Teaching PR

Book review: The New Rules of Marketing and PR

My colleague Kristen Smith is gearing up to teach our PR writing class for the first time, and she asked for my advice on what to do with the class. Some things are obvious and haven't changed in decades, but I don't think most of the PR textbooks do much with the Web and social media (and I haven't taught it in a while so please feel free to add a comment if you know of a good PR writing text). I mentioned, for example, that she'll need to talk about SEO when teaching about writing news releases, even if the textbooks aren't doing that yet.

Later it occurred to me that I already have a great resource on hand* for her and for students: David Meerman Scott's 2nd edition of "The New Rules of Marketing & PR." I used the first edition of this book when I taught a special topics ad/PR class on social media, and the students loved it. The second edition is out now, and it could very easily be used in a PR writing class.

The early chapters clearly explain how the Internet and social media in particular have changed PR and marketing -- primarily in that organizations can now reach individuals directly and cheaply. The second part of the book runs through different platforms -- blogs, social networks, Twitter, audio, video -- that can be used.

Part III introduces the idea of "buyer personas," in which the PR person pulls together research to draw portraits of different kinds of buyers and then to figure out how to talk to that kind of person, using the language they would use. That concept isn't anything new to PR, but somehow writing that little character sketch seems to make target publics more concrete to students.

The book includes a chapter on Search Engine Marketing, but in it Scott makes the point that "this entire book is about search engine marketing." As such it would make a great supplement to a PR textbook that focuses on more traditional writing (brochures, news releases, annual reports, etc.). I would definitely recommend it to someone teaching a PR writing course.

So, Kristen, check your mailbox. You can borrow, but not keep, mine.

*Disclosure: David knew that I used his book in class and asked me to write a blurb for the 2nd edition. You can find me on the bottom of page iii.

PR news you can use

In the interest of better connecting academic researchers and professional communicators, AEJMC started a program called "News You Can Use," in which editors of academic journals submit research to be promoted to journalists and others in the relevant industries. For my first issue as editor of the Journal of Public Relations Research (which is sponsored by the PR Division of AEJMC), I selected "The Effects of Attribution of VNRs and Risk on News Viewers' Assessments of Credibility," by Colleen Connolly-Ahern (Penn State), Susan Grantham (University of Hartford) and Maria Cabrera-Baukus (Penn State).

The article challenges the notion, perpetuated by the U.S. Government Accountability Office and others, that unattributed government video news releases are overly-influential forms of covert propaganda. The authors' experiment found that partisanship had a tremendous impact on how viewers interpreted the VNRs. AEJMC's news release explains the results of their study in more detail.

The Week's Best, 22 February 2010

• Why Some PR People Deserve and Get a Seat at a Table and Others Do Not, Katie Paine
• The Unwritten Rules of Social Media, Lauren Shapiro (via @tressalynne)
• Is This the Real World?, Ginger Carter Miller
• A Pitching Lesson, C. C. Chapman
• Four Lessons from PleaseRobMe.com, Dave Fleet
• Five Ways to Avoid Writing a Blog Post You'll Regret, David Griner
• When An Unpaid Marketing or Public Relations Internship Is Illegal, Mary Fletcher Jones (via Robert French)
• Curious George Goes to the Office, Allan Schoenberg

Do you have a suggestion for The Week's Best? Submit it to weeksbest at gmail dot com

PROpenMic Week: If I did it again....

Here's a report to other faculty who might be considering a "PROpenMic Week" assignment like this one.

Overall it went pretty well. My students jumped right in with joining groups (two created new groups), commenting on posts, and (if they didn't already have one) creating profiles. It seemed to me that there was a leap in site participation that week (Robert French: can you confirm this perception?), with lots of new posts on the site; a couple of my students from past semesters also got re-energized about using the site because a lot of their (IRL) friends were friending them or commenting on their old posts. Also, if students from other schools joined that week there would have been lots of activity to engage them. So that's a good thing.

What I thought would be the high point, the joint blogging project with UNC-Wilmington's Dr. Jeanne Persuit's intro class, actually turned out to be the part that needs tweaking. I sent Jeanne a list of my students the week prior to PROpenMic Week, and she matched names with her students and posted a list on the discussion board for our "Seahawks + Bulldogs" discussion group. However, we should've done this sooner, because most students didn't start posting their interviews until Wednesday or Thursday of PROpenMic Week, which left very little time for anyone to comment on these posts. Moreover, the "week" was supposed to end on Friday, but it really ended up being "week-and-a-half" because some of the student pairs didn't finish each other's interviews in time to be posted during the official assignment (Jeanne and I both extended the deadline when we realized what was happening). I think a number of the students enjoyed talking to someone from a different school and at a different point in their education, but the assignments need to be made a least a week before the start of the assignment if you expect them to be part of the week's conversation.

