In addition to the lunch discussion on the future of our fields, another ADPR Connection panel that I attended was "Community Relations: Creating a Climate of Success." It featured Bonnie Jones of Jackson EMC, Jen Reid from Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, Lakeshia Poole from the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, and Elaine Armstrong of Goodwill Industries.
Jones described five areas where Jackson EMC contributes to the community: youth programs aimed at developing leadership (such as a science and engineering fair, which matches the company's tech profile), community sponsorships (including the Taste of Home cooking school, which uses electric appliances), worthy causes (Relay for Life, March of Dimes), economic development projects that serve the communities where the company operates, and the Jackson EMC Foundation, which gets its funding from people "rounding up" when they pay their bills and which has put $6 million into 10 counties in 10 years.
Reid explained that Children's Healthcare has 3 hospitals but also 17 neighborhood locations, and that she works on a 6-member team which places a big emphasis on external media relations. She explained that they try to show media the face of the hospital, such as showing a cardiac patient in order to illustrate their cardiac services, in order to demonstrate to people that the hospitals are there for everyone -- no one is turned away for financial reasons. They also bring in celebrities and sports teams who can cheer up the kids for a while and at the same time attract media attention for a good cause. Finally, she described their interaction with bloggers, which includes sharing information about the hospitals, providing health tips, discussing children's health issues, etc. She said they establish relations with the social media community in order to get people, locally and regionally, involved.
Poole works at the Boys and Girls Clubs national headquarters in Atlanta, but the organization is community-based with 4,000 locations nationally. Her job is to support local clubs particularly by capturing national corporate partnerships. She said she has to find ways to add value to both the corporation (or celebrity-- Denzel Washington and Jennifer Lopez are their national spokespersons) and the Boys and Girls Clubs. For example, partnerships with Comcast and Microsoft focus on developing technical skills: corporations and communities will need these employees in the future. She said they try to consider how sponsorships will position the sponsors as good corporate citizens in their communities, and that she honestly believes that Boys and Girls Clubs can change the world.
Finally, Armstrong said that Goodwill's mission is simple: put people to work. Her office works with 45 counties in North Georgia, and she is the primary media contact for that area. Essentially, everything Goodwill does is community relations: they work with other nonprofits, referring people who need other services; they work with employers by holding job fairs and interviews at the 7 North Georgia career centers; and they tap into corporate partnerships, because companies want to be good players in the community and their money and visibility are helpful to nonprofits like Goodwill. Armstrong recommended that people should sit on the boards of nonprofits in order to make connections while helping nonprofit organizations.
I enjoyed the fact that the panel included both community organizations and a sponsor of community events, which provided insight on how relationships, and partnerships, are built. Thanks to the organizers and panelists for their time and expertise.
Disclosure: Jen Reid and Lakeshia Poole are former students of mine.
Omnicom Group has one solution. Several Atlanta Omnicom agencies, including BBDO Atlanta, Porter Novelli, Ketchum and Fleishman-Hillard, are joining with the Grady College to offer a six-month Future Leaders Fellowship program for Grady students and alums. In January, the first group of 3-5 fellows will start their internships (and we hope it'll expand from there), with each person working part of that time at a PR agency and an ad agency, as well as being mentored by someone from a third marketing-related firm.
In a press release, the president and CEO of BBDO Atlanta, Chris Hall, said, "The dynamics in the field are changing -- rapidly -- and require a broader perspective and facility with advertising, public relations, social media and beyond. The Fellowship with Grady College allows for our organization to participate in the development of top talent through this innovative program."
Hall also said that the fellowship program is an example of Omnicom's commitment to and innovation in talent recruitment and development -- and I agree. They're investing time, money and expertise into our students' education. And although the program will touch a relatively small number of students directly, but I have to think it'll touch many more indirectly. I've seen, for instance, how students who participate in the Coca-Cola internship program come back and influence their peers -- and sometimes their faculty, too.
