Teaching PR

Summertime special, 2.5 Weeks' Best

I spent a few days at the beach and didn't give any thought to posting the Week's Best links for PR students. Then I got back from the beach and was overwhelmed by the backlog in the feed reader (and the mound of laundry). Oh, well. Here are a few picks for the last two-and-a-half weeks:

• Tips for Electronic Resumes, Karen Burns
• How to Use Interns in Your Social Programs, Jeremiah Owyang 
• Is Public Engagement Ever a Bad Idea?, Bill Sledzik  
• Engagement: Ranking the Top 100 Global Brands (PDF), Altimeter Group and Wetpaint 
• 10 Insights Gained from Spending 7,280 Hours on Social Media Websites, Heather Mansfield
• To Blog or Not to Blog..., Tom Murphy  
• Audit Your Intellectual Capital--7 Ways to Find Your Stories, Elizabeth Sosnow (via @sarahcannon)
• What's Your Definition of Public Relations?, Sarah Evans (via @barbaranixon)  
• Social Media Privacy and Personal Security Issues, Robert Siciliano (via @PRwise)

How much HTML is enough?

Following up on my curriculum post, Grady graphics guru Kristen Smith asks me what students should know about HTML. I know several recent grads have told me they wished they knew a little HTML, but I don't know exactly what would be most useful.

So, Grady alums, students and faculty at other schools, PR pros who hire new grads, and anyone else who wants to comment: what exactly should students be learning about HTML?

Book review: Online Public Relations (Phillips & Young)

In the second edition of Online Public Relations, David Phillips and Philip Young start with the premise that "nothing will ever be the same again." After a quick review of key online tools and terms (SEO, chat, new media release, etc.), the book turns to a series of chapters that discuss "a shift in culture, communication and value," developing a conceptual understanding of transparency, porosity and the nature of information, and exploring new models of information exchange. The authors consider collaboration, knowledge building and knowledge protection, and they consider PR's role in these processes. Both the Internet and public relations, they conclude, are about the exchange of information. 

The book's third section considers how online communication, including social media, can have an impact on public relations planning, strategy and tactics, and an important chapter discusses the risks as well as opportunities online communication presents to PR practice. Other chapters on ethics, monitoring and measurement, and corporate social responsibility provide insights on the very real problems that a public relations practitioner can, or will, encounter in organizations that get involved in the social space. 

The book is well written and provides theoretical and conceptual approaches rather than just tactical information-- not surprising if you read, as I do, Phillips' and Young's blogs. It would work well in a digital PR class, especially if it were supplemented by case studies and current events, but I think it works even better as a guide for people who are already working in PR and need to get up to speed on ways the Internet is changing the practice. 

Where does it fit with the recent discussion on this blog? The authors clearly state that the Internet (particularly social media) is driving a "new PR" -- it is, in other words, transformative to public relations practice -- while also stating that the fundamentals of PR, relationship management, have not and will not change. I think that means we agree.

Connect09: PR and social media conference

Grady College and Porter Novelli are teaming up again to sponsor UGA's third annual conference on public relations and social media, to be held Sept. 19 in Athens. The unofficial theme this year is "integrating social media with traditional PR and marketing."

Confirmed speakers include:

• Paula Berg, Southwest Airlines
• Toby Bloomberg and Jeremy Pepper -- on consumer/B2B 
• Dr. Richard Waters and Dr. Tom Watson (via Skype from the UK) -- on nonprofit PR
• Government PR panel TBA 
• Melanie James (via Skype from Australia) and Dan Greenfield -- "Is Social Media Transformational?" 
• Perry Binder -- on legal issues related to employee blogging 

The student team (Kristin English, Allison Brill, and Lesley Anne Dickerson) and I are working on the rest, and we'll keep you updated via @UGAconnect.

Unfortunately Grady's Web site recently got hacked (by Russians, no kidding!), so we're slow getting the registration site up -- I'll let you know when it's ready. The deadline will be Sept. 11.

The Week's Best, 20 July 2009

• Advice from a PR Pro, Nicole Bersani
• Advice for Graduating PR Students, Nicole Jordan  
• Hispanic PR Blog  
• Unrealistic Millennial "Expectations" in the Workplace, Bob Batchelor 
• The How (Not) Guide to PR, Lauren Fernandez 
• 20 Things Job Seekers Shouldn't Say on Twitter, Resume Bear 
• Should Your Major Be Your Passion?, Cal Newport (via @ludwikc)
• Students May Not Be as Software Savvy as They Think, @chronicle 

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.

Mistakes student bloggers often make

The first time I taught a special topics social media class (shout out to the WOMmers who still read this blog), I asked them all to start a blog on the topic of their choice. Midway through the semester, I realized that they need a lot more guidance than just that, and since then I've noticed lots of other student bloggers making many of the same mistakes that group made. Here are some suggestions to help keep student bloggers out of trouble.

