Teaching PR

Meet the Teacher: Bill Sledzik

Every so often I remember my "meet the teacher" posts, then I check my list to see who's been invited and who's still on my list. How could I have left out this guy? Kent State's Bill Sledzik is not only one of the most popular PR educator/bloggers, but also one of the most outspoken. In fact, just after I asked him about taking a stand (see below), he launched into a debate on ghostwriting in the blogosphere. He's got a love-hate relationship with social media; read on to see what I mean.

Q. How and when did you first get interested in blogging?

ToughSledding is an experiment by a 50something educator who’s just trying to figure it out. And I haven’t yet! I studied blogs for two years before I launched mine in 2006. I’m a trial-and-error guy, which means I learn by doing -- and by making mistakes. I encourage students to do the same.

Q. What is the purpose of your blog?

The blog is an outlet -- a place to express my thinking about the business. It’s helped me expand my network; invigorated my teaching, too. But it takes way too much time. Way too much.

I view my blog more as a column than a conversation. It’s about what I think. I know how that sounds, but in the end, social media is a pretty self-centered place. How else do you explain Facebook?

Q. I know you're on Twitter; are you using any other social media?

Twitter and the blog are my primary outlets, but I like Facebook a lot. For me, it’s both a social and a business network, and a place where you can let your hair down. I’m on 5-6 other networks, but don’t have time to keep up with them.

I was a Twitter doubter when it began, but I’ve come around. It’s a useful application to stay in touch with my professional contacts and alumni. It’s also a not-so-secret pleasure for those of us with addictive personalities.

Q. Your blog always takes a stand, especially on professional disputes and PR blogosphere "kerfuffles." Is that part of your mission as an educator, or is it just for fun?

It’s a little of both, really.  There’s not enough serious debate in the PR blogosphere and way too much “group think.” So I do my best to stir the conversation and to be a little contrary. Challenging people is what educators are supposed to do, isn’t it?

Q. Tell us a little about your school and how PR is taught there.

Kent State is a hands-on place. Students learn by doing, and doing, and doing. Our faculty members are seasoned PR professionals who know how the real world works. The typical PR major does at least two internships before graduation, sometimes four and five. Bottom line: our students get jobs. It’s the one ROI measure that matters to me.

Q. In what ways do you incorporate social media into the classroom? What would you most like to do that you aren’t already doing?

Three years ago we launched a new class called “PR Online Tactics.” It gives students hands-on experience with a range of digital and social-media tools. They produce blogs, podcasts, e-newsletters, and soon online newsrooms. But no class is the same semester to semester. We’re constantly reshuffling content to match the marketplace.  We also remind students that while the tools of communication have changed, the DNA of public relations really has not.

What’s missing in our program is video -- which in most PR firms and departments is still done by specialists. But we know our students must understand video storytelling, since it’s so critical on the Web.

Q. Do you have any advice for other PR educators who are considering starting a blog or getting involved in social media?

If you aren’t spending at least an hour a day monitoring social media, you’re missing a key chapter in the new “book” of PR. So start there.

I’ve discouraged others on our faculty from starting blogs. It’s too time consuming, and it won’t do much to enhance your chances of tenure or promotion. You can learn social media by reading books and by following thought leaders online. Join the conversation when it makes sense, but don’t let it rule your life. If you don’t love blogging, don’t do it.

Most important, remember why we do public relations. And remember that social media are but one element of a larger picture -- one way to communicate, and not always the best way. I remain a huge proponent of face-to-face communication. And I remain skeptical that you can use digital tools to scale relationships. Just because I follow someone on Twitter doesn’t mean I trust ‘em.

 

Meet the Teacher: Christine Smith

Meet Canadian PR educator/blogger Christine Smith of Centennial College's PR program and find out how social media can help recruit top students:

Q. How and when did you first get interested in blogging? What is the purpose of your blog? Are you using any other social media?

    I think I attempted a personal blog about three years ago and didn't quite "get it."  For the past 14 months or so I've written A Learner's Way.  The purpose:  to explore, and comment on, how learning takes place in my PR classes.  I'm on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.  And, last year, we produced a podcast, and I was involved.

Q. Tell us a little about your school and how PR is taught there.

    I'm part of Centennial College's Corporate Communication and Public Relations program.  It's a postgraduate, two-semester, graduate certificate program, situated at the Centre for Creative Communications in Toronto, Ontario.  Students get  lots of hands-on learning via PR writing labs,
executing special events, hosting mock news conferences and producing print/graphic pieces for clients.  And, of course, students get the basics in strategic communications, media relations, project management and Canadian business.

Q. In what ways do you incorporate social media into the classroom? What would you most like to do that you aren't already doing?

     Last year, we launched a new course--Online Public Relations, developed, and taught, by the recently retired Gary Schlee.  Students must write a blog as part of this course, comment with relevant bloggers and produce a podcast.  We also recently hosted Talk is Cheap, an "unconference" about PR and social media. Lots of students got involved as volunteers in this super event.  Our college / program has also been the site of three live Inside PR podcasts. We'll continue to evolve our curriculum as social media and its PR applications evolve.

Q. Do you have any advice for other PR educators who are considering starting a blog or getting involved in social media?

     Get in the game!  Our involvement in social media has positioned Centennial's PR program as very, very desirable among applicants. I believe applicants view us as a program that is in step with the times.  This is a competitive advantage.

Q. I enjoy the fact that your blog is more often about students and learning generally than about public relations specifically. How have your own students responded to the blog? Do you conceptualize them as your primary audience?

     I often consider how my students will react to what I write on A Learner's Way.  Most of those who read it are students and grads (I don't have a huge following because I don't blog enough).  I think I do
conceptualize them as my primary audience.  I'm fascinated by what goes on in the classroom when a group of individuals struggle to learn and get along (and earn good grades.)   I'm fascinated by how learning takes place. I'm challenged by how to take an idea and make it stick.  I continually want to push myself to do better. That's why I'm an educator and why I continue to find this job stimulating.

Meet the Teacher: Corinne Weisgerber

Despite the fact that she was in the throes of the first week of a new term, St. Edward's University's Corinne Weisgerber was kind enough to answer a few questions for "Meet the Teacher." Although it's meant for her students, I'm a happy subscriber to Corinne's Social Media for PR Class blog, which always touches on interesting current events relating to PR... check it out, and check out her answers to my questions:

Q. How and when did you first get interested in blogging? What is the purpose of your blog? Are you using any other social media?

A. I started studying communication right about the time the Internet started taking off and as a budding communication scholar I was immediately intrigued by the changes these new communication technologies were bringing about. So I guess it was really more a timing coincidence that got me interested in the Internet and the study of computer-mediated interaction. In fact, up until that point I wasn’t very computer savvy at all. I knew that if I wanted to study online communication, I’d better start figuring out the web. I began by teaching myself HTML in the mid '90s – a time when knowing how to develop websites was a big thing.

I didn’t officially start blogging until I started teaching my social media class last year, although I had been maintaining a web presence through various personal and professional websites up until then. For my dissertation for instance, I created a website on which I regularly published qualitative research memos. It was a way for me to keep my committee members in the loop. I even included a form field that allowed them to send me feedback – you could say it was an early attempt at blogging.

My blog is the course blog for our Social Media for PR class. It is meant to explore emerging social media technologies and study their application in contemporary PR practice. I have played with the idea of starting my own personal blog plenty of times, but never seem to get around to actually implementing that idea… Part of the problem is that when you teach this stuff, you have to try out all sorts of social media and before you know it, you get sucked into yet another social network, or new web application. I am on Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning and I subscribe to about 100 feeds which range anywhere from news sites, to blogs, podcasts, and social bookmark feeds. I am also an avid del.icio.us user, just got introduced to Blackboard Scholar, and use wikis and other collaborative tools in both my research and teaching.

Q. Tell us a little about your school and how PR is taught there.

A. Communication majors at St. Edward’s University can choose from one of four areas of specialization: Communication and Culture; Media Arts, Public Relations, and Advertising; Organizational Communication; and Rhetorical Studies. Students interested in the PR track take Intro to PR, PR Writing, Research Methods, PR Campaigns, and Internship. We also started offering a Social Media for PR class as a special topics course last year, and I’m very excited that we are about to remove the special topics status from that class and make it a core component of the PR curriculum. This doesn’t mean though that we don’t cover social media in other PR classes. Our Intro students for instance, are required to contribute case study analyses to a course blog, while our campaigns students use collaborative social media technologies such as wikis, mind mapping tools, and calendar applications to manage their teamwork and keep their clients informed about project developments. Our campaigns class (called PR for Nonprofit Organizations) is somewhat unique because it focuses on the special PR needs of the nonprofit sector. It is taught as a service-learning class and requires students to work with a local nonprofit to develop a strategic communications plan that addresses a PR problem or opportunity for that organization. This focus on the nonprofit sector stems from our university’s Catholic heritage and its mission to promote social justice.

Q. In what ways do you incorporate social media into the classroom? What would you most like to do that you aren't already doing?

A. When I first designed my Social Media for PR class, I thought of social media exclusively in terms of course content rather than thinking of it as a pedagogical tool. It was going to be a class about social media and it didn’t occur to me at first that social media held important pedagogical promises as well. It wasn’t until I started blogging, social bookmarking and using feed aggregators that I started seeing the pedagogical applications.

