messages to deliver to those audiences, and how to capitalize on with new audiences.

As we read the various workshops that will be hosted at the conference, we noticed there is a distinct emphasis on the use of these tools as well.
While it’s safe to say that almost all businesses would benefit from some social media, it’s not always realized.

We’re impressed by the fact that ‘Main Streeters’ as we’ve heard conference attendees referred to, are cognizant of the ever revolving ways we communicate with one another.

As we all know, you can have the greatest product in the world, something all could use. But if you can’t communicate the message, the story, and process of that product you’ll be lucky to gain an audience.

As we see it, Main Street is not current when it comes to social media. It’s ahead of the curve and in a very big way.

The audience is getting bigger every day that much is clear. In fact, we think it won’t be too long before we start seeing major research emerging showing that the majority of social media users are each following or engaging at least one Main Street program.

The next few days were research days on a variety of topics, along with a few planning sessions for filming.

This morning we secured our camera and we’re on our way out of town. First to Redmond for an unrelated event, and then Sunday we’ll be in the air most of the morning.

We’ll see you then!