so this is mass communication?

The first-ever live stream of a presentation at UGA Connect WORKED. Well, sort of.

I was thrilled that Karen Russell allowed me to take a chance & live stream my presentation on relationship and ethics at Connect. From my perspective, the presentation was just like any other one that I ever done … the only change was that I clicked a button before hand to start the stream then ignored the laptop the rest of the presentation.

It was my intention to record the presentation so I could also post that … but, it being my first ever live-stream on demand, I failed to remember to hit record the broadcast. Sigh.

On my end, the chat didn’t work. That probably would have confused me anyway. I hear there was a lot of talk about me being sponsored by Herbal Essence (perhaps because my hairs were so loud & proud?) & requests for me to put my new puppy on the live stream. Sorry guys, no sponsor & Ali is across the street napping right now. She can’t be bothered. Apparently there was also some discussion of my mixing the phrase “big honkin’” with quantitative statistics.

I understand that Auburn’s Robert French also put the live stream up on PR Open Mic, which makes me happier than you can ever imagine. This is what social media is all about. Sharing information, experiences & get togethers. I love it.

I’m told there were more than 10 remote viewers across the nation - mostly practitioners, viewing remotely. It doesn’t get any better than that.

I hope more people try to experiment with live streaming conferences …. just remember to hit the record button!

Note: Image from Kevin Dugan (@prblog) of his desktop while watching my live stream.

During my presentation at the UGA Connect conference in Athens, I plan to present a pilot test experiment I did looking at the impact of ethics on relationship. I plan to mention following:

• Tom Kelleher & Barbara Miller’s seminal paper on blogs as relationship tools
• Sweetser & Emily Metzgar blog experiment on the role of relationship during a crisis (pdf)
• BMW Rampenfest campaign explained
• BMW Rampenfest campaign coverage on CNN
• BMW YouTube videos (trailer, part 1, 2, 3, fake filmmaker’s channel)
• Word of Mouth Marketing Association ethics

If you are able to tune in, please join the live video stream & chat around (give or take) 11:15 a.m. EST Saturday, Sept. 20.

Earlier this summer I talked about how much I was looking forward to (seemingly-now annual) UGA Connect. Well guess what - it’s here!

This weekend (started earlier this afternoon, already) is Connect. The conference focuses on the use of social media in public relations & brings together academics, practitioners & students. But mostly practitioners.

You can follow the conference a number of ways … blog, twitter, twemes, flickr, you know the list.

I talked Karen Russell, my colleague & conference organizer, into letting me try something new this year too. I’m going to live stream my presentation on relationships. I will turn the stream on at when I go up (after Kami Huyse), probably around at 11:15 a.m. EST Saturday, Sept. 20.

Check us out, and, well - CONNECT!

Keeping with my online political public relations program of research, this study (with my amazing colleague Dr. Ruthann Weaver Lariscy at UGA) looked at a social media tool new to the 2006 midterm elections.

Kaye D. Sweetser & Ruthann Weaver Lariscy. (2008). Candidates Make Good Friends: An Analysis of Candidates’ Uses of Facebook. International Journal of Strategic Communication, 2, 175-198.

Through content analysis of Facebook wall comments in U.S. House and Senate races during the 2006 midterm election, this study describes young potential voters’ comments (quantity, valence, etc.) through the lens of the dialogic communication theory of public relations. Findings indicate that individuals who wrote on candidate walls perceive themselves on friendly terms with the candidates, overwhelmingly write messages that are shallow and supportive, and are positive in tone. Candidates rarely, if ever, respond to these messages; although the mere use of Facebook is a dialogic feature, researchers conclude campaigns are not using it for two-way symmetrical relationship building.

We have more work coming out from the huge multi-cell survey on the professional application of blogs in the journalism & PR fields. This study, just published in JMCQ, looks at the issue of credibility that professional journalists and public relations practitioners put on blogs, and relates it to use.

Kaye D. Sweetser, Lance V. Porter, Deborah Soun Chung, & Eunseong Kim (2008). Credibility and the use of blogs among professionals in the communication industry. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 85(1), 169-185.

