NCA09: PR educators on teaching social media & public relations

This year I decided to attend the National Communication Association meeting for the first time. My first session of my first NCA conference turned out to be a great one, focusing on how social media can be incorporated into public relations classes. Here are brief summaries of the presentations.

Tiffany Derville, University of Oregon, provided a "podcasting lesson" handout (update: here's the lesson), which included what to do prior to the lesson, discussion questions, and an assignment with a grading matrix. She talked about how important it is to explain the rules of social media prior to setting the students loose -- for example, that not many people will be interested in your podcast if it's nothing but an ad. She also emphasized that podcasting is just one tactic that's part of a broader strategy, not an end itself. She listed the top 5 mistakes she made the first time she gave the assignment, saying she wished she would have emphasized these things more:

• The audience can hear rustling papers on the podcast. 
• Don't let the presentation sound scripted.
• If the student doesn't care about the topic, their tone of voice reflects it.
• Don't talk too quickly. 
• Podcasts must be based on research and new information (not bland generalities). 

Bill Handy, a visiting professor at Oklahoma State, noted that he teaches the only stand-alone course on social media and PR in Oklahoma, but pointed out that he thinks it will be a short-lived class (meaning it will be integrated in other courses soon). He discussed a number of issues relating to adding social media to educational mix. Among these are the cultural issue of convincing faculty to accept social media -- including the university's branding possibilities, organizing all of it, and making sure people understand that conflicting messages and points of view are part of the value of social media. Nurturing communities and finding the content when someone doesn't realize they're participating are probably the biggest issues. And there are legal implications as well, from FERPA to copyright. He suggests that 30% of people in any organization will resist adopting social media. 

Bill also discussed the benefits of adopting social media. Cost savings, tearing down walls between academic settings (such as those between B- and J-schools), and extending the classroom conversation beyond the classroom walls. For example, using a wiki allows former students to continue to participate in the conversation with current students, whereas university sites like Blackboard kick former student off the site. 

Kelli Matthews of the University of Oregon agreed that stand-alone courses are probably short-lived. Nonetheless, she's teaching a social media strategy course now and described an assignment to create a social media plan similar to a traditional PR plan, focusing on strategy rather than the technology. She sees this as a way to incorporate SM into general PR classes, although she uses it as the final assignment in her SM Strategy class with a real client. Students work in teams of 2-3 mostly for the same client, but they can also choose another client if they have the ability to get inside information (not just finding information on the Web). In the publics section she asks students to incorporate Social Technographics in the plan, based on Groundswell. They also have to incorporate the Groundswell phases of Listening, Talking, Energizing, Supporting, and Embracing. She expects a significant measurement component with awareness, interest and action categories. Finally, they must include a realistic budget and timeline. At the end of the semester the "best" team was actually hired by the client to implement their plan.

Barbara Nixon, Georgia Southern University, credited the University of Georgia's inaugural Edelman Digital Bootcamp in 2008 with getting her started in social media. She reviewed different ways she's using social media in her classes, starting with the fact that she puts virtually all of her assignments online so anyone can see them on her class blog. She asks her students to blog and gives them a group of topics they can talk about. She said she's not using Flickr as much as she used to, but recommends to students that they take pictures of projects and assignments and upload them on their own. She also suggests that teams use Delicious so they can share bookmarks within groups. She does informal office hours in Facebook but asks students to block her from anything they didn't want their parents to see, and that classes sometimes have groups within Facebook, with varying degrees of interest on the part of the students. Students also sometimes use fan pages for clients when relevant. As for Twitter, to which she admits being addicted, Barbara uses class hashtags so students can follow only that if they wish. She also does a "one week of Twitter" assignment that requires students to use replies, links, retweets, etc. 

Kaye Sweetser, University of Georgia, discussed her viral video project that she used in PR writing but that could be used in other classes.  (Here's more information on the discussion and videos that went along with this assignment.) The assignment objectives are to identify the audience they are trying to reach with their video; determine the correct appeal; and create a message that will resonate with that audience. She picked a client, the UGA admissions office, and brought the client to the class for 30-45 minute talk on their publics and what they wanted to get out of the videos. She was very specific NOT to say "we want a rap," or anything that detailed, instead leaving it to the students to do their own creative work. Admissions officials pointed out that the 16-17 year old potential college student is one audience, but so are that kid's parents. Kaye said that prior to this assignment she did very traditional lectures on messaging, identifying audiences, types of appeals (she refers to Aristotle here), but added new things to her class a guest lecture via Skype by Paull Young of Converseon who discussed what makes a video go viral and provided a case study. He emphasized that you need to have a call to action in your video. She also lectured on finding appropriate and legal music for student videos. She gave the students access to Flip cams and to media labs, but provided no in-class training or tech support. Student teams turned in their videos on CDs, but she also asked them to provide keywords, title etc. for her to use when she uploaded the videos to YouTube. Then she put all five videos on a playlist and began publicizing it. Students received extra credit if the client chose to use the video, and extra credit for getting the most views.

Alisa Agozzino of Ohio Northern University teaches a social media class in which the students read Groundswell, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, Citizen Marketers, and The New Influencers. They have to blog three times a week for 10 weeks, including blogging about the books -- sometimes the authors comment. The second post is about public relations or social media, and the third is about the university in general. She also requires that students not to do all three posts on one day. In addition, students have to make three comments a week, at first just on each others' blogs, but after the first few weeks they must go outside the class. There is also a podcasting assignment and a viral video. On Twitter she requires students to follow two organizations to identify key audience and how well they reach the audience -- she encourages to contact the organization and see if they got it right. Finally, students have to do a social media resume on CV.com (three grads got jobs from it last year), and a 10-page ethics paper on social media, which she encourage that they submit to a conference.

At the end of the session Bill Handy quoted Lewis Menand's Harvard Magazine article: "It is the academic's job in a free society to serve the public culture by asking questions the public doesn't want to ask, investigating subjects it cannot or will not investigates, and accommodating voices it fails or refuses to accommodate." He suggested this is applicable to teaching social media as well; for example we can point out that research shows small groups are better in a number of ways, which goes against the "how do I get more followers" mentality often prevalent in social media.

Comments

[Alisa Agozzino]

Great summary of our session Karen! Thanks for attending and putting this together!

[Bill Sledzik]

Intrigued to hear so many educators are integrating SM across the curriculum, making it subservient to strategy and planning. We at Kent State also have a stand alone class covering social media. Last year we began to break up the tasks. E-newsletters moved to our "PR Publications" class, online newsrooms and SMRs to "Media Relations," professional digital networking to our Face-to-Face Tactics class.

Integration of SM across curriculum bodes well for PR education and for social media. It's no longer the shiny new toy, and that will help us see more clearly where it all fits into the mix.

[Tiffany Derville Gallicano]

Thanks for summarizing our panel, Karen. I just posted my podcasting handout. Readers can click on my name below to read it.