Don'ts for student bloggers:

1. Don't discuss multiple topics in one post. First, it makes your posts too long. Second, it messes with a search engine's ability to find your post. And third, it's confusing for the readers.
2. Don't delete posts or change the content of posts. If you need to make a small change, like correct a typo or grammatical error, go ahead. But if you're changing the meaning or correcting a major error, make addition to your post (marking it as an update), strikethrough words or phrases that were incorrect (so readers can see what was changed), or write a new post and add the link to the old one (so that readers who come across the first post can go to the second).  
3. Don't post when you're angry or upset. It's great to be passionate about your topic, but if you're really mad you might say something you regret... and I just told you you're not supposed to delete posts later. Save it as a draft and look at it again the next day. 
4. Don't start promoting your blog too early. You want to make sure you've settled on a niche and found your voice before you start inviting the world to stop in. 
5. Don't resort to the sweeping generalization just to attract attention. I used to just roll my eyes, but now I call it out in the comments when I see bloggers doing this -- "all PR programs suck," "all women do this," "no one does that," etc. Please. The world is not that simple. Either you think it is, or you're just trying to get everyone to visit your blog: is that really how you want people to see you? 
6. Don't quit. Don't worry, I'm not saying you have to blog for the rest of your life. But you do need to have an exit strategy, rather than just letting your blog die a slow death by neglect.

  Any other "don'ts" for this list?
  

The Week's Best, 13 July 2009

• Will Google Wave Eliminate the Need for PR as Media Relations?, Valeria Maltoni
• Iconoclasm, Jason Mical
• United Airlines Breaks Guitars, David Meerman Scott; The Secret to Avoiding a YouTube Crisis -- Revealed!, Amy Mengel; and "United Breaks Guitars" Singer Gets Cash Offer From Airline, Ryan McCarthy (via @prprof_mv)
• The Power and the Story, Michael Wolff (via Steven Silvers) 
• Think PR People Don't Need Math? Think Again, Dave Fleet 
• Nike Censors Lebron James Dunk Incident; Creates Needless PR Fiasco, Jim Edwards (via @Debalobo)
• PR Camp Atlanta, Dan Greenfield -- I'm planning to go & hope to see you there!

The Week's Best, 6 July 2009

• Insights into Web 2.0 Job Hunting, John Cass
• U.S. to Sanford: Shut Yer Pie Hole, David Kamerer
• Losing the PR War, Anthony Reich (on The Israel Situation)
• The [Washington] Post's 'Salon' Plan: A Public Relations Disaster, Andrew Alexander
• PR Has Never Been Truly Authentic, Beth Harte, and Authenticity of Public Relations, David Reich
• PR Tips for Surviving a Flip Cam..Er..iPhone "Ambush," Dan Greenfield
• How to Manage a School/Blog Balance, Aditya Mahesh (on PRoBlogger)
• Are We Forcing Social Media Tunnel Vision on Young PR Pros?, Meg Roberts (on Communications Catalyst)
• Spinning the Web: P.R. in Silicon Valley, Claire Cain Miller, and NY Times on PR May Be Right for Silicon Valley, But Not Necessarily Anyone Else, Ephraim Cohen

Just for fun: watch the videos linked here. Social Media Broadway Parody, Thom Pulliam and Social Media is the New Punk Rock, Trevor Young

PR principles in a social media environment

Five principles that are important in social media and can influence or inspire how we teach public relations:

1. Collaboration. If people are now expected to understand how to harness collective intelligence, it's important for them to learn how to operate in a collaborative environment. An example is the collaborative literature review project I used in my special topics social media class, inspired by Michael Wesch.

2. Narrative. I've been referring a lot to Henry Jenkins's notion of "transmedia storytelling" lately. We've always needed to teach students to tell stories about products, people, issues, etc. but the new media environment forces them to tell stories across multiple platforms. I like Jenkins's discussion of transmedia storytelling because it suggests telling different parts of the story in different places (movie, game, Web site, etc. -- he uses "The Matrix" as an example) tailored to the medium. My students experimented with this idea in their book report blog on Jenkins's Convergence Culture. Applying this concept to PR would mean NOT taking a press release and making a podcast of the press release being read out loud. Instead, a press release might link to a video that has a human interest story related to, or maybe just briefly mentioned in, the press release -- either could stand alone, but together they tell a bigger story. I'll be experimenting with this next time I teach PR writing.

3. Online identity production. I refer here not just to online branding (personal or product) but to actual production of identity along the lines discussed by danah boyd in her study of teens on MySpace. Transparency and authenticity are important parts of this discussion -- how do you construct a personal or corporate self in an environment with those expectations? What do you say, or not say?  Looking at examples like the Dell Twitter feeds, where a person and a brand are both identified (such as @LionelatDell, who tells me that there are about 200 Dell employees tweeting now, although not all with the xyzatDell username), or the Rubbermaid blog, where different people write brand-based stories from their own lives (disclosure: Erin is a Grady alum), will help students understand the blurring of personal and professional as well as the work of creating an authentic identity.

4. Culture. Of course students need to understand online culture and expectations. They need to learn to enter an online space treading cautiously, stopping to understand how the community operates and understand its norms and expectations before they start blasting their own thoughts and opinions. But culture also means attending to the inherently cross-cultural nature of communication on the Web. I learned this one the hard way when I complained about the cold winter weather on this blog, and an Australian reader reminded me that it was summer there. Yes, I had ignored an entire hemisphere. Since then I've tried to remember that anyone can read what I post. This is even more important for someone representing an organization, particularly a multinational organization, in a time when communication automatically extends around the globe. I haven't figured out any particular way to teach this, but would welcome suggestions.

5. Entrepreneurship. I listened to Tina Seelig's podcast (but I'm linking to the video because there are visuals involved) and got really energized to think about how entrepreneurship can be taught in PR. I'll be doing some sort of experiment with it in PR Administration next semester and will report back then.

As always, I welcome your thoughts and input.