Let’s face it, we all love free stuff. And with three of us engaged and in the throes of wedding planning here at blast! PR, we’ve joined the other thousands of brides-to-be interested in getting our hands on free loot!

So often we’re on the other side of contests, charged with planning and orchestrating the details, which means it wouldn’t exactly be fair if we were to participate and, by some stroke of luck, win the very contest we were running. What fun it is to finally be on the other side! Just last week, Crystal won a piece of jewelry from Bailey’s Jewelry here in Raleigh. I’ve won professional help with home décor and our wedding registry from “The Bride and Bloom” magazine. (Trust me, we need it. I nearly had a fit trying to register for China.) And Carla has a renewed faith that she, too, can win something!

But social media has done so much more for me and planning our wedding, like helping me tackle the big question: where can I find a traditional gluten-free wedding cake? And this power is not something that has gone unnoticed. In addition to the leagues of wedding sites providing guidance on how to use social media in planning your wedding, Josh Catone, editor of Mashable.com, wrote “HOW TO: Plan a DIY Wedding Using Social Media” in September of 2009. And every day I see more and more people Tweeting under handles that immediately declare they’re status as “Engaged” or “Bride-to-Be.”

According to Wikipedia, the wedding industry has grown to an empire of 40 billion dollars per year and the average American wedding reception in 2008 was $21,810, which dwindles when compared to 2007 weddings, which ran $28,730 on average. Looking at these numbers, it’s no wonder social media outlets are saturated with wedding vendors and bloggers eager to share their offerings and abilities with brides trying to decide how to spend their slices of that $40 billion industry pie.

My fiancé and I have already made most of the large decisions going into our wedding. We’ve been very diligent and thoughtful in deciding how we’re going to spend our slice (albeit a very small slice) of that wedding industry pie. But even still, whenever I feel I can’t find exactly what I’m looking for, like my most recent challenge of finding the perfect invitations, I turn to Twitter and Facebook. It still shocks me to see that within minutes, I have names of people in the Raleigh, NC area that can give me what I was looking for along side a glowing recommendation. And, if I happen to win a Mojuba Wedding Kit from @my_mojuba while I’m searching for information relevant to me or *gasp* doing client work, then that’s fantastic. But if not, I’m probably going to buy one myself just because of how abundantly clear the need for the kit has been made on Twitter.

blast! PR is proud to announce that we’ve won Best Place to Work for companies under 50 employees for the second straight year! Thanks to the entire team for making this possible.

On my way home from Seattle last week, I picked up a copy of the latest Real
Simple, my favorite way to pass the 6-hour plane ride back to the East coast. Two things in the issue caught my eye and made me laugh. Next to the header, “Newly Coined” they have the term Social Notworking: the act of playing around on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites when you should be working. Also, on another page, a reader wrote in to say that her guilty pleasure is checking and updating her Facebook status several times a day.

Although I suppose this viewpoint holds true for many people out there, it reminded me how differently blast! PR, and the majority of the online marketing/technology industry, views social networking. Not as a guilty pleasure or an escape from work, but in fact, an integral part of our work day and client strategy. If I don’t update my Twitter status, even my personal account, I get a note from my boss (via Twitter) reminding me to do so!

We have always strived to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to social media and PR 2.0, and we know that for many of our clients, establishing a Twitter presence, building and updating fan pages on Facebook and generally joining the real time conversations with their peers, prospects, clients and industry influencers social media provides is an essential piece of the brand (and credibility) building puzzle. In order to provide the best recommendations and stay on top of trends, all of us at blast! PR have been assigned the responsibility to test, know, use, love and experience first-hand the latest and greatest social outlets and applications.

So for everyone out there worried about Social Notworking, know that there are those of us who are working hard to be social every day. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it!

Carla Vicens, Senior PR Specialist