PR Studies

The rise of fun-raising

Good causes have always sought awareness, and always need funds.

Volunteers have always been willing to help them in this.

In essence, there's nothing new in the emergence of what I'm calling fun-raising, but several factors have come together to empower the JustGiving generation.

• The rise of 'voluntourism': the win-win of a wortwhile activity being linked to raising funds for a good cause. This appeals to activity-minded young people, and shatters the stereotype of the elderly volunteer
• The emergence of online donation as an easier and more transparent system than the old paper forms and the need to ask for pledges and then to go back for the money
• The growth of gift-aid, giving a tax-back boost to our giving

Of course, there are problems with this popularity.

• There's a beauty contest amongst charities and not all good causes are equally popular or photogenic
• There's the risk of donor fatigue since so many are now requesting our support
• There's a danger of risky endurance activities being pursued because of rising expectations of a worthwhile, newsworthy activity

As individuals, we need to work out our own response to these requests. (Mine is to allocate a monthly budget of £50 in anticipation of just such requests.)

As beggars and students-with-clipboards will know, it's hard to get money out of strangers. Charities have realised that it's more effective to devolve fundraising to volunteers who tap into their own networks. As we know from PR, relationships work. May the fun continue.

How I read blogs

I know. There's already something quaint about the word, and 'weblogs' looks archaic now.

Besides, it's hard to define something that runs from Twitter updates (microblogs) via Tumbr and WordPress to fully-fledged content management systems. How can you compare a student's blog with the Huffington Post (sold for $315m)?

So how do I read frequently-updated webpages created by PR students and practitioners? Here are some personal tips:

• First of all, I have to know you're out there. If you want to encourage people to your blog, put the link on your Twitter profile page and comment on other people's blogs (this will embed a hyperlink back to your site). Start networking and start sharing.
• On your blog or website, make sure you've updated your About entry. It's the first thing I look at when checking out new blogs, and it should be the first thing you fix.
• I often read blog entries in Google Reader and only click through if I want to comment or check another page. So, for me, blog design is less important than blog content.
• I might look at how many comments you receive, but it's not a show stopper. Seth Godin's impressive, but he gets no comments at all (he doesn't allow them).
• How often do you post? There's no simple answer, but less frequently than monthly and your blog looks untended. You need to cut the grass regularly in the summer.
• Here's my hierarchy. First, I need to find you; then I'll subscribe to your blog; finally, if I want to recommend you I may add you to my 'blogroll'. Gain attention, merit interest, earn trust.

A week in the life

Increasingly it seems that education never sleeps. Particularly if there's an educational aspect to one's presence on social media.

I'm not complaining: it's a privilege to teach and I'm fortunate to be busy. Here are some things I'm looking forward to over the next seven days:

• Teaching on a CIPR Diploma course in Bulgaria (Saturday and Sunday)
• Teaching public relations to second year business, marketing and journalism students (Monday)
• Moderating a batch of Diploma scripts and some MA PR Writing assignments (Tuesday)
• Starting delivery of a new, experimental Public Relations and New Media module (Wednesday)
• Giving positive feedback to returning CIPR Diploma students and first year PR students (Thursday)
• Planning a paper for the International History of Public Relations conference
• Discussing a proposed chapter for a textbook
• Designing new social media modules for a revamped Sport Marketing course
• Giving feedback to dissertation students
• Hunting out more stories for our subject group blog
• Attending the CIPR networking event on Thursday
• Editing new stories for Behind the Spin
• Keeping up with RSS, Twitter, blogs, news, email and books (last, not least)

We all fall short of our highest expectations, and I'm sure I'll slip up and forget some things I should be doing, but I like to keep my eye on the goal. If I can put it in one word, I aim to be encouraging.

Blogging: a surprising survival

Blogging is old. Student essays that claim it as new based on a quotation from a book published five years ago make me smile.

After the peak of expectation in 2003-2005 came the trough of disillusion as first Facebook and then Twitter became the place for short status updates and community conversations.

Yet blogging survived, and in some areas is even seeing a revival.

Here are five reasons for blogging's surprising survival:

1. Humans have an innate desire to connect and communicate. Blogging is essentially personal publishing, and many will continue to seize the opportunity for creative self-expression. Is there anyone in the world more compellingly readable than Penelope Trunk?
2. Twitter's strength as a 'push' channel helps drive traffic to sites like blogs with regularly updated content ('hub and spoke' strategy).
3. Blogging is evolving from personal to professional publishing. Newspapers and magazines are increasingly based on blogging software, a glimpse of the future.
4. WordPress is one of open source software's greatest hits.
5. Newer services like Posterous and Tumblr are making blogging much more agile.