Since then I have incorporated various elements of social media into most of my classes. Last semester, I had my public speaking students embed videos of speeches on a course blog and critique them. In that class, we also relied on data visualization technologies such as tag clouds and word trees as a way to analyze the content of public speeches. This fall, my Intro to PR class will develop an interactive timeline of the history of the PR profession using a web application called Dipity. Some of my students will also be using social bookmarks to contribute course material to a shared course resources repository and to identify a person who shares their interests. My PR for nonprofit class will be developing their entire PR plan in a wiki, which will be accessible to the client and me (a great way to keep tabs on their progress!). We will also complete in-class writing activities in these wikis, and critique the work by pulling up the wiki page on the screen. I’ve become so interested in the pedagogical applications of these technologies that I will be leading a pre-conference seminar on the topic (together with my husband who also teaches at St. Edward’s) at the upcoming National Communication Association’s annual convention in San Diego.

Q. Do you have any advice for other PR educators who are considering starting a blog or getting involved in social media?

A. Just do it! Seriously though, that is the best way to get started. When I proposed our social media class, I actually knew very little about social media. All I knew was that it was a hot topic and that the PR industry seemed to be getting increasingly interested in it. I also felt that as a communication department we owed it to our students to expose them to the latest communication technologies and help them critically examine their social and cultural implications. The great thing about most of these tools is that they are very easy to use and don’t require users to understand every single little detail about the underlying technologies that make them work.

I would definitely encourage any PR educator who hasn’t already started blogging to do so. I think that if you teach your students about blogging for PR without having experienced its power yourself, you will be missing a lot of key points. My students didn’t learn about tagging, linking, and SEO from a lecture or powerpoint presentation, they learned about it when Google picked up one of their posts and catapulted it to its first page of search results for a key tag or topic.

Q. One of the things I love about your blog is that you're clearly a lot more computer proficient than I am, and you include a lot of multimedia. Where did you develop your expertise, and how do you manage to keep up?

 

A. As I mentioned before, I have no formal training in any of this. What I do know, I taught myself – mostly through trial and error. For instance, this summer I decided to figure out why everyone is talking about Drupal, an open-source content management system. I hadn’t heard of it until a student mentioned it last year. So two months ago, I decided to give it a try and use it to build a webpage. Although learning my way around Drupal was frustrating at times, the end result was very rewarding.

 

In terms of keeping up with all the changes, I find that social media has actually made it easier to do so. I subscribe to a lot of PR and technology blogs, and follow people who share my interests on del.icio.us. That’s how I hear about new technologies or interesting web applications. Another great source of information are my students. Since they know I’m interested in technology, they constantly tell me about their latest Internet discoveries or send me links to new sites. 

 

Meet the Teacher: Kaye Sweetser

Kaye Sweetser, one of my colleagues in the Grady College at UGA, is not only a leading scholar in social media and public relations research but is an excellent teacher -- in fact, she won our department's teaching award last year. Her profile here is long overdue, but I hesitated to add one more thing to her already busy schedule -- she's also in the Navy reserves and is about to become the parent of a new puppy. (And, if you didn't follow her Twitter updates from the boat she lived on this summer, you definitely missed out.)

Kaye's well-known love of her flip cam inspired her to answer my questions via video. Here's what she has to say:

After Kaye finished her video she came up with several more ideas for modeling social media use in teaching:
1. Post a picture of the class in your Facebook album then have the students go on & tag themselves
2. Create a Twitter account for students to follow & send quick admin-type updates (no class, change to assignment, etc) there -- what used to take up 10 minutes at the beginning of class each session now is online & archived
3. Use a flip video cam (~$100) to record student presentations then put them on YouTube. Then share the videos with professionals interested, faculty & use as examples for presentations for future classes. No cam? Audio only works, too!
4. Audio record your lectures to upload or do supplemental podasts for your class.
5. Share Web sites with a class by tagging items in del.icio.us (Here's Kaye's class page)

Meet the Teacher: Mihaela Vorvoreanu

Today's "Meet the Teacher" features one of my favorite social media friends (as in, without social media I wouldn't know her very well) Mihaela Vorvoreanu of Clemson University. Among other things, she's 2008 fellow of the Society for New Communication Research, and she's always willing to give new social media tools a whirl. Here's what she had to say:

Q. What is the purpose of your blog? Which other social media do you use?

A. I intend my blog to be a site of establishing connections among ideas and people: PR educators, practitioners, students. I hope to translate some of the academic theories to show their utility for PR practice and to make sense of PR practice in light of concepts and theories.

I'm on Twitter (@prprof_mv), flickr, del.icio.us, FriendFeed, Plurk, Facebook, LinkedIn, Second Life, a couple of niche networks on Ning (PR Open Mic is of interest to your readers). I get accounts and try out several things, but I don't always end up using all of them, of course!

Q. Tell us a little about your school and how PR is taught there.

A. The PR courses at Clemson have just undergone some revamping and restructuring. We follow the classical intro-techniques-campaigns structure. All the courses I teach include social media, and from time to time I teach a special topics course in Internet PR.

Q. Your discussions at the Edelman Digital Bootcamp showed that you're integrating social media into many of your classes. What are some of the most successful ways you've incorporated social media into the classroom?

A. I think students benefit most from case studies and examples. I get my students to use twitter, to blog, and read blogs. What I'd like to do is help students create their social media habits. Of course, they use social media all the time even if they haven't heard the term. But I'd like them to understand how to use it professionally, and how to keep on learning by participating in the professional online community - even when I'm not around!

Q. Do you have any advice for other PR educators who are considering starting a blog or getting involved in social media?

A. Social media is not about technology, it's a culture. Take the time to listen and learn the culture, then jump in, don't be afraid. Your computer won't blow up, I promise :)

Meet the Teacher: Tiffany Derville

Lately the Oregon Ducks have been making a big move into the PR blogosphere. Robert French noticed and interviewed Kelli Matthews and Lisa Poplawski; I noticed, and I'm interviewing Tiffany Derville. It turns out Tiffany's a big fan of my colleague, Kaye Sweetser -- perhaps the next lucky teacher we meet here on Teaching PR. :-)

Q. Tell us a little about your school and how PR is taught there.

A. The University of Oregon is located in the Willamette Valley. We are two hours south of Portland and an hour away from the beach. Our School of Journalism and Communication has five required public relations classes for undergraduates: Principles of Public Relations, Public Relations Writing, Advanced Public Relations Writing, Public Relations Plans and Problems, and Public Relations Campaigns. Last quarter, we added a research class for public relations and advertising majors, which Dr. Pat Curtin taught last quarter. We plan to make it a requirement. Students can take Communication Law and Mass Media Ethics classes. At least every four years, Dr. Tom Bivins teaches a public relations ethics class. We are experimenting with weekend boot camp classes to give students basic skills in specialized areas, such as video production and investor relations.

We have experiential learning opportunities through Allen Hall Public Relations, our student-run public relations agency; PRSSA; and the Senior Experience. Students who are selected for the Senior Experience program live in Portland for a quarter and take one to two public relations classes at our Turnbull Center. During this time, they work 20 hours a week as paid public relations interns. Some of the organizations that partner with us include Adidas, Columbia Sportswear, Nike, Portland Trailblazers, Edelman, Fleishman-Hillard, and Hill & Knowlton.

An innovation that has worked well for us is pairing our Public Relations Writing class with our Reporting class for news conferences and pitches.

Q. How and when did you first get interested in blogging? What is the purpose of your blog? Are you using any other social media?

A. I first learned about social media through PRSA's publications, Tactics and The Strategist. I started collecting clippings (this is before del.icio.us entered my world). Then I went to an AEJMC conference, where I met Dr. Brigitta Brunner and received a copy of her blogging assignment. At that point, I knew I wanted to integrate social media into my teaching, but I still needed a shove into the pool, so to speak.

That push came when I joined the University of Oregon's faculty last fall. I was thrilled to receive the course assignment of Advanced Public Relations Writing. I had wanted to dive into social media, and this was the opportunity for which I had been waiting. Kelli Matthews regularly teaches the course, so she brought me up to speed.

I experimented with blogging in the fall and launched my blog, The PR Post, in the winter. I found that having my own blog, reading others' blogs, and commenting on them made a world of difference in teaching the subject. I also use Twitter, del.icio.us, and social networking sites, including PR Open Mic, Facebook, and MySpace.

Q. Your blog is tied to your writing class. Do you teach social media in other classes?

A. I only teach Advanced Public Relations Writing now. I think it would be a great idea though for other classes, such as the principles class. Joining the blogosphere is a way to learn fresh case studies and join contemporary discussions that public relations educators and practitioners are having. The blogosphere is a bridge between education and practice.

Q. In what ways do you incorporate social media into the classroom? What would  you most like to do that you aren't already doing?

A. My students create public relations blogs and post comments to others' blogs throughout the quarter. They set up accounts with Feedburner and Technorati to track their subscribers and "authority." In addition, they set up Google Alerts for themselves to get familiar with this application. I require them to set up a feed reader with at least 20 public relations blogs for monitoring. Your blog is always on the list of recommended blogs to follow.

