Palo Alto College, one of the Alamo Colleges, holds a dear place in the hearts of many CMC members as that is where they started their undergraduate career.  For Andrew Valdez he not only attended, but he now works there as a senior multimedia specialist in the public relations department.  Since beginning his job at Palo Alto, Andrew has taken PACFest as an opportunity to build awareness of the college, not only at the event, but through social media. PACfest is an official fiesta event held on the Thursday before Battle of the Flowers parade. During PACFest 2013, Andrew and the PAC PR team created a “Social Media  Alley” which included a twitter wall, flat screens, and step-and-repeat which allowed participants to engage in social media throughout the event. The social media alley was a huge success and earned the PAC PR team a prestigious NCMPR paragon award for best social media campaign. Then in 2014 Andrew and the PAC PR team decided to take it up a notch and build on the successes of the previous year. In addition to PACfest social media campaign, Andrew and the PAC PR team managed to get back-to-back national awards, even being chosen to present at the 2015 national NCMPR conference held in Portland.

CMC officially got involved with PACFest when Andrew asked if any members would be willing to come and get photos.  We were happy to come help out and it was a great experience for all of those involved.  The staff, the faculty and community were great. It was a true community event that we were able to help document.

So this year, we began our collaboration early on.  Andrew and the PAC PR team put together a stellar social media campaign and even held a successful Mariachi Flash Mob at South Park Mall.  CMC members Corina Zavala Lopez, Joey Lopez and his niece Victoria helped out by gather audio, photos and video of the flash mob.

For the day of Andrew invited Palo Alto graduate and CM alumni, Christian Rios, owner of the arcade Dreamonoids, to set-up a table with arcade games. The arcade component gave social media alley an extra interactive component that wasn’t available previous years.

Dreamonoids was a hit and introduced a new outlet for social gaming to the college. We also had professor joey lopez, as well as G&A Media crew Johnathan Guajardo, Joel Peña and Christian Giron from the CMC to gather additional photos and videos of the event.  Andrew and the PAC PR team stepped up the event media wise with a Drone to capture some aerial footage as well.

The CMC is proud to be a supporter of the PACFest 2015, kudos to Andrew and their PAC PR crew, their work is top notch and it is great to see such cutting edge convergent media work being done by a local community college.