I hope our strong relationship with Porter Novelli and BBDO Atlanta in particular will continue to benefit both industry and education. And I hope that other PR and advertising programs can use this fellowship as a model for developing programs with industry in their local areas.
This year Grady College's longtime PRofessional Connection event morphed into "ADPR Connection," organized by both PRSSA and the Ad Club and sponsored by Porter Novelli and BBDO. The day kicked off with a luncheon and panel discussion, which focused on figuring out where are fields are headed in the next 10-20 years. The panelists were Jana Thomas of Porter Novelli, Eleanor Dake of BBDO, and Karen Mawhinney of Erwin Penland.
Thomas focused on her specialty, the future of social marketing, which she defines as using the principles of marketing for social good. She commented that social marketing has always kept our fields together through integrated marketing. She said she uses music and counterculture as predictors of the future, and based on music today she says that we're heading toward a time of an "I'm okay, you're okay" mentality, which would suggest that social marketing will focus more on social justice. It will be less about the individual and more about society as a whole -- issues like the environment or sex trafficking.
Dake pointed out that the massive changes of the last 5 years will continue to shape the next 10 years. We will continue to focus on staying connected, we will expect (as a right) to have access to information, skepticism is building and brands will have to face doubt, and advertising and public relations will continue to integrate. She also said she expects to see big changes in how we shop, such as the wireless wallet, and that as always the fields will need passionate and creative people to deal with these changes.
Mawhinney pointed out that there is tremendous angst in the industry now, that people don't know what's going to happen next; yet, she said, that's not anything new -- pointing to the introduction of radio, then TV, then cable, and so forth. She urged the students to remember that we're in the content business. Because agency of record relationships are breaking up, firms are having to learn to collaborate with each other (partnering with other firms, even from the proposal stage) and crowdsourcing (example: Genius Rocket). We have to learn to think holistically, not just PR or digital or advertising, but with a focus on developing content.
During the Q&A section, the speakers suggested that there will be less in-house and more agency work; said that there is skepticism by clients to believe that one agency can do it all; pointed out that some clients are pushing into digital whereas others have to be pushed; and reported that keeping it on strategy is the biggest problem, whether they are pushing or being pushed.
Great panel and great way to start off the day-- kudos to the student organizers. I'll do a post on the community relations session soon.
The 2011 TEDxPeachtree was my first live TED experience, and based on it, I would urge you to seek out a TED experience if you can.
If you're curious, the X in TEDx signifies that it's not an official TED conference but it's licensed by TED, and organized locally around the "Ideas Worth Sharing" theme that TED promotes. Most of the presenters had Atlanta connections, which made it feel both local and international -- especially with the tweets that seemed to be coming in from everywhere.
Our day started with Dr. Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, who has explored morality in the primate world. The two pillars needed for morality, he said, are reciprocity and empathy, and he showed us examples of primates displaying those pillars in various experimental scenarios. He suggested that morality is based not on religion because primates display an evolved morality. He was funny and the primate videos worth both funny and thought-provoking, and it was a fabulous way to kick off the day. The second speaker, Ekaterina Walter, talked about her journey as an immigrant from Russia and inspired us to keep the American dream alive -- not in terms of striking it rich or becoming President, as we sometimes think, but in realizing that we live in a place that gives people a chance to maintain dignity, which is simply not possible for individuals in other parts of the world. It makes you appreciate something we take for granted.
Next we watched a TED talk on video, and it's one I strongly recommend for people interested in communication research. It starts by talking about language acquisition, but toward the end you'll see the implications for mass media. Please watch Deb Roy's Birth of a Word:
The next presentation, Michael Horn's Toward Student Centric Learning, focused on K-12 but has implications for all teachers. Horn started with the concept of Disruptive Innovation, which he argues is more predictable and more successful than we think. He suggested that the computer has brought this sort of dramatic change to every sector, except education, pointing out that someone from a hundred years ago would probably still feel comfortable in a school, with its rows of desks pointing to a teacher speaking in the front of the room. He said that rather than looking at budget cuts and teacher shortages as a crisis, we should consider them an opportunity to rethink online (not distance, but blended) education. Computers can allow use to use competency-based learning, where students continue to work on a concept or process until they understand it, whether that's a day or two weeks, rather than standardizing everyone on the same page at the same time. Teachers would still be critical, but their jobs would be different. One person might focus on developing virtual content as a job, whereas another person might serve as a facilitator or mentor in the classroom. I had a fabulous discussion at lunch with two people affilitiated with schools (one was a kindergarten teacher) about how this might be implemented and what impact it would have on college students and college teaching 15 years from now: I can't really picture someone taught in a school like Horn envisions being satisfied with the old lecture-discussion format.
