The purpose of the videos is to help students sort through the mounds of data that they can collect. I want to help them determine what meaningful and actionable metrics they can track. Measurement, especially in an ever-changing environment, can be a little intimidating. I am hopeful these little tips help my students focus their attention on measuring things concepts that really get at understanding engagement – not just numbers for the sake of numbers.

I decided to do videos rather than cover tips daily in class to not only save time in class, but give students a chance to review the tips as they desire.

The videos are basic (this is an intro research methods class, after all), but if you are interested you can follow along at 1 metric, 1 minute playlist.

And so this semester I have my students monitoring real clients and producing 3 social media monitoring reports on the client throughout the semester. The purpose is not only to show them how to measure social media, but to allow them to do it over time for tracking purposes and come to a deeper understanding of what metrics really matter.

Each student will follow an assigned client all semester. The student will create a monthly report, determining the baseline in the first report then trending data for the 2nd and 3rd reports.

Here is the information I gave to my students in the handout, and the video (.mov) I made to explain the basic assignment.

*******

This on-going assignment will have you tracking your client throughout the semester and creating a total of three reports detailing trends in online conversation.

Resources
The following social media monitoring resources may help identify conversations about your client.

• Search all social media: Addcitomatic, IceRocket, Yahoo! Pipes, Samepoint, Social Mention
• Twitter searches and metric tools: tweetgrid, Twazzup, trendistic, twitalyzer, tweeteffect, tweetstats, twitturly, tweetvolume, trendpedia
• Blogs: blogsearch.google.com, postrank
• SEO: google.com/insights/search
• Facebook: facebook.com/lexicon/

Be sure to also consider searching Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler and any other social site you can find!

Tips

• Make the layout of the report consistent from month-to-month
• Use graphics and minimize text
• Specify what you think the goal for the client should, include target audience: focus data around that
• Avoid heavy text that will be complex to process
• Track: topics, tone, message salience, word-of-mouth, engagement, etc.
• Set up system to collect data throughout month & code as you go (content analysis)

Read blog posts seek out current resources on best practices for metrics and monitoring.

• Social networks: http://www.kayesweetser.com/archives/206
• Twitter: http://www.kayesweetser.com/archives/214
• Viral video: http://www.kayesweetser.com/archives/221
• Photosharing: http://www.kayesweetser.com/archives/223
• Todd Defren’s blog: http://www.pr-squared.com/
• KD Paine’s blog on measurement: http://kdpaine.blogs.com/

Requirements

• Each report is only limited to one page (and no, not 2-sided), margins unimportant
• Provide basic information on how each metric was measured (parameters, search terms, method, etc.)
• If reporting a statistic garnered from an online tool, cite the tool as the source
• If publishing a graphic created by an online tool, cite the tool as the source

Turning it in

• Print a copy (in color if desired), place the print out on the table at front of class
• E-mail a PDF of what you turned in to professor no later than 11:59 p.m. on the day the report was due, subject line will be client / report # (example: @NavyNews / report 1)
• Late work never accepted and the assignment is not fully turned in until professor has both the print out and the PDF

Whooo! I got tenure!

Tenure, for young academics, is that magic word that represents all we work for our first 7 or so years after earning the doctorate. At a point when our academic unit feels is right (around the 5-6 year mark), a tenure dossier is made and includes one’s CV listing research, teaching and service duties (due April 2009 for me). During the summer before the package is voted on (summer 2009 for me), the package is sent to at least 3 reviewers at peer institutions who are experts in that scholar’s field. The outside reviewers look at the young scholar and essentially summarize his or her work then answer the all-important-question of whether he or she would get tenure at that outside reviewer’s institution. The reviews come back (Aug. 2009 for me), the department votes (Aug. 2009 for me), the college votes (Sept. 2009 for me), then off it goes to the university for consideration (Sept. – Dec. 2009 for me).

The purpose of tenure, though perhaps archaic in the modern world, was to allow scholars the freedoms to pursue knowledge regardless of who it may offend. If your research is controversial to the church or state, theoretically those with tenure can’t lose their jobs for pursuing such academic interests. One could argue this is how we know the world isn’t flat and a slews of other facts we now take for granted.

These days tenure is more of a simple milestone. Some institutions don’t even offer it anymore.

Even so, it creates much stress for young faculty members.

How many publications do I need before I go up for tenure? (I’d been told 2 per year, so about 12 would be minimal.) How will I know if I’m doing well? (Annual reviews and a good 3rd year review should provide feedback.) Can I go up for tenure early? (Not at UGA.) What if one of my outside reviewers is someone who hates me? (I was able to provide a very short “black list” of potential outside reviewers I *didn’t* want to review my dossier.) Will I be fired if I don’t make tenure? (Essentially, yes.) I previously worked at another institution before coming here, will those years count or do I have to start the tenure clock all over again? (I was given the option to either carry over my LSU years or start over, whatever worked best for me.)