Students listen to guests share case studies about using social networking sites for public relations and then set up profiles on PR Open Mic, Facebook and LinkedIn. I ask them to join a Facebook group or fan page to experience how others are using this tool. I like Dr. Kaye Sweetser's idea about using Facebook to send gifts to volunteers. Students also engage in the 48 hours of Twitter assignment, which I learned about on your blog. In addition, they create a podcast about a public relations topic of their choice. My students also build del.icio.us pages, and we discuss purpose-built del.icio.us pages. They also produce a social media press release and an ePortfolio. They post their ePortfolios on their blogs and use Google Docs for hosting their ePortfolio tactics.

Online video is the next frontier for me! I am inspired by the conversations from Edelman's Digital Bootcamp, which you hosted. Even though I didn't attend the conference, I learned a lot from following the social media coverage of it. Thank you for being so inclusive! I enjoyed the discussions about video by Dr. Kaye Sweetser, Robert French, and Phil Gomes.

Kelli and I are considering having our students experiment with social media resumes.

Q. Do you have any advice for other PR educators who are considering starting a blog or getting involved in social media?

A. Yes! Visit Dr. Kaye Sweetser's blog. Her assignments include descriptions, directions for students, learning objectives, recommendations, and grading rubrics. Also, join PR Open Mic to meet new people and engage in discussions with public relations students, faculty, and practitioners. In addition, set up an aggregator through Google Reader or Bloglines to monitor your students' blogs, practitioners' blogs, and educators' blogs. Set up an alert for yourself in Google Alert, so you can reply when others mention you on their blogs. Commenting on others' blogs is also a great initial step.

Tiffany was kind enough to interview me back, so look for her post, published simultaneously with mine, at the PR Post.

Meet the Teacher: Toni Muzi Falconi

For my first "meet the teacher" post on the new Teaching PR, I interviewed Toni Muzi Falconi, founder of PR Conversations and an educator at both Italian and American universities, to explain how he uses social media. Toni has lots of upper-level public relations experience, and he's not afraid to be corny -- or to speak his mind -- when the moment is right. Read for yourself:

Q. How and when did you first get interested in blogging? Are you using any other social media?

A. I have been intrigued by digital communication processes since the early eighties without having yet understood (because of my shameful disinterest...) the technicalities.

My public relations agency of the time (SCR Associati, then market leader in Italy) was the first consultancy to install a 20 unit word processing network for its employees so they could better work together. Too bad that our supplier (Xerox) abandoned that market a year later at a tremendous loss for us…We quickly switched to a Mac network and subsequently to Windows in order to be compatible with all our then clients and not only Apple.

At the end of the eighties I was an early adopter of Agorà, Italy's first ever social network (a term which wasn’t used then)….Then came the increasing use of the Internet as a tool for information and communication.

In the second part of the nineties, when I also started teaching public relations in Universities, I began to explore the Internet as a virtual relationship environment and assisted clients (mostly financial) in developing extranets with selected stakeholders, creating private environments in traditional organizational websites to stimulate relevant conversations.

When blogs first arrived and instantly exploded I confess I was sceptical and snobbed them thinking they amounted to little more than navel gazing. How wrong I was!

I began to blog personally only in July 2006 with Toni's Blog which then turned into PR Conversations in April 2007, as some ten other co-bloggers from around the world agreed to collaborate.

As for other social media, the only one with which I have some familiarity is wiki, but not as much as I would like.

Q. You've taught at several different schools. What is your approach to teaching public relations?

A. In my view the pervasiveness of public relators in shaping attitudes, opinions, decisions and behaviours of others is at the same time so relevant and so unknown in today’s society, that my primary objective is to help create awareness of this amongst others.

Students who, for some reason have decided to learn about pr, should first of all be fully aware of the social impact they will be making when they practice, and therefore fully appreciate and understand their responsibilities… not only to their clients or employers, but most of all to their interlocutors and society at large.

Only after they realize this, do I proceed to explain and discuss with them the various approaches to public relations practice, the history, the principal paradigms, the roles, the methodologies, the specific practices.

I take an organizational, systemic and relationship based perspective, while focussing on the identity of the global professional community (you cannot effectively work for a grocer in milwakee if you do not have a global perspective…), and engaging students in refining the generic principles and specific applications framework towards a new global approach… a full discontinuity from the traditional ethnocentric US based 20th 'century of self' one, which is no longer either desirable nor effective.

Q. In what ways have you incorporated social media into the classroom?

A. Well, not half as much as I would like to.

At a recent Euroblog conference in Bruxelles I was astonished (and jealous… but eager to catch up) to see how many other colleagues are much more advanced..

This takes one hell of a lot of time and effort, although of course the impact is amazing.

With my Italian undergraduate students (I teach public relations at the Vatican's LUMSA University in Rome) I practically do nothing in this area and I am ashamed.

With my post graduate NYU students (I teach Global Relations and Intercultural Communication at NYU’s executive master in public relations and corporate communication), I engage students in a highly intense use of what we call our virtual blackboard, including of course group conversations on selected issues and dilemmas, week by week, session by session.

I find this extremely gratifying (as well as time-consuming), mostly because by monitoring on line relevant threads of conversations between students, I am much more capable of understanding how their individual mind works, rather than in frontal classroom setting where you experience the usual divide between those few who are eager to attract your attention (not necessarily the brightest), those few who do not follow at all (not necessarily the least gifted), and the great majority which the professor tends to overlook because disturbed by the first and worried by the second.

I learned about this by experimenting last year for the first time a fully on line class. Great experience and full of many pleasant (and a few unpleasant) surprises.

Q. About a year ago, you changed your blog into a group blog, PR Conversations, which includes both educators and practitioners as contributors. What do you see as the purpose of this blog, and how does it contribute to the global PR conversation?

A. As we hold this dialogue, the group of active collaborators around the pr conversations blog is debating its purpose and about bringing this discussion on line, so anything could happen in the next few weeks.

We certainly did not go through a collective envisioning process (mission, vision, guiding values, strategy) before going on line.

Maybe we should have, but as experience shows, in many occasions, it is better to decide to through the troubling effort of an envisioning process only when you are confident that it is worth while.

In my view, the global professional public relations community (formed by professionals, academics and students) is, as mentioned earlier, insufficiently aware of its social and economic impact and identity; and the actual practice perceived by society is largely unacceptable in terms of responsibility and sustainability.

The issue is not, mind you, ethical.

The issue is that public relations, if professionally conducted, is incredibly effective (this is usually a surprise even for us professionals!!!) and that much more than 50% of our collective time and financial efforts are inexcusably wasted.

This is intolerable.

So if prconversations (this, of course, is only my personal view) is effective in making our global pr community more aware of this and capable of indicating threads of reflection, tools and experiences from all over the world by mixing contributions of educators, students, scholars and professionals into a ‘melting pot’ fully respective of the infinite diversities, then it serves a purpose.

Otherwise…I have always preferred merry funerals to boring parties….Also I strongly object to self preserving initiatives.

Q. Do you have any advice for other PR educators who are considering starting a blog or getting involved in social media?

A. I very much benefit from the advice of others and believe that nothing is as it was only a few hours ago, not even opinions one has just finished arguing.

Yes, I am an unabashed relativist, always eager to adapt and change but sufficiently aware that to do this I need to be convinced.

Curiosity and passion are the two drivers. Certainties and time constraints are the two killers.

Finally (and this is probably the most banal of my thoughts today), as much as I am fully emphatic to the dire need of frameworks, conceptualizations, theories and paradigms, I find it fragile to teach public relations in void of actual practice….credibility with one’s students is the real turning point of the learning process… (wow! That sounds corny…).

Meet the Teacher: Robert French

You may have noticed we haven't been meeting any teachers here on Teaching PR lately. To make up for the recent lack of profiles, this week I've landed the biggest fish of all, Mr. PR-and-Social-Media himself, Robert French of Auburn University.

I can personally attest to Robert's willingness to help other educators, as my Campaigns class is putting together an entire semester project by 20 people on a wiki he created and is hosting for us. (More on that project some other time.) Read on to learn 5 great reasons to use social media in the classroom.

Q. You were one of the first, if not the first, PR educator/bloggers in the U.S. How and when did you first get interested in blogging?
I'm not sure if we were the first to use blogs, but perhaps the first to so publicly use them in class activities.

Privately, my first blog of any kind started on February 28, 2001, at Blogspot and later at LiveJournal, starting on March 19th, 2003. We were experimenting with private blogs during that time in classes. Our first effort at using a CMS, of any kind, for classes actually took place on the AU servers in 2000. Students were writing features and posts about Auburn and also broad topics in public relations. That one has since been taken down and it was behind a firewall, not pinging anything.

In a public forum, we started using AuburnMedia.com for class writing, blogging and other CMS class activities back on August 9, 2002. We started our first WordPress blog on the university servers Sunday, December 12, 2004. PRblogs.org started up about August 16, 2005. That's when I registered the domain and we went live with the site just days later, thanks to James Farmer in Australia. James has hosted PRblogs.org on his servers all this time. A very nice guy, and the premiere edublogger in the world, in my opinion.

Prior to all of that, we used Yahoo! groups in 2000 and even used Yahoo! Messenger as the default way to communicate with clients live. We also experimented with other online CMS tools for class writing, campaigns and other discussion purposes. Those often included students communicating with clients in other parts of the country. We also started experimenting with CMS from The Open Source Collective in late 2002. We have tried most all of their software platforms at one time or another.