This study examines use, credibility, and impact on the communication industry of blogs as seen by professional journalists and public relations practitioners. Informed by the uses and gratifications perspective and using an online survey, the study used factor analysis to reveal simplistic blog use categorizations as being either interactive or noninteractive. Results also indicate that those who are labeled “high users” in both factors assign more credibility to the medium. Differences between journalism and public relations professionals were examined.

Other studies from this line of research include:

• Uses and Perceptions of Blogs: A Report on Professional Journalists and Journalism Educators
• Blog power: Examining the effects of practitioner blog use on power in public relations

I was very pleased to present a paper, “On the Ballot & in the Loop: The Dialogic Capacity of Candidate Blogs in the 2008 Election,” on behalf of my team of co-authors at AEJMC last week in Chicago. The paper stemmed from a project in my undergraduate public relations research course at UGA.

In this paper, we compared 80 different blogs from gubernatorial, house, senate & presidential candidate blogs during the primary leading up to this November’s election. This paper focused on the female candidates and their use of blogs.

Thanks to Grady doctoral student Kristin English, we have video!

One of the first steps in a PR program’s entry in the world of social media is often monitoring. I found this to be true in much of my research, & well it just makes sense.

So we set up Google alerts, use blog search engines & keep a watchful eye on TweetScan.

Prof. Robert French from Auburn shared an invite with me so I could check out a new service called StartPR. The online service boasts the ability to easily compile all these searches into a single place to streamline social media monitoring. You guessed it - it’s a clip service for the social Web.

I tried it out using a few terms that were niche enough that wouldn’t provide an overload, but big enough to return some hits.

I was very impressed with:

• ease of setting up the search terms
• quickness of returning items
• ability to mark items as read or keep them as unread
• visual display of items — layout, easy to see the date an item was posted & blog source, listing of the search engine through which it was found
• ability to add others in your office to the account so you can all see what is happening (big picture & response)
• ability to assign others particular items for action (tasking)
• place to paste in comments internally (called “notes”)
• built-in response management program to track whether you/your PR folks replied/commented on the post

That last item is really the coolest part — but heck, you might already have a bigger internal system integrated with other media efforts set up for that.

What I didn’t like:

• most of the returns were items that had been caught via Google alerts
• heavy reliance on Google as a source (only other source in my searches was Technorati)
• had to scroll really far down (using Firefox on a Mac) when in the notes section & didn’t immediately see all the options
• ignored non-text social media: nothing from YouTube, Flickr, audio or video etc returned
• ignored social networks: nothing from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc returned

Areas for improvement (i.e., my “wouldn’t it be cool if” list):

• include number of comments (live feed) made on each item returned
• ability to sort items by date, blog, number of comments, those you’ve replied to, etc
• more personalized fields/options in the “notes” area
• integration of metrics (other than frequency of post per day report) into the system
• expand service to cover non-text multimedia (video, audio, images)

All in all, it looks like a neat little tool … but I wouldn’t pay for it (since good old fashion alerts & searches can get you the same information + more) unless they up’ed the ante to add more sophisticated monitoring features.

Note: I was given a free trial of this service from a friend. It was my idea to write the review (no one asked me to). Finally, I have 5 invites available for a free trial of this site up for grabs if you are interested. First come, first served & be sure to give me your e-mail address.

When social media first started out, it was like the clouds parted & little digital angels started singing for me. I saw all the possibilities of reaching mass amounts of people in a much more personal way. I thought we could push the boundaries of para-social relations with celebrities really becoming our friends & companies having real voices. 

No doubt about it, I bought it.

Everything.

But I’m starting to feel like this viral world where everyone is sharing YouTube videos right & left or making cute little games where you turn yourself into an elf & sing songs has become polluted. 

We need a vaccine to protect us from viral marketing.

It’s mutated. 

And I think it’s going to get a whole lot of people sick on this whole social media craze all the kids are talking about. 

What do I mean?

To put it in one word: ethics. 

Oh! Try this one: responsibility. 

Not buzz enough for you? Okay: transparency. 