My students are still expected to participate on the site throughout the semester, but I think this assignment can serve as a good introduction for students who aren't familiar with using a social network for professional reasons. I also thinking pairing up with another class makes it more interesting because it seems a little silly to interact primarily with students you already see in class every week. Just use the "Faculty" discussion group on PROpenMic to find a partner.

The Week's Best, 15 February 2010

• The Death of Public Relations, David Phillips
• Search Engine Optimization for Newbies (presentation by Lee Odden), Barbara Nixon
• "Solidifying" Public Relations and Its Professionals Through Diversity, W R King
• And Now, Let's Work for the Stockholm Accords and the Future of Our Profession!, Toni Muzi Falconi
• Empowering Communicators Via a Social Media Policy, John Bell
• Top 10 Social Media Mentors that PR Students and Publicists Need to Know, Andrew Worob
• Using the Right Blog Metrics, Jay Baer
• Gen Y: Our Values Define Us, Carol Phillips (via @JRMoreau)

No, I don't endorse buying class papers

Spammers for organizations that sell papers -- class papers, theses, dissertations -- love this blog. It seems like every day I'm deleting comments or trackbacks for these so-called "services." I block their URLs, and they come back with new ones. I close comments on old posts where I figure there won't be any additional comments, and they reply on newer posts that don't have anything to do with their product. I closed trackbacks on all posts, old and new. I can't really block their keywords, since things like research, paper, and dissertation have a legitimate role in the conversation here.

So, instead, I'll keep blocking and deleting and issue a warning to my readers that should you happen to see one of these spam comments before I get to it ... no, I don't endorse buying class papers. Anyone dumb enough to buy a thesis or dissertation will get what they deserve. Based on the quality of the writing in the comments, the papers aren't going to be very good anyway.

And, because this post's keywords are going to attract their attention, I'm closing comments on it now. (I hesitated, though, because it would be funny to see their spam comments on this post about their spam comments.) 

Legit readers can talk to me on Twitter. :-) 

The Week's Best, 8 February 2010

• Celebrating the Memory of D. Parke Gibson, Multicultural Public Relations Pioneer, Gary McCormick
• We're Turning Comments Off for a Bit and Commenting on Engadget: A Human's Guide, Joshua Topolsky
• YouTube: The Channel of Choice for C-Level Execs, Stephen Davies
• The PR Person of the Future Will Be an Utter Know-It-All, Steve Earl
• Three Common Misconceptions about a Public Relations Career, Margie Newman
• Where Are the Women Outliers?, Joan Curtis
• Are You Fun to Follow on Twitter?, Tammy Erickson (via @JBrossman)
• Sussex Safer Roads Partnership ("Embrace Life" PSA), zefrank (via @Ed)

Celebrating PROpenMic week

The students in my class, PR Campaigns, are celebrating PROpenMic week, today through Friday. They'll be creating blog posts, interacting with Dr. Jeanne Persuit's students at UNC Wilmington, adding friends, joining or creating groups, and commenting on other people's blogs.

Even if you aren't in my class this semester, and even if you aren't a student at the University of Georgia, you're welcome to join us in taking advantage of this great resources for PR students and educators. See you on PROpenMic!

Cross-posted on PROpenMic.

Money, It's a Gas

The American novelist Edith Wharton once said, "The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it."  So true. And because the state of Georgia doesn't have it, and private donors don't have it, and people who pay for tuition don't have it -- we're all thinking about it.

Grady College faculty had our meeting with the new provost of the university today, and it was pretty much all about money. The university wants to recruit more graduate students -- partly for the money. We'd like to improve the diversity of the faculty and student body -- but it's hard to do without money. UGARF (the research foundation) is pretty much out of -- you guessed it -- money. State funding of this "public" university has gone from 48% to 34% in a very short amount of time, and there's no reason to think that will change anytime soon. Oh, and by the way, what will happen when the state's stimulus money is gone after FY11?

We're all learning to do more with less, but at what point is it no longer possible to do good enough with less than enough? I'm not blaming anyone, although I've had good times on Twitter and Facebook poking fun of the state on our furlough days this year. I'm just sad to see the consequences of a poor economy beginning to enter the classroom.

The Week's Best, 1 February 2010

• An Inconvenient PR Truth, via Stephen Davies; and An Inconvenient PR Truth or an Inconvenient Solution?, Rachel Kay
• Don't Be Evil, Or At Least Try Not to Be, and Fail, Jed Hallam
• iBetThereWereNoWomenInvolvedInNamingThat, Lindsey M. Allen
• Edelman Trust Barometer 2010 and Edelman's Trust Survey Interrogated, Paul Seaman
• The Jamie Sanders Experiment (registration req'd), Garrett Alan Pace
• Your Brain Can't Handle Your Facebook Friends, Stan Shroeder (via @Florina_B)
• Service of Interns, J M Byington & Associates (via @davidreich
• Crisis in Haiti: Where Do We Go from Here? (audio), Knowledge@Wharton