Finally, I started my current blog on July 24. 2004: infOpinions?. I was actually blogging months before that, on PR, using other software applications like Serendipity - but, I deleted all those blogs and databases. Dummy me.

Q. What are the purposes of your blogs?
Oh, goodness. I feel the exercises serve many purposes, but here are the ones I believe are most important.

1) Writing. The practice of researching latest trends and forming opinions, then writing about it, is perhaps the most valuable aspect of blogging, in my opinion. Our students need to practice writing in many forms. I have students using blogs to write the more traditional brief conversational posts. Other times, they write features and alsodo video / audio podcasting.

2) Engaging mentors. One of my favorite blogs has always been Marcomblog.com. Social media now allows us to engage our students in conversations with PR / Marcom practitioners from around the world. Never before has it been so easy to provide students with a true worldly view of PR practice. If there is one thing social media has done for education, which may be more important than any other aspect, is to open up the world via VOIP and streaming media, along with reading blogs.

3) Experiential learning. Students may now experience trends like never before. I'm referring to trends beyond just social media, too. But, the barriers to entry for social media are so minimial, students now have a window on the world along with the chance to actively participate with leaders in the field. It is easier than ever before to engage the students in real-world activities and track their progress. They see results, rather than dream about how the practicemight work out in the future.

4) Reading. Our students are required to read a wide variety ofpublications, including blogs, throughout their tenure in the program. After all, that's the best way to develop a broad understanding of PR practice around the world.

5) Social networks and VoIP. We use social networks and Skype to do interviews and conferences with people all the time. Now, with social video networks (Seesmic, uStream, ooVoo, etc.), we're looking at doing something just like an e-mail interview (Q&A), but seeing if the interview subjects will answer the questions on video and share them so the students can do a mashup of responses. Now, when could we have really done that before? Once we get them, we post them to the blogs.

Q. What other social media are you using?
We try to at least experience a little bit of all of it. We've used blogs, to be sure. We also use wikis (both MediaWiki and PmWiki, among other platforms). We've also used YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Skype and other platforms. Our classes were beta testers forEdelman's StoryCrafter and Shannon Whitley's PRXBuilder, too. We are about to embark on the use of UStream.tv, BlogTalkRadio and Seesmic in the Spring 2008 semester. Finally, we've also dabbled with Pligg, the open source platform that is similar to the Digg site. The "purposes of your blogs" section above actually refers to our overall philosophy, too. We've been fortunate, due to our early visibility, to have some major PR firms contact us to beta test their new tools, too. This kind of exposure, again, was never really possible before the advent of social media and social networks.

Q. Tell us a little about your school and how PR is taught there.
Auburn University's Department of Communication and Journalism is home to the public relations program. The public relations discipline is essentially a traditional program. Writing is strongly emphasized. Experiential learning is strongly encouraged and incorporated into class activities. Although only one internship is required to graduate, we encourage students to pursue two or three -- as well as many related work experiences they can find. It is not uncommon for our students to graduate with two or three internships under their belts. Finally, I believe that most PR, if not all, is local. Most public relations practice is actually done in smaller shops, or one/two people offices. In fact, my best count shows that there are far more PAs (public affairs practitioners) than their are business (agency/corporate) PR practitioners. So, we emphasize that PR offers a broad range of opportunities for future employment.

Q. In what ways do you incorporate social media into the classroom? What would you most like to do that you aren't doing already?
Well, aside from the blogging, we use wikis for collaborative writing exercises and campaign projects, Skype for interviews with various PR/Marcom professionals around the world, Pligg for experiments with ranking articles, Twitter for networking, video blogging in association with features, and more. The writing aspect of the exercises is perhaps most important. It goes further than just writing. Students are beginning to be exposed to the latest trends in PR practice, as well as the tried and true.

Q. Do you have any advice for other PR educators who are considering starting a blog or getting involved in social media?
Take it slow, at first. Whether we're talking about students or faculty ... begin by reading the numerous blogs out there already. Then comment. Then begin to write your own posts. Your posts may be short or long. Doesn't matter, really. Try to write with some frequency (at least once a week) to begin developing your audience.

Network. Visit the Teaching Social Media page at the NewPR/Wiki - That was begun by educators like Elizabeth Albrycht and Kaye Sweetser, for instance. Engage all of those educators in a discussion. Look for some new offerings from SNCR, the Society for New Communications Research, too. Their site is sncr.org.

Interact with all those educators and practitioners. We'll all share what we have, or at least I will. I've seen a lot of caring and sharing from many educators, PR firms and practitioners around the world. Ask for help and resources. You'll likely get it. That's the whole idea of social media, right? Collaborate & share. We, for instance, have provided blogs and wikis for many educators around the world. That was one of the reasons we started PRblogs.org.

Q. Auburn grads have a fine record of employment in social media positions. Take this opportunity to brag a bit!
We have been very fortunate to gain visibility for the program via social media class activities. Our students are now working and/or interning with many of the largest firms. But, they are also with the small boutique agencies, too. A lot of attention has been given to the high profile students, but we also have students engaging in social media practice in corporate in-house departments, government agencies (state & local), churches, nonprofits and small business. For just a sampling, here is a short list. Erin Caldwell, Ashley Imsand and Mary Metcalf are all with Edelman (DC & Chicago). Christi Eubanks is with Converseon in NYC. Lara Worsham is with Golin-Harris in Chicago. Emily Melton is with Weber-Shandwick in NYC. If they'd let me write about their clients, I'm sure everyone would be impressed. They are all heavily engaged in social media activities with a wide variety of clients. You know, we've had a lot of much appreciated attention.

But, I'll share a secret. People are watching because of the students. Reality says, if it was just me blogging - no one would care. The students have humored me and dug in when I ask them to experiment and try to come to terms with social networks and the strategies that can make them work for a client. Students. Ya' gotta' love 'em. They are great people.

Meet the Teacher: Bob Batchelor

This week I'm featuring Bob Batchelor of the University of South Florida -- he's relatively new to the blogosphere, but he sure caught my eye when he blogged about PR history! It's my area of expertise but, let's be honest, not one of wide public concern. ;-) Here are Bob's responses to my questions... it's the first time Johnny Cash has appeared in Teaching PR.

Q. How and when did you first get interested in blogging? What is the purpose of your blog? Are you using any other social media?
My professional career in communications began roughly the same time the Web started taking off, which led to a longtime interest in technology. For example, I helped design and wrote content for a corporate Web site in 1996-1997 that was at the time state of the art. I do not recall an "aha" moment when the bulb went off regarding blogging, but rather my interest in the medium grew out of my writing for online publications. I used to write for some then-big Web sites, like office.com and worked as a staff writer at dbusiness.com in the heyday of the dot.com era. I also wrote quite a bit for Rick Shenkman’s History News Network (hnn.us), which uses history as a vehicle for understanding today’s world. I see blogging as an extension of these attempts at creating a platform for myself as a popular culture specialist. My first (sporadic) blogging attempts began in March 2003 at Pop Goes Our Culture .

PR-Bridge grew out of my frustration with divide between the theory-laden, scholarly work going on among public relations academics and the buried under work, gut instinct driven world of practitioners. There are so many opportunities for true collaboration, but neither side (and they do seem like separate worlds!) seems that willing or interested in working with the other. I hope PR-Bridge grows into a place where some discussion can take place. My other hope is that professionals will recognize me as someone who can help them find new talent, thus getting my students jobs and internships.

Currently, I’m using a variety of other social media platforms, including personal and professional MySpace pages and a Facebook page. I also signed onto LinkedIn and MyRagan. I’m purposely avoiding most cell phone based social media, just because I like to be tuned out to have time to think, so I use my cell about twice a day to make short calls and in case of emergencies related to my two-year-old daughter.

Q. Tell us a little about your school and how PR is taught there.
The University of South Florida is the ninth largest university in the nation. We have gained a bit of notoriety over the last couple of years because the school football team joined the Big East and has been ranked. Also, there is a big push to become a nationally-recognized research university, so that has drawn attention.

Public relations is a sequence in the School of Mass Communications, which is approved by the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, one of only 25 percent of the 450 journalism and mass communications programs in the United States accredited by ACEJMC. The School of Mass Communications requires students to apply for admission and pass an English diagnostic test, so most PR students are upperclassmen. My colleagues in the PR sequence include: Kelly Page Werder (sequence head), Kelli Burns, Rebecca Hagen, and Derina Holtzhausen, who is also the director of graduate studies. I also serve as faculty advisor for the Public Relations Students Society of America.

Public relations is a three-semester sequence, though students have strict requirements while completing the degree, from taking Mass Communications courses like Intro to Advertising and Beginning Reporting to taking management, marketing, economic, political science, and library research skills courses outside the major. Students take Principles of Public Relations their first semester. In the second, they enroll in Writing for Public Relations, Public Relations Research, and Public Relations: Issues, Problems, and Practices, which is a case study course. In their final semester in the sequence, students take our capstone Advanced PR, where they work in account teams for a real client. They also take PR Design that final semester. In addition, most of our students are juggling internships, jobs, and extracurricular groups, like PRSSA, Student Government, and a variety of activist groups and philanthropic activities. Most of our top students are graduating with two to four internships.

