Teaching PR

June's best posts for PR students

June's almost over and I've only posted one Week's Best... ah, summer. Here are just a few of the posts and stories I've enjoyed reading this month.

• Google Launches Tool for Online Reputation Management, Sarah Kessler (via @stevequigley)
• How Embarrassing/Job-Threatening Facebook Photos Are Part of Your Job Application, Kashmir Hill (via @Perry_Binder)
• This Company Scours the Internet to Tell Employers Your Secrets, Cord Jefferson (via @martaescotet)
• Future Top Communicators -- Skills and Training, Tom Watson
• Review: The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser, Philip Young
• Integrating Communications: Pottermore, Rich Becker
• Should PR and Media Pros Offer Opinions?, Kristina Summers
• The Public Relations Man Who Directs Like Fellini (podcast), Kevin Killeen
• Visionofstudents.org Video Collage, Michael Wesch
• Note to Self: Don't Pretend to Be a Lesbian Blogger in Syria, David Wescott
• Easy Way to Subscribe to TopRank's 25 Women Who Rock Social Media, Kami Huyse
• The Truth About Public Relations, Wendy Marx
• With Good Public Relations Counsel, No Need for "Ethics" Officer, Paul Holmes
• How to Interview Your Prospective Employer, Patricia Brehm
• Greenpeace vs. Mattel: A Social Media Battle over the Rainforest, Margot Roosevelt

Movie review: Catfish

My Maymester students recommended "Catfish," a 2010 film about a relationship that began on Facebook, during a discussion on the difference between friends and Facebook friends, so I found it at the local video store and watched it almost immediately after I turned in my grades.

"Catfish" is the story of Nev (pronounced Neev), who became friends with an entire family on Facebook. Nev's brother, Ariel, and his business partner, Henry, shared an office with Nev, and began filming the story of his relationship with this family in 2008. Over the course of a number of months, Nev receives boxes full of art from precocious 8-year-old Abby, talks to her Mom, Angela, hears music composed by Abby's brother's band, and falls for Megan, the beautiful older sister, who's a musician/artist/dancer. The family lives in Michigan, Nev and his buddies in Manhattan.

But then Nev finds one of Megan's songs... on YouTube. Performed by someone else. "It's a cover, it's supposed to sound similar," Megan explains. But Nev continues to investigate and begins to realize that Megan's lying. The guys make a surprise trip to Michigan to find out the truth.

I won't give the whole thing away, but it all turns out to have been a hoax. Nev is understandably upset, but he gets defensive: "They never fooled me," he says, "They just told me things I never called to question." And when they do figure out what's going on, Henry says, "It's not malicious, it's just sad."

Although there are some questions about whether the film is fiction or documentary, Nev's story provides a great way to introduce discussions about anonymity, trust, and online identity. I will definitely use it in class next time we're discussing online relationship building.

 

Team Book Presentations

I reprised my Maymester team book presentation assignment and thought I'd share the results from this year. The assignment divides the class into small groups, each reading different books. I provide discussion questions (available to Teaching PR readers upon request) for four 50-minute small group meetings plus 1-2 hours of class time to prepare presentations. Each team reads one book but learns about three by listening to the other teams.

The teams are required to recap the key concepts from the book and to somehow use social media as part of their presentation.

The first team, which read Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, created a Tumblr with key concepts and relevent links. The second team presented Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins, and live streamed their presentation -- clever. The third team, which read We the Media by Dan Gillmor, organized their presentation on a Twitter page (!) and even got an @ reply from the author.

The best part was when students in one presentation started pulling in (on the fly) the other books, making connections and demonstrating that they were learning from each other. Watching that is a lot more fun than grading traditional final exams.

The Week's Best, 6 June 2011

• One Piece of Advice from the DMEF Rising Stars, Paull Young
• Five Principles for Amazing Cause Marketing that Makes a Difference, Kami Huyse
• Best Class Blog Posts of Spring 2011, Tiffany Gallicano
• Why Are Digital Story-Tellers Still Thinking in Terms of Paper?, Valeria Maltoni
• Worst PPT Slide Contest Winners, InFocus (via @CommunispaceCEO)
• PR Industry: Where Are the Latinos?, Louis Pagan (via @odwyer)
• Social Media Summer Camp 2011, Barbara Nixon
• Master's of Spin: PR Belongs in B-School Studies, Anthony D'Angelo (via @dbreakenridge)
• 5 Social Media Tips from a Digital Native, Chris Heggem (via @jchernov)
• Truth to Power: A Tribute to PR Pioneer and Critic Chet Burger, Ira Basen

Updated collaborative lit review project

A couple of years ago I posted about a collaborative literature review project I used during Maymester; this year I tried it again and made some changes to address some of the issues that came up the first time around.

First of all, I told students that our overall question was, "What do we know about how people interact with social media?" This helped them focus more on scholarly research (though they were allowed to include one newspaper/magazine/trade press article) and eliminated how-to tips and that sort of thing. Next, since the class includes a broad range of majors -- ad/PR, telecomm, consumer journalism, ag communication -- I asked that each student include at least two articles from their own area of academic study, plus two more from another area, such as psychology or computer science. This gave us a broad range of topics and subject areas, which in turn gave us more to organize.

When students uploaded their abstracts to our wiki (I used PBWorks), they organized them mostly around academic fields, so we had topics like "social media and advertising." In class, I gave a brief lecture on information overload and showed a video of Clay Shirky, who argues that the problem is not information overload but filter failure. I then asked the students to reorganize the wiki around overarching categories such as privacy or psychological effects. They needed about 30 minutes to accomplish this. Last, we watched Michael Wesch's video "Information R/evolution," and discussed how our project would change if we used tags rather than categories. 

I thought the project worked better this time and would again recommend it to others. It demonstrates the power of collaboration and has the added bonus of allowing students to practice working on a wiki. I do recommend starting the project off with a trip to the library -- our wonderful mass comm librarian provides a 50-minute presentation on how to search and which databases to start with, along with a helpful reminder that abstracts are copyrighted and cannot simply be cut-and-pasted to the wiki.

Because it's Maymester the students had only 2 days from start to finish; during a regular semester I'd suggest making it a week-long project.