More companies are engaging in much more questionable social media campaigns then ever before. Like the big Target Rounders scandal my former student Rosie Siman broke last year and this ‘BMW launch across the Atlantic‘ mock-u-mentary. 

Indeed, it is the latter that got me all spun up this time. This video on CNN brings to light many issues which, quite frankly, damage the credibility of social media:

• Decreasing our ability to be media literate
• Creating an extensive ‘Blair Witch’-like backstory 
• Fake Facebook pages & accepting friends (who may not realize you’re fake in the first place)
• Creating a 30-minute long fake documentary
• Waiting for several weeks (after millions of views) to reveal you’re behind the project

At the Edelman Digital Bootcamp, I presented a number of social media assignments and teaching tools that I have worked into my traditional PR classes. This assignment is one of those assignments.

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Wikis are Web sites where users can all collaborate on a document. Some wikis are password protected and some are public (like the wiki of all wiks: Wikipedia). Google has similar technology in their Google Doc and a more power place, in Google Groups, where users can also upload files & thread discussion reactions to pages (which are, essentially, wikis).

While most talk in the PR practice about wikis deals with an organization’s Wikipedia entry and the ethics of editing Wikipedia, there is a great internal use for wikis and similar technology like Google Doc/Groups. Collaboration! Think of how frustrating it is to be working on a document (press release, research paper, etc.) only to find that someone else on your team already updated it and you are now working off an older version? Wiki and the Google equivalent (a Google Doc that can be shared among users or made public) is a great solution!

In the classroom, encourage students who are working in teams with one another to write their papers using wikis or make a Google Group. My students use Google Groups (they are the ones who told me about it in the first place) and said that it was one of the best things they could do to not only keep track of all the documents associated with the project in one place, but all work together on the final writing of the project without making time-costing mistakes of double-editing.

For your own research, consider making different Google Groups or wikis for the various team research projects you work on. I am working with colleagues from New York, to Tennessee to Hawaii and I use either a wiki or Google Group with all and it has really streamlined collaborative research writing.

At the Edelman Digital Bootcamp, I presented a number of social media assignments and teaching tools that I have worked into my traditional PR classes. This teaching tool is one.

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Social bookmark sites, like del.icio.us, allow users to post their Web site “bookmarks” online (so you can access from any computer, anywhere) and with others. When you bookmark a site that others have bookmarked, it will show you not only how many others but who. Why is this so interesting? Well, if you bookmark something that I bookmark then chances are we are interested in the same things … so you may find some really interesting Web sites over on my del.icio.us page and vice versa.

Social bookmarking can be used in the industry as a way to distribute daily clips to management. Additionally, you can check social bookmark sites to see how many people might have bookmarked a recent news article, press release or white paper.

In the classroom, social bookmarking can become a repository of extra online resources for your students. For examples, see my pages for my Public Relations Research Method (ADPR3510) course: http://del.icio.us/kaye.sweetser/adpr3510

Tips

• For each bookmark you add, you will want to create a “tag” for it. Think of these tags like keywords; they are just general organizational items. Each bookmark can get several tags. I often use content labels (like SPSS or IRB for my research class) as well as the class name (ADPR3510) when I bookmark something for a class.
• Post the del.icio.us URL for your class on the syllabus
• Tell the class to subscribe to your class del.icio.us RSS
• When you see that others have bookmarked the same thing you have, click on that link then start exploring their del.icio.us links to see you have other interests in common (this is how I found a lot of really great online tutorials for my classes)
• To create a “class del.icio.us page,” simply give all items you want your class to see a common tag (e.g., ADPR3510) then type in the URL to see just that tag on your del.icio.us account (http://del.icio.us/username/classtag can become http://del.icio.us/kaye.sweetser/adpr3510)
• Subscribe to others’ del.icio.us RSS feeds as a way to keep up with your own interests, in PR practice and education I suggest:
  • http://del.icio.us/kamichat
  • http://del.icio.us/cbasturea
  • http://del.icio.us/Tiffany_Derville
  • http://del.icio.us/kellimatthews
  • http://del.icio.us/KarenRussell
  • http://del.icio.us/kaye.sweetser
  • http://del.icio.us/geoffliving