And here are five reasons why I still advocate blogs in education:

1. Open source learning is a powerful concept. Students who connect beyond the classroom are the most employable. 1b: Reaching out to graduates and potential students is good PR for courses and universities. 1c: Some blogs have the potential to become as valuable as academic journals (PR Conversations is an admirable collaborative experiment).
2. It's a level playing field, and not even limited to current students to participate. (Take a look at this aspiring PR student.) Nor do teachers necessarily have an advantage over their students. Here's one I'm incapable of developing or improving.
3. There's a place for class blogs and for assessed blogs, but I still favour non-compulsory blogs as a truer and more enduring reflection of a student's interests and personality.
4. Is there a better way to learn about SEO than to start a blog, get discovered, and learn what makes people visit?
5. Just because something's unfashionable doesn't make it bad. (Confession: as a student, I was an extra in a film called Chariots of Fire set in the 1920s. The costume team did not even need me to change clothes to look the part.)

Here are five things new (student) bloggers should do:

1. Link to people you know (start with fellow student bloggers). This helps them to get discovered, and adds value to your blog.
2. Comment on blogs you read. The author is sure to follow the link back to your blog and so discover you.
3. Think carefully about the statement you will be making with your blog. Jazz Chappell is ee cummings-like in her conscious use of lower case. Rob Clarke is abrasive: he won't make friends with everyone, but he'll get noticed.
4. Everyone can start a blog. There's no credit in this. The trick is to find your niche and enjoy what you're doing, like Sabrina Johnson.
5. Tell others you're blogging (I welcome alerts on Twitter).

An hour of tweeting dangerously

It all started with an innocent discussion on Twitter. Should we encourage students to tweet in lectures?

It resulted in this blog post and the follow-up comments.

There was only one way to find out: to experiment.

But how many would be in the lecture? How many would be registered on Twitter? How many would be holding a suitable device and willing to participate?

Surprise #1. The majority of first year students (based on this small and random sample) were already on Twitter and about half were prepared to give it a go.

I sprung surprise #2 on them. There were already a few people 'watching'.

We involved another through an @mention during the lecture.

Surprise #3 is no surprise at all. Employers - and consultancies in particular - are keen to work with digitally savvy students and graduates. I was able to announce a very appealing music industry internship with Rising Digital in the lecture. 

So what are the lessons?

• Anything live is better than over-prepared, pre-recorded or the linearity of PowerPoint. My mistakes were visible for all to see, and we had fun
• Clay Shirky's 'publish then filter' was clearly a memorable concept, mentioned in several tweets
• We learnt about the use of hashtags to filter conversations
• Students enjoyed the shift in the balance of power: I spoke, but they chose what to say about it
• We should trust students more (the default setting is to ban mobiles in class)
• No one in that room will forget that Twitter is a public channel and that people are watching

 

Searching for the meaning of PR

The most popular search term for those arriving at this blog has been, for some time, a variant on 'the meaning of PR'.

This always makes me smile. Google may be the wonder of the age (Bing's good too) - but why put so much trust in a search engine? Are people typing in 'the meaning of life' and expecting the answer to their problems?

More prosaically, I imagine a student somewhere faced with a deadline for an essay or a presentation, making a desperate bid for enlightenment. Well, you've come to the wrong place.

But in a spirit of sharing, here are some thoughts on 'the meaning of PR'.

First, this is linguistically specific. In France, the same search would focus on 'RP' (which in the UK some take to mean 'received pronounciation').

Then there are cultural and political contexts. PR, in the UK, is more widely understood as 'proportional representation' (a fair voting system) than 'public relations'. In the US, PR is often used to refer to Puerto Rico.

But let's focus on public relations. What does it mean? You can answer this in several ways: by looking at definitions of PR, by asking questions about PR practice and the role of PR in organisations.

There are numerous definitions of PR (there's no monopoly here), and new ones emerge all the time. Here's a recent one from admired academics Coombs and Holladay from PR: Strategy and Application published this year:

Public relations is the management of mutually influential relationships within a web of constitutuency relationships.

Relations, relationships, relationships. Get the message? The next way to understand the meaning of PR is to consider the paradigm (or world view) proposed in the major definitions. This one is clearly proposing public relations as relationship management.

Other well-known paradigms of PR include symmetry/excellence (Grunig et al); reputation management (see the CIPR definition and works by Fombrun and van Riel). Less well-known paradigms include PR as community building (Kruckeberg and Stark). That's before we start on the critics of PR who view it as spin and propaganda.

Then there are practitioner perspectives. What name is given to the public relations function? It could be corporate communication(s), marketing communications, public affairs, corporate affairs as well as public relations. So there are definitional issues from a practice perspective, too.

What value do practitioners add to organisations? This is a big question, addressed here in this post about the Stockholm Accords.

There are many ways to answer a question about the meaning of PR.