My primary class is Writing for Public Relations, though I also teach Principles and Issues on a regular basis. I also teach an introductory course Mass Communication and Society, which is a large course (I’ll have 300 students in January) that students from across USF can take. The PR sequence is difficult and we stress the competitive aspects of the profession. Based on my professional experience, I teach from an integrated communications perspective, which I feel best prepares my students for entering the field.

Q. In what ways do you incorporate social media into the classroom? What would you most like to do that you aren't already doing?
I use blogging extensively in my courses. In the Writing classes, I make blogging part of their weekly assignments. Often, this entails giving the students a current article or op-ed to read and then having them post their responses on our internal (Blackboard-based) blog. Supplementing their textbook this way forces students to read about events and issues taking place right now and shows them the kinds of publications they should be reading to prepare themselves for their professional lives. I started experimenting with podcasting this semester. In the 45-student Issues class, I had them do group work and then each group answered the same four questions via podcasting. Next, they had to blog about the assignment after listening to the other groups’ podcasts. The student really enjoyed the work, so I plan to incorporate more podcasting in the future.

What I would like to do more of in the future is use Wikis as a way to build the class into an online community. Also, I hope to find a way to get more involved myself in the students' blogging efforts. Keeping up with them is a numbers game that I always seem to lose to some degree. That said, I am pretty harshly critical of myself as a teacher. I will always search for better ways to prepare my students, particularly by using new technology. In the future, I foresee this including actually teaching them how to build Web sites, blogs, post podcasts, and other technical skills that they lack as a group.

Q. Do you have any advice for other PR educators who are considering starting a blog or getting involved in social media?
Despite the effort that blogging requires, I find it valuable enough to dedicate the time. My priority is my students and blogging helps me understand social media better, thus giving me some credibility when discussing it as a teacher. My students are focused on building the skills necessary for them to succeed in the profession, so they want to know that I have the experience and background to teach them. PR-Bridge is a kind of "putting my money where my mouth is" exercise that shows students the value of social media. In fact, I challenged my students to build their own brand by starting a blog or joining the social media networks that I mentioned earlier. Here’s an example of a couple students who took me up on the offer: Meg Roberts and Tory Lynne.

On a personal level, I would love it if more PR educators blogged, particularly those who approach the field from a more scholarly viewpoint. There are big issues in this profession that need addressed and we could all benefit from more voices in the mix. For example, though I know Bill Sledzik by reputation, I had never met him prior to a recent exchange we had via blogging, looking at an issue from two divergent views. This conversation would have never taken place without social media.

Q. Like me, you're a historian, and you're currently studying for your doctorate in English Literature. What are your long-term career plans and how will you fit in your varied interests?
After a decade of corporate communications work, I needed a change of pace. Luckily, USF wanted to hire someone who had deep professional experience. But, academe requires a doctorate for tenure, so I took the steps to gain admission into the English Lit program at USF. I have always been a secret lit kind of guy, so working toward this degree has been a dream come true. The degree will help me get tenure and gives me a new perspective on teaching writing to PR students.

My primary goal, as audacious as it sounds, is to become the best college professor in America. That’s the kind of standard I hold myself to. I hope to write quite a bit in the future about how to best teach PR, which is another reason why I wish more of us were blogging.

As a scholar, nearly all of my work is broadly defined as popular culture. My long-term goal is to be a respected pop culture scholar, like my friend Ray Browne from Bowling Green State University. By labeling myself as a pop culturist, rather than narrowly defining my interests, I keep my work fresh and varied enough to encompass everything I want to write about. Currently, for example, I am working on a book on pop culture in this decade and editing a 4-volume encyclopedia on American pop culture in the twentieth century. My next project is editing a 3-volume series of original essays on cult pop culture. Then I’ll be onto a modern history of public relations, which the field sorely needs, and a short bio of Johnny Cash. I want to publish a book a year for about a decade then see what happens next.

Labels: education, meet the teacher, public relations

Meet the Teacher: Carolina Acosta-Alzuru

This week for the first time I'm featuring one of my own colleagues. Some people may not like this term, but I'm telling you, she IS a rockstar. Carolina Acosta-Alzuru is an award-winning PR professor in the Grady College, but her research on telenovelas has made her a best-selling author in Venezuela, as indicated by the bottom picture of her being interviewed for television while the onlookers snap her picture, and a friend to the stars (the top picture shows Carolina with telenovela star Carlos Cruz, left, and Edgar Ramírez, who appeared in "The Bourne Ultimatum" and is now shooting Steven Soderbergh's "Che Guevera.") Carolina's blog focuses on her research.

Read this interview to find out why she's not on Facebook and how her blog serves as an academic gym.

Q. How and when did you first get interested in blogging? What is the purpose of your blog? Are you using any other social media?

My interest in blogging has grown slowly and tentatively. For the past two years I've been reading blogs related to telenovelas, which are my research topic and obsession. However, my first attempt at blogging was completely unrelated to my academic interests. It was in June of 2006 when I fulfilled an old dream: to travel to Santorini with my daughters and sisters. Blogging seemed like a very practical way of sharing the realization of my dream with friends and family. (It never crossed my mind that "other" people would read it). However, I stopped posting the minute I arrived back in the U.S.

My second attempt was related to my research and left me a bittersweet taste. I set up a group blog for the participants of my study of the telenovela Ciudad Bendita. Its purpose was to have a forum in which these audience members could comment freely on the telenovela without the need of my questions and probes. It worked well, but only for the first three months the telenovela aired. After that, participants stopped posting and started emailing me their comments directly.

After this experience I was sure I would never blog again. But last April I heard about the Blog Dawgs and how some of my colleagues in the Grady College were blogging. I visited your blog, Karen, and was amazed at its tone and usefulness. Soon after I decided to blog about telenovelas. I started writing in English and then realized that my blog needed to have a mirror image in Spanish . Therefore, my blog is really two blogs. In it/them I write about all aspects related to telenovelas, including my research studies and my classroom experience teaching about these Latin American soap operas, culture and society.

As for other social media, the only ones I use regularly are those for video sharing like youtube and dailymotion. I'm currently facing a conflict regarding the ubiquitous Facebook: I receive invitations every day from people who want me to join and be their friends. I'm curious about this phenomenon and would love to experience and study it. However, my kids, ages 19, 23 and 25, have asked me not to be in Facebook, a place they consider theirs. So far, I've abided by their request. But, I wonder if I'm missing something really important.

Q. Tell us a little about your school and how PR is taught there. I teach in the Grady College at the University of Georgia. I'm very proud of our public relations program. For many years I've taught our visual communication course and our capstone, PR Campaigns. Every semester I'm amazed at what our students are able to do. Our program is strict in the courses it requires. We make sure our graduates are ethical strategic communicators who have mastered all necessary skills: writing, research, graphics, etc. We emphasize hands-on experience, and we teach them how to work both individually and in teams.

Q. In what ways do you incorporate social media into the classroom? What would you most like to do that you aren’t already doing? Social media is both a research source and a strategic target for my public relations students. In addition, this semester I'm teaching a course on Telenovelas in which students are encouraged to participate in social media groups related to telenovelas.

What I haven't done: I would like to set up a blog for my classes. I haven't done that yet. But, I'm determined to implement it for next semester.

Q. Your blog is different from the other public relations educators I've interviewed in that it focuses on your research, so it's not actually about PR. In spite of that, has blogging affected how you teach PR? How has it affected you in other ways? Yes, blogging has definitely affected the way I teach PR because it underscores the rhetorical underpinnings of public relations. Issues of persona, voice and audience are paramount in blogging and in the fulfillment of public relations' societal mission and purpose.

Blogging has had a profound effect on me as a researcher. Never before has my voice and my work reached so many people. I've lost count of the times I've been interviewed about telenovelas since I started blogging ...and from all over the world! I've always kept a research journal. Therefore, I'm used to being permanently reflexive. However, my blogs are like an "academic gym" in which as I plan my posts and comment on the the comments I receive, my mind is constantly analyzing, decoding and figuring out the significance and usefulness of my research, and how to construct a tight argument.

Q. Do you have any advice for other PR educators who are considering starting a blog or getting involved in social media? Yes, do it! It's a tremendous learning experience and teaching tool, and it's a great way to connect with your students and people around the globe with similar interests.

Labels: education, meet the teacher, public relations

Meet the Teacher: Heather Yaxley

It's Friday at 9:30 p.m. and I'm just now getting around to this week's Meet the Teacher (amazing what gets accomplished once the child is safely tucked in bed). Fortunately, this week's featured PR educator is evidently much better at time management than I am -- as you'll see when you read about everything Heather Yaxley does. Heather made the top five on my "best PR blogs for students" list because of her consistently great content, which draws on her perspective as both an educator and a professional.

Here's what Heather had to say.

Q. How and when did you first get interested in blogging? What is the purpose of your blog? Are you using any other social media?
About 18 months ago, it became obvious that blogging was something that needed to be understood if you are interested in public relations and its future. Consequently, I organised a workshop led by Antony Mayfield who was writing about blogging in the short-lived PR Business magazine. He made it clear how easy it is to monitor and create a blog. So I started reading and decided to have a go myself. The Greenbanana blog was intended as an experiment initially so that I could gain a better understanding of the medium. It soon became apparent that I could use the blog to assist my students engage with topical PR issues, draw theory into reflections, make connections with other bloggers, engage in conversations, and gain some really useful online skills. One year on, my blog continues to do all this, but also acts to reflect my personal and professional "brand", which has opened up new opportunities for me and enhanced my credibility in PR more widely. As well as my blog and online educational site, http://www.greenbanana.biz/, you can find me on Facebook, and a few other social network sites. I also blog at the collaborative, international blog, http://www.prconversations.com/ -- and my avatar has been into SecondLife twice.

