Crowdsourcing my Social Media for PR Syllabus: Need your Input!

The end of the fall semester is right around the corner and that means it's time to start thinking about spring classes. When I started teaching my Social Media for PR class in Fall 07, the field was so new I had little to go on to help me put together a syllabus. In the end, I developed my syllabus by compiling a number of social media and PR topics I felt my students needed to know. I have been tweaking the class ever since -- adding topics, changing readings, experimenting with assignments, etc.

This semester, I'm ready for a major overhaul and I'm asking for your input! I'd love to create a state of the art Social Media for PR syllabus crowdsourced by experts in the field. And I'd love to hear from you! Actually, make that I need to hear from you!

What do you think PR majors should know about social media -- specifically:

• What topics should a Social Media for PR class cover?
• What readings are absolute musts?
• How can students demonstrate their mastery of course content? What should the student projects/assignments consist of?

I have started the brainstorming process in this wiki and I would like to invite anyone with an interest in social media and PR to contribute to it. The wiki is open to anyone (you will need to create a free Pb Wiki login if you don't already have one). Please feel free to suggest additional topics, projects, readings, etc. I've also posted my old syllabi on the wiki for reference purposes.

Can't wait to hear from you/see your suggestions!

You don't need to tweet to get value out of Twitter

Yes, you heard me right: You don't necessarily need to tweet in order to get value from Twitter! Let me explain why I say this. For the last few semesters I have been encouraging my PR students to get on Twitter. I've explained the necessity to be Twitter literate (twitterate?) and discussed examples of corporate, non-profit, and personal uses of Twitter. I've even thrown in a lecture on how to use Twitter as a job search and personal branding tool. The response though has been mixed. While some students get really excited, others react much less enthusiastically.

Let me make a confession here before moving on: I probably fell into that second category myself when I first learned about Twitter back in 2007. I saw its potential as a PR tool, but as an academic, I didn't see the need to tweet myself. I set up an account mainly because people were talking about it and I felt it was something I should discuss in my social media class. I basically registered my account so I could learn about Twitter.

So now you know - I never planned on tweeting myself! Having said that, I think I can understand my students' initial hesitation about joining the twitterverse. I've been there. So here's my advice for them (and anyone else sharing their feelings): Just set up an account, develop a network and listen in - no need to jump in with your own tweets right away! Staying away from tweeting for a while might even open your eyes to Twitter's potential as a powerful social search engine.

So how do you develop a good network?

1. Start by identifying a few people in your field whose work you admire. Then look them up to see if they tweet. You may use Twitter's built-in search engine to locate people on Twitter (click on the 'Find People' link on the top right hand side of the page), or you can check their blog or other social networking site to look for their Twitter handle.
2. Now you can piggy-back off their following/follower list! Go through both lists to see whether there are any people who share your interests or who tend to pass along valuable information. A quick look at their latest tweets usually is enough to make that call.
3. When someone in your network sends out an RT (retweet), look up the person who sent the original tweet. Again, check their latest tweets to see if you could benefit from the type of info they tweet.
4. Check out the #followfriday suggestions from the people in your network. Every Friday thousands of Twitter users all over the world participate in this event by suggesting people who are worth following.
5. You can also check Twitter for suggested users although those suggestions won't be tailored to your specific needs. Twitter uses the analogy of your local book store's staff picks to explain its suggested users list.
6. If you want to receive suggestions on who to follow based on your current network, give Mr. Tweet a try. Mr. Tweet looks through your relationships and tweets to identify the influencers and followers you should follow.
7. An even easier way to discover new and interesting Twitter users is to consult a Twitter list. Twitter is in the process of rolling out its own list feature to the public, so you may want to check your favorite tweeter's lists once the feature goes live for everyone.
8. In the meanwhile, check out the lists published on TweepML, another service that allows you "to manage and share groups of Twitter users." Use its "find a list" search tool to locate lists of Twitter users in your field (for instance, check out this list of educators on Twitter, or this list of PR pros).

If you implement all of the steps outlined above, you should end up with a pretty good-sized group of people to follow. Now all we need to do is a bit of network tweaking:

1. Start by filtering your incoming tweets. That's the only way to keep on top of Twitter when you are following a large group of people. Get a Twitter desktop client such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic and divide the people you follow into groups. For instance, I have a group for PR educators, one for PR professionals, another one for non-English tweets, etc. By organizing them into categories, the tweets will be neatly displayed in columns which will make it much easier to scan your tweets for relevant information.
2. "Test drive" your Twitter subscriptions for a month or two. Then re-evaluate. Are there accounts you are subscribing to that aren't providing much value to you? If so, hit the "unfollow" button! Think of your subscriptions as coming with a money back guarantee. If you don't like what you see, simply cancel at no cost to you.
3. Don't forget to repeat steps 1-8 every now and then to add new voices to your Twitterstream.

