Behind the Scene: Taylor's CommFest

TAYLOR's UNIVERSITY staff and students had a blast while bonding amongst one another throughout CommFest 2012: Social Media Olympics (Social-lympics) at Taylor’s University Lakeside Campus, on October 31, Wednesday.

While most of the participants of the event have truly enjoyed themselves with experiencing sports and social media at the same time. There is more to this event than they think.

Taylor’s School of Communication (SOC) lecturer and CommFest project advisor Thaera Yousef along with SOC Public Relation (PR) student and ProPassion operations director Tristan Fung share their thoughts.

What is CommFest?

“It is called Communication Festival and it is an event organised by the SOC students to look at (the field of) communication being expressed in different ways.

“Every year we have different themes, which the students have to come up with; one of the (CommFest) objectives is to see how creative and versatile they can communicate (their ideas) through different medium or modes (to their audience).

“Another objective of CommFest is to get people to interact especially between students and staff; that’s what our activities has always been about: participation and games.

“CommFest gives them (PR students) the exposure they may not have experienced from their internship.

“Very seldom in their internship, they get to do things like proposal planning and pitching to the media. Generally they (the company) will ask them to do a small role because the company is afraid they will make a mistake.

“In this project (CommFest), the (PR) students have to do an event from the beginning until the end, so the exposure would be a lot more than their internship,” she added.

What is ProPassion?

Thaera explains, “proPassion is a student PR consultancy, so basically what happens is that they will have positions in that consultancy like operations director, marketing director, events director; in this consultancy they have to find a client to work for projects. When they pitch for a project, it gives them a hands-on experience of how to run a PR campaign, it depends what (client) they get, this is the time where they put their first four semesters of theories to the final semester into practice.

What happens after CommFest?

Thaera mentions, “Additional funds will be used to pay our sponsors and the rest will be distributed to the Bario Project.

"Bario Project is a Corporate Social Responsibility project spearheaded by Taylor's. This project is dedicated to help the community in Bario, Sabah. By building facilities like hostels for the family who can't afford to send their children to school; it is still ongoing," she added.

Why Social-lympics?

Thaera mentioned, “Since (CommFest) 2010, we are still looking at social media because this is the current issue with youth today.

“They are so much in the virtual world that they are not in-touch with their reality; the hours spent on social media and what is happening is that: if you are an avid social media user, it doesn’t really mean you are a good communicator and that’s why we sort of went onto the same platform but this time we ask (the PR) students to go into sports and activities.

“I have my fair share of students who communicates well when they are online but face-to-face, (they) do not know how to interact.

“We are embracing social media, it is not going anywhere. Although there is a lot of problems now like when you use social media you become more narcissistic, where all you think about is yourself.

“Facebook users, everything is me, I upload the latest Char Kuey Teow I ate, I do this; I did that.

“Since almost everything is done through social media, what we are trying to tell the public to come out from it (virtual reality) and interact with people. Face-to-face communication cannot be eliminated. I mean if you want a real relationship with someone, whether it is friendship or whatever; you have to do that face-to-face.

“That’s why we called it Social Media Olympics,” Thaera added.

However from Tristan’s point of view, “The idea (Social-Lympics) was taken from CommFest 2010 and CommFest 2011, the issue now is the lack of (physical) activities and sports; they (youth) are always on social media.

“Basically we want to imply the sports and social media together and bring up this event where social media is brought up with sports.

“We want them (online users) to know that even though you are so attached to social media today but you can still go out to have fun with activities especially (like) sports. We want youths these days to have a healthier lifestyle.

“You can still have both worlds, you can have a healthier lifestyle while you can be very technologically-wise.

“Whether the message was sent out or not, hopefully it is out there, that’s why we have this social media event, we want them to have fun and to keep in mind that you can have both: sports and social media as well,” Tristan added.

For more information, visit: https://www.facebook.com/CommFest2012.