The next set of talks didn't have as much direct impact on me except that they were just interesting in the way TED talks usually are. We watched Markus Fischer's TED talk, A Robot That Flies Like a Bird; listened to Kennesaw State University's Dr. Adriane Randolph on Your Brain, a talk which described her research on brain-computer interface, which is often being developed for commercial purposes but which can also help people who have no other way to communicate; and Dr. Ami Klein, of Atlanta's (Bernie) Marcus Autism Center, who described his efforts to develop a way to test for autism using eye tracking very, very early in order to allow early intervention which could attenuate the negative effects of autism. "Autism creates itself," he argued, meaning that an autistic child's actions also determine her development, so if her actions can be changed the way her brain develops can also be changed. He said the purpose is not to "cure" autism --pointing out that autistic people have strengths that we can benefit from-- but to free individuals from its negative consequences like poor language development and isolation.
One of the really fun things about the conference was that interspersed throughout the day were art performances, including music, poetry, and dance, which not only added some variety but also engaged the audience in a different way. And, just watching/listening to people with so much talent is inspiring in itself.
Two more afternoon talks had particular relevance to communications people. John Copenhaver talked about our need for a better kind of crisis management. He began with the premise that the old disaster paradigm is failing, pointing out that disasters are worse than they used to be and that governments (worldwide) have a diminishing capacity to respond to them. He suggested that the private sector is unlikely to bail out the government, so help will have to come through communities. "All disasters are local," he argued. Communities need to be more resiliant, and one way they can do that is to use new technology to communicate and collaborate during a time of disaster. He suggested that communities look at their hazard risks, the resources of the community (including technological resources), and community stakeholders (both formal and informal-- everything from government, police, hospitals,water/gas, grocery stores, etc.) to create plans about how to respond to disasters. We should not rely on "someone else" but think in terms of the old civil defense model to solve our own problems. He asked us to look at our own communities and think about, if their survival depended on us, what would we do, who would we talk to, what would need to get done?
Last, Courtney Spence talked about the Transformative Power of Multimedia Storytelling, describing her work through Students of the World to help people document positive stories that are not covered in the media. "Life lessons don't happen in the moment but when we pause to reflect upon them," she argued. She showed three examples from Uganda, New Orleans, and Haiti, where the media stopped showing "disaster" stories and thus failed to adequately portray the more positive recovery stories that are still taking place. She urged us to seek out the good stories and demand them from the media and in our personal lives. Jeremy Gilley's TED talk, One Day of Peace, rounded out this session.
Sadly, I had to miss the last two talks but I'm sure they were just as amazing as the others. Videos from 2010 are posted on the TEDxPeachtree site, so I'm hoping 2011 will be up, too. If so, I'll definitely provide links to the most relevant talks for communications scholars.
I'm so lucky: I get to attend the TEDxPeachtree event in Atlanta tomorrow.
I love TED talks and sometimes have to stop myself from watching too many in a row -- they're so "fascinating" and "inspiring" and "ingenious" (if you don't get that, you aren't as addicted as I am) -- but I do have a job to so. Anyway, it should come as no surprise that I sent in my application the first day that I heard Atlanta was hosting an event and feel fortunate to have been selected.
At any rate, I've decided not to tweet but just soak it all in. For those who haven't had the chance to go to a TED event, here are a couple of my favorite TED talks.