Q. Tell us a little about your school and how PR is taught there.
I have a portfolio of educational connections -- firstly in teaching the professional Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) qualifications. The students are all working in PR or, in the case of the Advanced Certificate, they may wish to move into the profession. Teaching for these qualifications is undertaken with day long teaching sessions over a 9 month period, supported by an online educational resource that I developed in 2006, http://www.greenbanana.biz/. That really helps in ensuring the course delegates are self-directed learners and enables connections to be made into the vast amount of discussion on PR available online. I also teach part-time at Bournemouth University, working with 4th year PR undergraduates on their dissertations and taking first year seminars. This year, my PR Theory and Practice seminars are actually with Advertising degree students. I think that is very exciting to be able to ensure they have a rounded perspective of PR -- and recognise it as much more than "free" publicity. We again support learning there with online and multi-media materials.

Q. In what ways do you incorporate social media into the classroom? What would you most like to do that you aren't already doing?
We’ve mainly be looking at the role of social media in PR terms -- so looking at case studies, exploring blogs and setting up monitoring using RSS feeds of particular brands or stories. We have looked at online petitions in respect of government relations and the use of YouTube in crisis management. I think Facebook will be a useful medium for communicating with the Advertising undergrads since they are pretty much guaranteed to be using it already -- and will be more comfortable with it than the University systems. I would like to investigate more the value of wikis as a learning resource and also gain skills to make better use of podcasts and video. What I would really like though is for the students to start challenging me rather than me having to introduce them to social media. As yet, there are few students who are active already in new media. Saying that, I had one CIPR Diploma student, Ellee Seymour, last year who was already an active blogger and very successful in using her site to campaign on issues that she cares about.

Q. Do you have any advice for other PR educators who are considering starting a blog or getting involved in social media?
I believe if you are going to start a blog, you need to be clear about its positioning and also committed to engaging in the wider blogosphere. As for anyone blogging, there are potential problems in respect of your personal and professional views compared to those of the institutes where you are employed. Having said that, I find the blog is a great way of giving students greater insight into PR and particularly, its wider relevance. For students, I think the social networks are more in tune with their lifestyles and this presents an opportunity to make a connection with them in a space where they are familiar. The problem potentially is maintaining a sense of distance -- there is a danger that they see the casual nature of the medium as appropriate for communicating matters that should not be done in that way.

Q. What are your thoughts on combining practice and education? What do you see as the pros and cons of having a foot in both worlds?
I believe we have to combine practice and education. I believe that if you are doing today, what you did yesterday, you won't be making a difference tomorrow. The world is changing so fast and the body of knowledge about PR is so vast, that if we aren't seeking to improve the way we practice PR, then we will be left behind. Practice that is informed by education means you avoid the obvious mistakes and can learn from others. Having said that, I believe there is also room for education that fundamentally challenges us regarding wider concepts in society. The benefits of having a foot in both worlds (boundary-spanning, I suppose), is that you can help students relate the models and theoretical concepts to their everyday life drawing on your own experiences. You can also challenge practice on the basis of principles and reflect on the value of theory in terms of whether it relates to real life experiences. The dangers are perhaps that you don't get the time to undertake your own reflection on theoretical concepts sufficiently -- although I'm hoping to start a PhD shortly, which will take me further into the academic world. Of course, my topic is intended to have application for practice too.

Q. You're the first educator I've interviewed who also writes for PR Conversations. How does that complement your own blog? How do you decide what to post to which blog?
I was very pleased to be asked by Toni Muzi Falconi to join the team at PR Conversations. My own blog reflects things that interest me and can be drawn from any source of inspiration. I see the posts on PR Conversations as a starting point to engage in discussing issues that are probably of wider interest in terms of public relations. I am particularly interested in the international collaborative process behind PR Conversations and the readers/commentators, who come from around the world. I learn as much from the conversation that ensues in the comments as from reading other posts -- and so I hope that my own posts will stimulate a good level of discussion that can be of value to readers. I generally think if it a topic is personal, local or quirky, it belongs on Greenbanana -- if it has greater international or PR dimensions, then could I take it to PR Conversations where others can participate in "chewing the fat".

Addition (October 2): I'm such an idiot! I just realized I failed to link to Heather's blog in my introducation. Sorry, Heather.

Labels: education, public relations, week's best

Meet the (former) Teacher: David Phillips

This week's Meet the Teacher features David Phillips, formerly an instructor at Bournemouth University and, as he says, "now focusing on my PhD at Leeds Metropolitan University, leavened with consulting." I especially wanted to interview David because of a comment he made on one of my posts last summer, which made it very clear that Bournemouth is doing a lot more than most U.S. schools in terms of integrating social media into the curriculum. Here's what David had to say:

Q. How and when did you first get interested in blogging? What are the purposes of your blogs?
I go back a long way with the Internet. In 1995, I spoke to the Chartered Institute of Public Relations about the significance of the Internet. Most people did not have cell phones, or e-mail at the time. They were sceptical, it has to be said.

At that time interactivity online included chat and Usenet and pointed to where the Internet was heading.

The interruption came with Web sites and the dot-com bubble but all the evidence pointed towards improved interactivity. The marketers wanted to transpose their paradigm to the Internet and saw it as a channel and not a 'place'.

I chaired the joint Chartered Institute of Public Relations/Public Relations Consultant's Association Internet Commission in 1999 which really set the agenda and was heavily biased towards online relationship opportunities. We got it right - thank goodness. Most of the findings are in my books 'Managing Your reputation in Cyberspace' (Thorogood) and the CIPR book 'Online Public Relations' (Kogan Page). The latter coincided with Shel Holtz excellent book (Public Relations on the Net) in the USA - which is how I met him.

My first blog was about 5 years ago - I just wanted to try it out and really forgot about it until two years ago mostly because my web sites had discussion lists.

Tell us a little about your school and how PR is taught there. What would you most like to do with social media that you aren't already doing?
I am no longer with Bournemouth University but it has excellent Public Relations degree courses (MA and BA) and is one of the premier Universities for PR in the UK.

The BA course is a four year course with a year out in a placement with a consultancy or in-house department. The quality of placement is good so that in the final year, students come back with good practical knowledge to add to theory.

The BA course includes a number of compulsory and elective modules. Online PR is a compulsory, year long, module and is really about Internet mediated PR. Last year the cohort was 50, so its quite a big class!

I cannot speak for the course this year but this is what we did last year:

The course is taught using a (closed) wiki, and a lot of Internet driven technologies as well as a range of communication platforms (PC's, Mobile, Games consoles etc). Students are introduced to communications channels and, mostly, try them out inside the wiki.:
1. Blogs (and, now, microblogs)
2. Chat
3. E-mail
4. File Hosting
5. Games
6. Instant messaging
7. Message Boards
8. Monitoring, measuring, evaluation and reporting
9. Mobile
10. New Media Release
11. Newspapers Online
12. Online community portals/social networks
13. Online conferencing
14. Podcasts
15. RSS
16. Search engines
17. Surveys online
18. Tagging/folksonomies
19. TV to mobile
20. Usenet(Google Groups)
21. Videos
22. Virtual environments
23. vlogs
24. Web 2.0 media relations
25. Websites
26. Widgets
27. Wikis
28. VoIP

In groups, they are tasked to write a comprehensive description of each and have to collect enough information (I have a set of rules) to enable a PR practitioner to use these channels using the information provided. It's a tough call. This is all maintained on the student wiki and is available to all students during and after their time at Bournemouth.

In addition we identify case studies of each type of channel being used in practice and each student has to select a channel/case study and write it up, once again, on the wiki.

We spend a lot of time on value systems and planning and management and I insist on rigorous understanding of risk management as part of the plan.

Midway through the year they have an assignment. It is the same organisation for all the students and (with attribution) they can use each other's work to develop an Internet campaign beginning with analysis of the value systems of the organization and audit of their online presence. They are encouraged to use McQuail's 'Uses and Gratification' theory for online evaluation. Student just can't believe that each assignment will be different with all this visibility and transparency - its a very good lesson to learn.

Additionally there are lectures and seminars on: Motivation, meaning and use of interactivity; The internet as a social medium; Virtual communities; Monitoring, measuring, segmentation (and an introduction to user created social segments); evaluating and reporting; Value systems; The law; psychology of Internet use and application and future proofing (how the practice of PR can stay up to date with the evolution of the Internet).

Of course, a lot of the information they need is scattered across the Internet (some provided by me but mostly from the best online expertise I can find - e.g. the nature of Internet Transparency Agency and Porosity by me can be found at The New PR Wiki or the debates on Network Neutrality will come from Jonathan Zittrain at Oxford. This is added by both me and students to a bibliography (again on the wiki) which in a year becomes very extensive. Even then, I find that in assignments some students find new references requiring reading an evaluation as I mark their scripts - it's a tough life teaching online PR!

It is a very intensive 20 week module with a written (yes - dead trees and pens) 2 hour end of course exam.

