Beginning with the letter "O"

Today’s word of the day on my first blog ever is: “overwhelmed”. The somewhat clinical definition is: (1) the temptation to despair or (2) so great as to render resistance or opposition useless. I believe this word applies to both how I am feeling sometimes in this PR Post Grad Program and what I will try to accomplish in this Blog.

First, let’s deal with the despair factor. That’s more about me. When I was planning my next move after completing the two year General Arts and Science Program, I looked at the PR Program at Loyalist for a few reasons. One, being that I found the teaching and program content at Loyalist College excellent and since I eventually plan to be a business owner in Event Management, I thought that this program would be beneficial. I was not really counting on the whole media type thing as this is really not my background thus far. I have always been involved in the actual planning and execution of events so this blog and twitter stuff is all too personal for me. While I am an outgoing and friendly person, I am not really comfortable exposing my thoughts to a mass population but despair or no despair, here I go.

Now, for the second interpretation: to render resistance or opposition useless. In a backhand kind of way, effective PR can achieve this. Whether the cause is to provide damage control or provide the damage, PR is a tool used to engage, sway and sell a view or product to potential opposition or resistance to the actual point that it becomes acceptable, believable and wanted. Who wins, depends on how the mass population feels about the end result and how it was delivered.

My goal in this blog is to take an ongoing PR case, which selfishly, I have already sought permission to use in my formal study and update readers on the status. While we will go back a bit in time as a way of bringing us to date, the case of the NHL versus Jim Basillie or Jim Basillie versus the NHL is far from over. By starting with one single word to sum up events, I hope to gain the opinions of my peers in what has become a PR circus. In the end, one side will render the resistance useless but at what cost? Since cost can be measured in different ways, the eventual outcome may leave the winner feeling like me at times, "overwhelmed".