For my first "meet the teacher" post on the new Teaching PR, I interviewed Toni Muzi Falconi, founder of PR Conversations and an educator at both Italian and American universities, to explain how he uses social media. Toni has lots of upper-level public relations experience, and he's not afraid to be corny -- or to speak his mind -- when the moment is right. Read for yourself:
Q. How and when did you first get interested in blogging? Are you using any other social media?
A. I have been intrigued by digital communication processes since the early eighties without having yet understood (because of my shameful disinterest...) the technicalities.
My public relations agency of the time (SCR Associati, then market leader in Italy) was the first consultancy to install a 20 unit word processing network for its employees so they could better work together. Too bad that our supplier (Xerox) abandoned that market a year later at a tremendous loss for us…We quickly switched to a Mac network and subsequently to Windows in order to be compatible with all our then clients and not only Apple.
At the end of the eighties I was an early adopter of Agorà, Italy's first ever social network (a term which wasn’t used then)….Then came the increasing use of the Internet as a tool for information and communication.
In the second part of the nineties, when I also started teaching public relations in Universities, I began to explore the Internet as a virtual relationship environment and assisted clients (mostly financial) in developing extranets with selected stakeholders, creating private environments in traditional organizational websites to stimulate relevant conversations.
When blogs first arrived and instantly exploded I confess I was sceptical and snobbed them thinking they amounted to little more than navel gazing. How wrong I was!
I began to blog personally only in July 2006 with Toni's Blog which then turned into PR Conversations in April 2007, as some ten other co-bloggers from around the world agreed to collaborate.
As for other social media, the only one with which I have some familiarity is wiki, but not as much as I would like.
Q. You've taught at several different schools. What is your approach to teaching public relations?
A. In my view the pervasiveness of public relators in shaping attitudes, opinions, decisions and behaviours of others is at the same time so relevant and so unknown in today’s society, that my primary objective is to help create awareness of this amongst others.
Students who, for some reason have decided to learn about pr, should first of all be fully aware of the social impact they will be making when they practice, and therefore fully appreciate and understand their responsibilities… not only to their clients or employers, but most of all to their interlocutors and society at large.
Only after they realize this, do I proceed to explain and discuss with them the various approaches to public relations practice, the history, the principal paradigms, the roles, the methodologies, the specific practices.
I take an organizational, systemic and relationship based perspective, while focussing on the identity of the global professional community (you cannot effectively work for a grocer in milwakee if you do not have a global perspective…), and engaging students in refining the generic principles and specific applications framework towards a new global approach… a full discontinuity from the traditional ethnocentric US based 20th 'century of self' one, which is no longer either desirable nor effective.
Q. In what ways have you incorporated social media into the classroom?
A. Well, not half as much as I would like to.
At a recent Euroblog conference in Bruxelles I was astonished (and jealous… but eager to catch up) to see how many other colleagues are much more advanced..
This takes one hell of a lot of time and effort, although of course the impact is amazing.
With my Italian undergraduate students (I teach public relations at the Vatican's LUMSA University in Rome) I practically do nothing in this area and I am ashamed.
With my post graduate NYU students (I teach Global Relations and Intercultural Communication at NYU’s executive master in public relations and corporate communication), I engage students in a highly intense use of what we call our virtual blackboard, including of course group conversations on selected issues and dilemmas, week by week, session by session.
I find this extremely gratifying (as well as time-consuming), mostly because by monitoring on line relevant threads of conversations between students, I am much more capable of understanding how their individual mind works, rather than in frontal classroom setting where you experience the usual divide between those few who are eager to attract your attention (not necessarily the brightest), those few who do not follow at all (not necessarily the least gifted), and the great majority which the professor tends to overlook because disturbed by the first and worried by the second.
I learned about this by experimenting last year for the first time a fully on line class. Great experience and full of many pleasant (and a few unpleasant) surprises.
Q. About a year ago, you changed your blog into a group blog, PR Conversations, which includes both educators and practitioners as contributors. What do you see as the purpose of this blog, and how does it contribute to the global PR conversation?
A. As we hold this dialogue, the group of active collaborators around the pr conversations blog is debating its purpose and about bringing this discussion on line, so anything could happen in the next few weeks.
We certainly did not go through a collective envisioning process (mission, vision, guiding values, strategy) before going on line.
Maybe we should have, but as experience shows, in many occasions, it is better to decide to through the troubling effort of an envisioning process only when you are confident that it is worth while.
In my view, the global professional public relations community (formed by professionals, academics and students) is, as mentioned earlier, insufficiently aware of its social and economic impact and identity; and the actual practice perceived by society is largely unacceptable in terms of responsibility and sustainability.
The issue is not, mind you, ethical.
The issue is that public relations, if professionally conducted, is incredibly effective (this is usually a surprise even for us professionals!!!) and that much more than 50% of our collective time and financial efforts are inexcusably wasted.
This is intolerable.
So if prconversations (this, of course, is only my personal view) is effective in making our global pr community more aware of this and capable of indicating threads of reflection, tools and experiences from all over the world by mixing contributions of educators, students, scholars and professionals into a ‘melting pot’ fully respective of the infinite diversities, then it serves a purpose.
Otherwise…I have always preferred merry funerals to boring parties….Also I strongly object to self preserving initiatives.
Q. Do you have any advice for other PR educators who are considering starting a blog or getting involved in social media?
A. I very much benefit from the advice of others and believe that nothing is as it was only a few hours ago, not even opinions one has just finished arguing.
Yes, I am an unabashed relativist, always eager to adapt and change but sufficiently aware that to do this I need to be convinced.
Curiosity and passion are the two drivers. Certainties and time constraints are the two killers.
Finally (and this is probably the most banal of my thoughts today), as much as I am fully emphatic to the dire need of frameworks, conceptualizations, theories and paradigms, I find it fragile to teach public relations in void of actual practice….credibility with one’s students is the real turning point of the learning process… (wow! That sounds corny…).
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