One of the real problems is that this has heavy practical stuff and a high theoretical element (and, of course is controversial because much of it runs counter to a lot of PR theory - and so a lot of critical analysis). There is also a need for much more research and we need more PR students doing MA and PhD online PR research (I guess I could keep a cohort of post degree students of 50 going most of the time).

What is interesting teaching this module is how fast it changes. Last year we had the rise and rise of Facebook (why?) and Twitter (what?) and the huge shift from traditional Web sites to social media (when?) which called for analysis of the motivations for use and all the information needed to be able to us channel in PR practice and research.

Do you have any advice for other PR educators who are considering starting a blog or getting involved in social media?
I could not possibly advise other tutors about online PR. So many are so good.

It is fun to follow the exchange of Q&A on Facebook as students come to terms with Internet Mediated relationship management and I do make myself available in Facebook and IM (and Skype and inside the wiki using a number of channels as we experiment with them) at any time just to bring home the immediacy of the Internet and its range of channels.

I think the golden rule is 'never ask a tutor or student to use social media if they do not want to'. The cross over from personal and professional is all to narrow. This is why the student wiki is closed. You can make mistakes there that would not be helpful elsewhere.

The mantra I use to all students is that 'All you and say do online is cached by someone somewhere and potentially available for all time - so handle with care' and, yes, when I include it in an early lecture, a lot of them blush when they think about IM conversations with girl/boyfriends in the past - but they get over it.

I saw that your blog enables audio comments. Why do you think this is important, and do you think it changes how people interact with your blog?
There are few books, so each of us has to try or confirm the other's experiments. Over time I have had all manner of devices and widgets on one or other blog just to try them out. The outcome for the course is very satisfying.

With this background most students get jobs easily (it's a great talking point at interview, I'm told) and about a third get online PR responsibilities in agencies and in-house in the first three months.

Labels: education, meet the teacher

Meet the Teacher: Ross Monaghan

This week's Meet the Teacher features Ross Monaghan, who teaches public relations at Deakin University in Australia. I think he makes an especially good point about social media allowing PR educators to connect--this has been one of the biggest benefits of my blog.

By the way, Ross, I would love to come to Australia one day, too. ;-)

How did you first get interested in blogging? What is the purpose of your blog?
It was soon after I became an academic in 2004. Deakin University makes extensive use of online teaching technology, so I thought I should quickly become familiar with what we now call "social media". I experimented with some anonymous Xanga and Livejournal blogs to get a feel for the blogging technology and how to write for blogs. James Farmer, the founder and CEO of Edublogs.org, worked at Deakin at the time, and we had quite a few interesting discussions about the future of social media and education. James introduced me to blogger.com and RSS feeds (I remember thinking at the time, what use are these?) and that’s when I really started my first public blog, PR Hits and Misses. It summarised some PR case studies I found online and allowed me to mention these cases in lectures, and refer students to my blog where they could find more information. In 2006 I received a grant to establish http://themediapod.net/, which is a blog and podcast site.

Tell us a little about Deakin University and how PR is taught there.
Deakin is my Alma Mater. I was actually in the very first intake for our BA (Public Relations) degree back in 1985. It's great to have come full circle. The PR teaching discipline is in the Faculty of Arts. We offer a range of professional communication and media streams for undergraduate and postgraduate students including PR, journalism, literature and professional writing. We have campuses in Melbourne, Geelong and Warrnambool, and have an extensive "off campus" student population in regional and metropolitan Australia, and around the world.

I’m very proud of our PR degree. We have an excellent team with a variety of research and industry experience. The theme running through all PR units is the need to be open, honest and transparent, and most of the team are also members of the University's respected Corporate Citizenship Research Unit.

You’ve also experimented with podcasting. Can you describe that project?
I received a grant from Deakin to establish a podcasting and blogging site. With my journalism colleague Colleen Murrell, we established http://www.themediapod.net/. Whilst it is very much an experimental site, it does show what is possible on a limited budget. Teaching staff, working practitioners and students are able to contribute to the site, although it is primarily used to highlight outstanding student work, and case studies produced by teaching staff.

In what other ways do you incorporate social media into the classroom? What would you most like to do that you aren’t already doing?
If I can think of a way of using social media, I usually try it. I'm not afraid of pushing the boundaries, or of making mistakes for that matter. I'm not exactly shy either, so I don't worry too much about making a fool of myself on YouTube or my podcasts! As an example, I produced a podcast by pretending I was 10 years old and back in 1976. I found copies of magazines and newspapers from the time and talked about the stories, and what I thought might happen in the future. The Independent of London found it, and reviewed it as part of a feature they did on 1976.

I also have Facebook and MySpace profiles to keep in contact with current students and alumni, and of course I’m contactable on Skype and MSN messenger.

This year I received a fellowship to look at Second Life. So far I've initiated a project with Red Cross Australia, conducted a virtual tour of PR agencies online, and arranged some mentoring via Second Life. I also use YouTube to explain certain aspects of my courses. Naturally Deakin has internal resources for hosting audio and video, but for nonessential academic activities I try to use external social media sites so that students experience how they can be used.

I’ve also used blogs to assist students to reflect on their PR internship experience.

I guess another use of social media in my teaching is establishing contacts such as yourself. If it hadn’t been for our blogs, we would never have met. I recently met a fellow IABC member and author, Ron Shewchuk, online and I interviewed him for theMediaPod. Ron is based in Canada. After the interview we had a long chat, which concluded with Ron saying, "I’d love to come to Australia one day". I made a few phone calls, and arranged for Ron to speak at a conference, and conduct a workshop for IABC here in Australia -- both of which paid for his trip. Whilst here, Ron gave a lecture for my students, and is now an honorary staff member interacting with students online.

Do you have any advice for other PR educators who are considering starting a blog or getting involved in social media?
I understand that it can be daunting. Writing a blog is a completely different process to writing an academic paper. You need to quickly produce concise information, often without checking and rechecking facts. You open yourself up to criticism through work produced in a hurry. Spelling mistakes and grammatical errors are par for the course, too. That’s scary for someone who teaches communication at a tertiary level. It was one of the barriers I faced - I was very nervous about my first couple of posts. I saved them as drafts, asked someone to proof them for me, and carefully re-read them before posting them live. I’m over my hesitations now. The benefit it brings me and my students is worth the occasional red face I experience when I notice bad spelling or grammatical mistakes.

So my advice is: jump in. Perhaps try an anonymous blog to start with. Dabble. Get a MySpace or Facebook profile. Upload some photos to Photobucket. Get involved. Invest some time, and there will be some fantastic, and probably unexpected, positive returns.

Labels: education, meet the teacher, public relations

Meet the Teacher: Tim Penning

Last week at AEJMC I actually got to meet a fellow PR educator/blogger, Tim Penning, of Grand Valley State University. Of course I invited him to be the next participant in "Meet the Teacher." Here's what he had to say.

Q. How and when did you first get interested in blogging? When we met, you mentioned that you try to keep your blog focused on the local area; how does that relate to the purpose of your blog?
A. A friend of mine in D.C. has written for the Post about local blogs. It occurred to me that as social media advances, there will be occasions where local emphasis will be appreciated again. There are millions of blogs, thousands about PR, few if any about PR in my neck of the woods. I also see my blog as an extension of my role as an educator, to reach out to area professionals and comment on/start discussion about PR. It’s like an ongoing PRSA chapter event of sorts.

Q. Tell us a little about your school and how PR is taught there.
A. Grand Valley State University has grown rapidly in recent years. We now have more than 23,000 students. Our Advertising/PR major has grown from 280 students to over 500 in four years. The Ad/PR major is one of eight majors in a school of communications (i.e., not under a journalism dept. or business school). We have a communication core, and then students take most classes together for either advertising or PR consisting of three courses. We then require an internship and two electives. Our PR courses match the recently updated recommendations in the Commission on Education in PR Report. When I came to GVSU seven years ago I worked to add a research course, a tech course, and revised our writing courses. I’m pretty happy with it but realize from the recent AEJMC conference that we should always be thinking about freshening the curriculum and/or pedagogy. We try to blend theory and practice in how we teach PR--our school’s motto is "the integration of liberal arts and professional practice."

Q. In what ways do you incorporate social media into the classroom? Are you using any other social media? What would you most like to do that you aren’t already doing?
A. I have to integrate more. I am using the Blackboard software for all my courses. I have used discussion boards and offer links and supplemental reading only. It seems participation needs to be required to get students involved. I’m toying with podcasts and vidcasts, but not of my lectures. I want students to attend class! The cases would be interviews with area pros etc. as a social media version of a guest in class. I want to be sure I’m not just using tech for the whiz bang effect but that it enhances learning. The other thing I do is demonstrate how PR pros are using it, applying age-old principles to new media.

Q. Do you have any advice for other PR educators who are considering starting a blog or getting involved in social media?
A. Most importantly, have an objective. Secondly, be sure you have time. I did a "soft launch" to make sure I had time to do this regularly before I started letting people know it was out there. I have lots of students and alumni reading, which is a nice way to maintain relationships.

Q. I've noticed that your blog roll is an eclectic mix of PR, media, and other kinds of sources. Would you say this is indicative of your interests or your blog in general?
A. I aim to comment on advertising and PR in West Michigan. Sometimes that involves reports by area media. I haven’t had time to "report" and offer "scoops" on my blog often, though I will when I can. Mostly, my blog is commentary. I’m trying to offer my ideal, normative view of PR, to humbly offer that perspective to pros who see PR as only publicity or who may not always practice ethically.