Do this for a while and I'll almost guarantee you'll see the value of Twitter and will want to get involved yourself. You'll learn so much from the people you follow and come across so much great information you'll want to reciprocate by sharing your insights.

How to optimize a news release (brief tutorial)

Now that you've learned how to write a traditional news release, it's time to discuss how to bring this old PR tool into the 21st century! After all, the media landscape has changed tremendously since Ivy Lee issued the first news release a little more than 100 years ago. It only makes sense that we adapt this old tool to today's media reality. And that reality is complex: publics don't just receive their news from traditional media outlets anylonger and they don't just passively consume news either. They receive news from their social networks and likewise share news with those networks. As a result, we need to change the way we think about news distribution. I have embedded the class notes on how to optimize a news release below. You won't see any of the animations since I had to convert the slides to a PDF file, but the content is essentially the same:

View more documents from Corinne Weisgerber.

List of sites mentioned in class:

• Twitter search
• Facebook Lexicon
• Google Insights
• Microsoft AdCenter Labs (Keyword Research)
• Muckrack (for examples of Twitter pitches)
• Twitter Pitch design example
  

New Assignment: Optimizing a News Release for Search Engines

I'm teaching our PR survey class this semester and instead of reusing the traditional news release assignment for the writing part of the course, I thought I'd try something a little different this year: I'm having students optimize their news release for search engines. Students will still write a traditional news release, but once that has been graded, they will then take their release, make the necessary corrections and optimize it. The assignment is described below. It's very much inspired by a position paper on search engine visibility published by Steve Rubel on behalf of Edelman. I'd love to hear from anyone who's done this in their class already - anything I'm missing?

The Assignment: Optimized News Release

As we have seen, news releases and the messages they contain increasingly end up on the Internet where they get indexed by search engines. Since these messages have become searchable, it is important to include words and phrases Internet users would use intuitively when searching for content related to that message. Having read Edelman’s position paper on the issue and having discussed search engine and message optimization in class, it is now your turn to take your SEU news release and optimize it. For this assignment, you will need to identify a set of keywords/keyword phrases for use in your optimized news release. Use free tools such as Wordtracker, Google Insights, Google Adwords, or Microsoft’s AdCenter Labs to do so. You may also want to check Twitter Search or Facebook Lexicon to get a sense for the natural words and phrases people use to talk about your type of topic.

1. Accurately reflect how people talk & search (natural language)
2. Face little competition from other keywords

Once you’ve decided on your keywords, strategically incorporate them into your news release (see the Edelman position paper for tips on how to do so).

Deliverables:

1. Your revised & optimized news release with the keywords highlighted in bold print
2. A short paper listing the keywords/keyword phrases you decided on and explaining why you chose them and how they fit the 2 keyword requirements outlined above. Include screenshots of the visuals generated by tools such as Google Insights to back up your argument.
3. A Twitter pitch for your news release of no more than 140 characters. Use a separate page for this pitch. Your pitch should incorporate at least one of your keywords. Since this is not an official SEU news release, do not send it out over Twitter. For tips on writing effective Twitter copy, check out this example.

Grading Criteria:

Your optimized news release will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

1. Quality of the writing (10 pts.)
2. Properly optimized
1. Keywords incorporated into headline (10 pts.)
2. Keywords incorporated into body (10 pts.)
3. Keywords bolded (only bolded words will be considered) (10 pts.)
3. Quality of the paper
1. Lists keywords (10 pts.)
2. Provides rationale for choice of keywords (10 pts.)
3. Explains how keywords fit reqs (natural language & competition) (10 pts.)
4. Provides screenshots to back up rationale (10 pts.)
4. Twitter pitch
1. Within the 140 character limit (10 pts.)
2. Incorporates keyword(s) (10 pts.)

Creating a social learning environment in the college classroom

It's back to school for us next week and to start off the semester, I'll be giving a presentation to our faculty on how to create a social learning environment in the college classroom. Since I can only cover so much in a 20-minute talk, I've decided to focus my presentation on a conceptual discussion of social learning and cover the how-to aspect in a series of tutorials on this blog.

The idea behind creating a social learning environment is to get students to engage the course material critically and to have them keep their eyes open for interesting material to share with their peers. By having to provide their own examples, students learn to reflect upon course concepts and simultaneously learn to evaluate their peers’ contributions. Such environments allow students to contribute course material and share relevant stories, articles, videos, and pictures in near real-time with both their classmates and instructor around the clock. Although this type of sharing of insights isn’t new, we now have technologies allowing us to do so much more efficiently. My presentation will discuss three technologies instructors can use to set up a social learning space for their classes: (a) Delicious Social Bookmarks, (B) Zoho Creator Databases, and (c) Blackboard Scholar. I have created a tutorial on how to set up each and have embedded them below.

