Adding social media to a traditional PR curriculum

Grady College has a curriculum review coming up soon, so I've been thinking about things that should be added to the PR curriculum. I've argued that social media should be integrated throughout the curriculum, so what should we be doing, and where? Some initial thoughts:

• Intro/survey course: add discussions of social media to the law module (copyright, defamation, etc.); introduce some of the commonly used tools; use examples from social media throughout, but especially in the discussions of theory
• Research: monitoring social media; measuring social media programs, including ROI
• Administration/cases class: principles and ethics; online strategy and decision-making 
• Communication/writing: transmedia storytelling; SMPR and online newsrooms; SEO (building keywords in); writing for the Web -- expanding the notion on "content" to include video, audio, games, etc.; ethics 
• Graphics: applying design principles to online communication; some HTML if it's not taught elsewhere 
• Campaigns: include online community building, ethics 

I'm sharing this because UGA has a pretty traditional PR curriculum, brought by Scott Cutlip from my alma mater Wisconsin to Georgia in the '70s. (Of course each class has changed with the times, but the basic course structure is common). Looking over the list, I think UGA's already doing a lot of this, but we could do more.

Any other ideas? I'd love to be able to share them when we do our review in the fall.

Comments

[amymengel]

I think online reputation management would be a good fit for the Administration course. How to respond/reply to misinformation online, how to "bury" bad Google results by creating fresh new content, how to handle an online attack by a blogger.

Also, this would probably go in the research class, but PR students could certainly benefit from a basic understanding of Web analytics and knowing how to bake those measurements (page views, unique visitors, click-through-ratios) into campaigns. Similar to the post Dave Fleet wrote about using unique bit.ly links to track clicks from different sources (Twitter, Facebook, blog, etc.).

[Debbie Ebalobo]

Research: monitoring social media; measuring social media programs, including ROI

I think this would be a very valuable tool for students looking for jobs because firms want to implement social media monitoring and measuring, and though new graduates know HOW to use the tools often case, they do not know how to present the findings accordingly therefore contribution to the discussion is mininal.

Can you just teach a rouge course with this topic so that I can take it? ha ha

[Karen Russell]

Good ideas, both of you. Will definitely carry forward to the curriculum meeting (especially the special class request -- heehee). Thanks!

[N Tindall]

Very good ideas. You are doing more than many other programs.