Labels: education, meet the teacher, public relations

Meet the Teacher: Kelli Matthews

This week's "Meet the Teacher" features Kelli Matthews, who has her feet in the worlds of both academics (instructor, University of Oregon) and practice (managing director, Verve Northwest Communications). Kelli's blog, PRos in Training, focuses on and often features her students.

Q. How and when did you first get interested in blogging? What is the purpose of your blog? I know you're on Twitter; are you using any other social media?
I got interested in blogging a little more than a year ago. I was doing some research for a presentation I was giving to a local United Way and the search results results kept coming from blogs--specifically Kami Huyse's Communication Overtones, and Nedra Weinreich's Spare Change. While I'd certainly heard of blogs before, it really dawned on me doing that research that this medium could be so powerful. All of a sudden, two women I'd never heard of --and without their blogs, I would probably have NEVER have heard of them--are my "experts" for a particular topic. I used the blogrolls of these two "seed blogs" to build my own list. I began my student-focused blog in June of last year--114 posts later, I'm still having fun and haven't quite run out of things to say. Other social media --I'm on Twitter, but barely... I'm also in Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and MyRagan. I'm in SecondLife, but I'm still going through "training."

Q. Tell us a little about your school and how PR is taught there. What are the pros and cons of being both a professional and an educator?
PR at the University of Oregon is a major in the School of Journalism and Communication. We have five classes: Principle, Writing I, Writing II, Plans & Problems and Campaigns. The Intro class is a large lecture class (125 students), and all the others are between 16 and 20 students in size. The first writing class focuses on media-related writing and the second (which has only been part of our major for 2 years) is more direct to consumer writing. Plans & Problems is a case study class and in Campaigns the students work with real clients to do research, planning and implementation.

I think the pros of being both a professional and an educator far, far outweigh the cons. I am bringing daily PR experiences into the classroom and finding that my research interests and academic strengths enhance the work I do for clients. Students love that I practice PR and clients love that I teach--and I really love doing both. The biggest con is the time management factor. I have an 18-month old son, too, so it's really like having three full time jobs sometimes. But I have an incredibly supportive partner who gets to be a stay-at-home dad, so we make it work and somehow it does!

Q. How do you incorporate social media into the classroom? What would you like to do that you aren't doing already?
In Writing II, I have the students write an industry-focused blog (public relations, advertising and marketing). I also have them write a social media strategy for a client. Because this is a new class, there's some trial and error with the details of the assignments, but in both cases, the students appreciate being forced to focus on social media. In fact, at least two of my students got their first job or an internship because of their blogs. (I've got a pocket full of "I told you so!" for them and "Seeeee?!" for my future students). I also use social media tools to collaborate with students and share resources. I have a de.licio.us page that’s very PR focused. I use tags related to assignments to collect resources I think might be useful. I use Slideshare to share presentations with them, too. I think as the students become more familiar with social media and begin hearing about it more, thinking about it more and using it more, by the time I get them in the senior seminar style classes we can begin to think more critically about the tools and take the planning and strategy to another level. Right now they are babes in the social media woods, so it's sometimes difficult to even get beyond the basics. I'd like to take social media thinking and doing to a higher "level" with the upper-division students.

Q. Do you have any advice for other PR educators who may be considering starting a blog or getting involved in social media?
I think my advice would be to go for it. I think that we get hung up on the academics sometimes and have a hard time just communicating at a human level. You don’t have to be creating publishable work with every post. Just talk. Your students will listen. In my experience, they are eager for someone to help them understand why and how the hype is relevant to them and their careers. And and educators, what could be more important?

Q. I've noticed you incorporate a lot of video into your blog. Why is this important to you? What do you think it accomplishes?
Well, lately it's been because it's summer and I'm feeling lazy. But, the videos I choose are usually funny or particularly creative. I hope that students get inspired to think about what's possible and think about how to (re)create the share-ability of the videos that I post (or that they are sharing and posting in their daily lives).

Labels: education, meet the teacher, public relations

Meet the Teacher: Richard Bailey

At the urging of the Friendly Ghost, I've compiled a list of PR educator-bloggers (now featured on my blog roll). The good news is that I found quite a few more than last time I looked -- 17 by my count, but I'm sure there are more (especially those not in English). The bad news is that I don't know a lot of these people! So I decided to institute a new feature on Teaching PR, "Meet the Teacher."

My first interview is with Richard Bailey of Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK. Richard's PR Studies was one of the first PR educator blogs I found, and it remains one of my favorite (I guess I should say "favourite".) Here are Richard's answers to a few of my questions.

Q. How and when did you first get interested in blogging? What is the purpose of your blog? Are you using any other social media?
It was pure opportunism. I was working as a freelance PR consultant and professional trainer around the start of the new millennium (also the time the dot com bubble burst - with the inevitable downturn about to follow). So I was in need of a personal website, had some time on my hands - and was in need to learning some new skills myself. I then gained a broadband connection to my home office and felt the need to make use of all this 'free' time online. I didn't get on with Blogger and wasn't aware of other blogging or content management software at the time. So I created my own home-coded website with blog-like characteristics (it was at writeeffect.co.uk though it's no longer live and I've not kept up the domain name.) This was in 2001.

By 2003 I'd taken a full-time lecturing job so registered the www.prstudies.com domain and subscribed to Typepad for my blog. It was envisaged as a group blog for our 12-strong public relations teaching team but there's something solitary and individualistic about blogging so it reverted to being a personal site. This is my current blog.

It's purpose is what it always was: to keep me learning. But it's no longer technology that I'm learning about, but ideas. (Interestingly, mine was never a blog about blogs; it was always meant to be a blog about public relations ideas and practice.)

We're now in need of a faculty web presence to reflect the breadth of our teaching, consultancy and research so the next evolution should be to embed the blog into a content management system.

Yes, I've explored other social media applications, but haven't found myself an enthusiastic participant of any until Facebook opened its doors this year. Now all of those disparate applications (eg Twitter, tagging, FlickR etc etc) seem to make sense withing a social networking site with critical mass.

Q. Tell us a little about your school and how PR is taught there.
As related in Jacquie L'Etang's Public Relations in Britain, the course at Leeds Metroplitan University (then Leeds Polytechnic) was one of the pioneering undergraduate programs in the UK. We're now one of the largest in terms of faculty and student numbers. We even have two professors of public relations (the most senior academic position) in Anne Gregory and Ralph Tench.

Where we differ from some other courses in the UK, and most, I believe, in the US is that we're situated in a business school, not within journalism or media studies. So our students gain a broader business and marketing education alongside theory and practice modules. All undergraduates complete a dissertation and around half of our cohort (around 60 this coming academic year) take a paid industrial placement as part of the course.

Back to social media: we aim to embed this into the curriculum rather than to teach it as a distinctive element. (After all, no one would consider teaching 'telephone public relations' would they?) So we're introducing electronic and online versions of the practice portfolios which have for a long time been a distinctive part of our course. I'm happy to acknowledge Robert French's pioneering work on online portfolios at Auburn as an inspiration.

Q. Do you have any advice for other PR educators who are considering starting a blog or getting involved in social media?
Blogs are good places for reflection and learning; they're also famously good for Google searches, so I'm surprised that there aren't more educators online. (In a more contentious mood, I've predicted that the process of online debate might even replace the more ponderous process of academic peer review. Though there's no evidence of this happening yet, we're certainly seeing blogs and online sources cited in 'serious' academic texts. I'm a huge fan of Wikipedia - though again I may be a solitary voice among my colleagues in this.)

The downsides are very apparent too. Blogging is an instant (though not disposable) medium. This poses pressures that many educators and academics are unprepared for. What if they can't keep up the momentum (my problem this year)? What if they live to regret their off-the-cuff remarks? But the flip side is how can we teach something we've no experience of?

The dangers for students and blogs are even more apparent. We've seen it with blogs and now with Facebook. There's a blurring of the boundary between public and private - but this makes it a fascinating time to be an educator, and it's what keeps me going.

Q. You also administer the PR Books wiki. Is that difficult? How is it going?
Similar story. I needed to do before I felt able to comment or to teach, so I started http://prbooks.pbwiki.com last summer. As a collaborative exercise (the USP of a wiki) it's a failure. But as an edited site it saves me time - so I aim to keep it going. Blogs emphasise the new and the up-to-date; I find the wiki a useful repository for static data that doesn't need to change quite so often.

Q. One of my favorite things about your blog is that you occasionally review books to save a little time for the rest of us. How do you decide which ones to review? What has the response been?
I'd started book reviewing on my old site and noted how, in an early example of the rise of social media, I was being quoted by some publishers (and how I was sent review copies by others).

Reading books is an essential part of this role, so I like to keep ahead of the field where possible. I also know that there are so many inquiring and intelligent people among the practitioner community who may not have my time or access to new books so I don't limit myself to academic texts. But my reviews are sporadic: it's entirely based on what's new and what interests me at the time.

It's now time I wrote something, and in keeping with my ethos, I've already stated that I'm working on a social media project aimed at introducing public relations to beginners. They're tomorrow's students and practitioners...

Labels: education, meet the teacher, public relations