The first tutorial covers setting up Delicious and pulling it into Blackboard through a simple Yahoo Pipe. I have students contribute at least one quality resource a week on a topic discussed in class that week. These contributions can take on the form of relevant news stories, articles, videos, podcasts, or slideshows. We occasionally review these bookmarks in class. During those reviews, students are expected to tell their classmates about the resource and why they think it serves as a good illustration of a particular course concept.

View more documents from Corinne Weisgerber.

The second tutorial is based on Mike Wesch's 94 articles activity and explains how to set up Zoho Creator databases and how to connect them to Blackboard.

View more documents from Corinne Weisgerber.

The last tutorial is a brief introduction to Blackboard Scholar, a social bookmarking service offered through Blackboard.

View more documents from Corinne Weisgerber.

Favorite slideshows from my social media class

Over the course of the past few semesters I have made some of the slideshows I use in class publicly available on Slideshare. I also shared most of them on this blog. Since I periodically get requests for particular ones, I've decided to make the most popular ones available in one post here:

Blogging 101:

View more documents from Corinne Weisgerber.

Twitter for PR:

View more presentations from Corinne Weisgerber.

Using Twitter to Connect with Audiences:

View more documents from Corinne Weisgerber.

Twitter & Social Media for Crisis Communication:

View more documents from Corinne Weisgerber.

Monitoring Conversations Online:

View more documents from Corinne Weisgerber.

Social search in academic research

If there's one thing that hasn't ceased to amaze me since I started blogging, tweeting, bookmarking and aggregating it's this thing I've come to refer to as social media serendipity. It can happen any time, anywhere. Sometimes it strikes as I am preparing classes, other times it happens as I am working on research. I may be working on a class on pitching stories when a new blog post just pops up in my feed reader with a relevant, up-to-the-minute case study to include in my class. Other times it is a Twitter or Del.icio.us user I follow who will share the perfect example. The reason I call it serendipity is because I didn't ask for it. The information just has a way of finding me. It's as if there were hundreds of research assistants out there scanning the web and bringing the information back to me just when I need it. I honestly can't remember the last time I spent hours online searching the net for that perfect example to illustrate course material.

Yesterday as I was working on research I had another one of these serendipitous moments (which I will describe in a second) and it got me thinking. There's been a lot of talk lately about social search and the future of search and it just dawned on me that this thing I had affectionately called social media serendipity really just is the result of a passive social search. I call it passive because in the cases described here, I didn't actively seek out any information from my social networks. I simply received pertinent information from my networks without actually asking for it. Nevertheless I do think it qualifies as search since I am constantly scanning those networks for relevant information through the various feeds I am subscribing to. I've always viewed social search exclusively as an active process (such as outsourcing your questions to your Twitter followers), but I think that definition may need to be broadened to include serendipitous, passive social searches such as the following:

• A few months ago, one of the people I follow on Twitter shared an interesting article with his followers. Since the article seemed relevant to research I am working on, I bookmarked it and set it aside to read at a later point (an example of a passive social search through Twitter)
• As I read it last week, I annotated it with additional research questions. I noted that it would be nice to know how many of the videos uploaded to YouTube each month actually reached more than 1,000 or 10,000 views.
• The next day, one of the Del.icio.us users I follow bookmarked an article in Slate Magazine that answered that exact question (another example of a passive social search, this time through social bookmarks)
• Yesterday after I had finished writing up the section of my paper that deals with these stats, I checked my feed reader only to find that I had a new item in the folder labeled research. The new item wasn't relevant to the research I had worked on that day, but the one above it, which I had marked as "keep new" was (I do that when a feed sounds interesting but I don't have the time to review it). This is how I stumbled upon a paper from HP's Social Computing lab on the success dynamics of 10 million YouTube videos - a perfect fit for my research and another example of a passive social search.

So there you have it - three examples of passive social searches that greatly helped me complete a book chapter I was working on. Obviously the quality of those searches will depend on the quality of your network and there is a definite danger of casting that network too narrowly as an article in the journal Science suggested this week. But that's something to explore in another blog post.

Update 7/27: A day after I published this post, ReadWriteWeb wrote a post using the active versus passive social search framework I outlined here. I'm not sure I completely agree with their search discovery continuum though - I think "friends & following" is just as important at the passive discovery side of the continuum, especially since our passive discoveries are filtered by our decisions on who to follow and friend.