The Halloween theory of social media

Boo! Not very scary, but perhaps a bit attention-grabbing.

Here's my Halloween theory developed from observation of various classes and courses over the last few years.

Young people aren't very supersticious - typically being action-orientated rather than reflective - and so they often need scaring.

There's a big, bad world out there (really?) and you need to consider the boundary between public and private (why?). In short, we have to remind them to 'think before jumping in.'

With mid career practitioners (and older), the constraints and criticisms are already apparent.

They have a hundred reasons ready why not to do something - and will sometimes miss the one compelling reason to take action. They don't need scaring, they need encouraging.

Social media may be scary - but so's life. The really scary thing is letting it slip by. Sure there are risks in taking action. But there are also risks in inaction.

Photo: by euart on Flickr (Creative Commons)

New year, new projects

I love this time of year; the optimism is infectious.

Though the mood will be different as we approach the darkest days of winter, it's always a good idea to capture the early year enthusiasm.

So here are three projects I'm involved in that welcome student input (NB only one is open to all).

Behind the Spin

Our PR student magazine is over two years old, and well established. But there's so much more we could do: all we need is time and ideas. I welcome contributors (ideally in response to our forward features listed on the About page) but also welcome those who'd like to contribute regularly by becoming a part of the editorial team. Tell me how you'd like to be involved - or tell me what we should be writing about.

PR@Leedsmet: 20 Years On

We're marking a 20th anniversary of public relations education in Leeds this autumn with a souvenir site profiling graduates and lecturers from the course. I need help reaching out to graduates and writing up profiles for the site. NB: this opportunity is only open to current Leeds Met PR or journalism students and will run to the end of November.

Euprera 2011

Next year's Euprera academic conference is in Leeds, and I'm hoping to work with some postgraduate students to develop content, connections and community around this forthcoming conference. This activity will continue until September 2011. NB: this opportunity is only open to current Leeds Met PR or marketing students.

My social media guidelines

I'm not too fond of rules, so here are the guidelines that help me navigate my favourite social networks (with particular reference to contact with students):

• Facebook. It's great for entertainment and for friendships, but it's not my first choice network for business or education. I'll accept friends requests from students and others I know, but never ask students to 'friend' me for fear or blurring the boundaries between work and play.
• Twitter. Unlike with Facebook, the default setting is public. My public role is as the editor of a PR magazine (@behindthespin), and I'll follow people of interest in this sphere, and follow you back if you're a PR student, practitioner or academic. I do occasionally unfollow people, usually when the noise gets too loud. Like most on Twitter, I'm still surprisingly pleased by @ mentions, so this is a good way to gain my attention when time is short.
• LinkedIn. I follow people I know - and will write recommendations if I know you well enough and have something positive to say. I also join groups and display my blog posts and tweets on my LinkedIn profile - but I don't go looking for activity on this network and very rarely request connections.
• Blogs. I do still have a blogroll and sporadically try to maintain it, though I will probably note your blog posts through RSS or a link on Twitter rather than by old-fashioned surfing. My list of PR student blogs needs some tending as so many start and give up, and the better ones soon graduate and belong on another list. Please alert me to your PR blog and I'll subscribe first before adding you to my blogroll later at my discretion. My blog is personal and uncommercial and I won't respond to requests for reciprocal links or sponsorship deals.
• Behind the Spin: I'm pleased when people offer to write for the magazine, but it's best to check the About page for our forward features rather than ask me to spell it out in an email. I also value original content (please don't publish an article on your blog and then submit it to me as an afterthought). I welcome press releases (I enjoyed writing that) - and will sometimes use them on the news page.
• PROpenMic. I like this specialist network and will try to comment on student blog posts I find interesting. I will accept friend requests out of courtesy, though I've never found out what friendship implies or bestows on this Ning network.

Notes from a short speech

[Here are my notes and links for a short welcome talk to first year PR students]

Congratulations etc.

This is a great time to be studying public relations.

1. Private sector recession followed by public sector cuts
2. Good time to be at university before fees rise and/or places contract
3. You'll be studying a young and fast-developing area (trade publication PR week has just celebrated its 25th anniversary)

Public relations is now a high profile business (in the last century, it was invisible alongside journalism and advertising, say). But is this high profile necessarily a good thing?

Back to reality... There are opportunities out there for those who can study, work hard, gain experience and keep on learning. 

Look how Leeds Met PR graduate Graeme Anthony is trying to find an opening in London. He's using his skills and creativity to do some personal public relations. 

And three Leeds Met PR gradutes from 2007 have just been shortlisted for Outstanding Young Communicator Awards in the CIPR PRide awards: Katherine Shenton (photo) in the North East; Amy Bullard and Lorna Gott in East Anglia.