Greeting from the International Liaisons in Prague!
This past week the Marketing Society in Prague was able to co-host an event with the NYU Lecture Series about the Impact of New Media Technology on Marketing. The Lecture was lead by Dana Bérová, an Information and Technology and Services consultant & Business Development Director at Gartner.
Ms. Bérová was the former Minister of Informatics in the Czech Republic, and is currently a specialist in media and television companies as well as a joint owner of a trading company. The discussion and lecture was facilitated by Denisa Kasl-Kollmannová of Charles University in Prague, and Hana Huntová of NYU in Prague.
The event begin with a mix and mingle between Charles University and NYU Students who were separated into groups representing companies such as Twitter, Blogspot, Wikipedia, Facebook, Google, and Seznam- Google’s main search engine competitor in the Czech Republic. Each group discussed their respective company’s services, value to consumers, and their business models. An interesting debate arose between the Seznam and Google teams about which company would ultimately survive in the Czech market, the native Seznam or the foreign Google. The groups also discussed their internet habits and the differences between the internet usage of Czech and American students.
The discussion was followed by a lecture by Ms. Berova who gave great insight into those companies that have been utilizing social media well such as Apple and the effects that social media has had on business in general. She brought up the issue of social media’s effectiveness and how there hasn’t been a completely convincing way to evaluate the impact of investing in it. For many companies, the question becomes whether or not it is worth using twitter or facebook, or if it’s just hype. The Q&A session following the lecture brought up another interesting discussion about not only the current motives of Google’s withdrawal from China, but also about their future outlook in that market.
To top it all off, the event ended with free pizza and an outing to a pub where several Czech and American students were able to mingle and network with each other…without the use of the internet – talk about progress!
See you all back in New York (:
Best,
Sandhya and Siya