In the end, my dossier (pdf) turned out to be good enough, warts and all. In the dossier, I had 26 peer-reviewed journal publications, a few teaching awards and served on the right mix of committees. Enough people in the field were citing my work in a diverse set of journals. I made the cut.

The path to tenure for me was very focused, but not stressful. I was always mindful and working toward it but never stressed about it. I just wanted it done with.

My research stream definitely changed as a result of my pursuit. I had been given very specific paths that I should pursue in order to get tenure, paths that I never would have naturally taken on my own. At first packaging my research that way felt forced, but in the end I really think that I as a scholar grew from it, it connected me more to my teaching and the changes in my research program are ones I believe I will keep now, post-tenure.

I don’t feel as if getting tenure were hard. I was certainly focused, but that is just my personality.

I’ll leave young scholars with a few take-aways from my own tenure journey looking back. This list got so long, I ended up breaking it up into sections.

RESEARCH

• set annual goals for yourself in regard to publication, make sure they exceed what your department tells you (if your department tells you 2 per year, shoot for 3-4)
• use your CV as a living document to keep track of the projects you are working on, where things were submitted, MS numbers for items under review, future works, etc. When you send your CV out or post it online though make sure to remove the works under review & work in progress to protect blind review (huge pet peeve of mine)
• keep a tenure tally comparing yourself to other tenured professors in your department to help give you a quick look as to whether you are on track
• if a senior colleague suggests a different packaging of your research, give it a try because it may actually be a good suggestion (& help you place your work more)
• get out of your hall/college — meet other people around campus. It will open you up to other theories, approaches & even if you’re just getting out  socially it can still help give you a more multidisciplinary frame of mind that will improve your scholarship
• don’t sit in your office all day long, go out & talk to colleagues. When I was a grad student I heard a stat (not sure how true it is) that there was a correlation between how prolific a scholar was and how often he or she would just chit chat with colleagues. The idea is that you will get inspiration, help & maybe collaboration from your colleagues if you’re talking to them
• use breaks (winter, summer, holiday) for focused work on projects. I would go into every break with a set of goals for each of my manuscripts in progress — sometimes I’d get it all done and sometimes I was too ambitious, but the time away from campus was a great opportunity to focus
• collaborate with colleagues — you do more work quicker and can then handle several different papers at once
• keep authorship in mind – try to be first author and solo-author as much as possible
• don’t waste your time with non-tenure seeking activities, for me this meant don’t consult. There was money to be made but in the end it took way too much time away from what my focus should have been so I stopped doing it.
• revise & resubmits take priority. Once you have one, you’re one step closer to publication so don’t let that slip away. Make the changes the reviewers want (most often it will make the piece better despite your grumblings) & push aside other projects in order to get these done in a timely manner. There are actually 2 r&r that I let slip away during my own tenure journey & that is an unfortunate waste.
• your 1st year is the most important – make a solid attempt to get at least 3 things under review by the end of the 1st year. Set your pace to win the race. You will never catch up so start off with a bang (and not just relying on dissertation, but start new projects as well).
• your journal submissions don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be done. Get work out the door & don’t obsess – make sure it is good but shooting for perfection will hold you back. The final published version will be different after the review process anyway.

TEACHING

• try to combine teaching & research to make the most of your time. I did this by collaborating with my undergrads on their research class projects (after the semester was over, I was last author but did the post-class work to get it published) and centered my lectures around my own research interest
• be smart when you write syllabi for your classes so you optimize learning for the students but don’t create repetitive & time-consuming grading for you
• use a TA to help you with as many admin teaching tasks as possible & research work

SERVICE

• serve on diverse committees in the dept/college, but not too many — don’t serve on a university-level committee your 1st 3-4 years if possible

POLITICS

• don’t go to everything, but go to the events that matter — find out what the “important things” are that you need to show up for within your dept/college but don’t feel like you have to go to everything. I’m probably worse at this than everything else, but as nontenured faculty you want to get your face out there. But going to every college and dept event could kill your research focus. Ask around about what the “must be seen at” things are (likely faculty meetings & start/end of semester get-togethers) then go to those.
• network at conferences because those senior scholars in the room may be your outside reviewer in a few years

NAVIGATING THE PROCESS

• stay focused but not stressed
• get feedback from a senior colleague about your cv over coffee  once a year — you might not be packaging yourself in a way that will make sense to a chemistry professor on the university tenure & promotion committee and that senior scholar can help you put your best foot forward
• 2 years before you want to go up for tenure have “the talk” with your supervisor to make sure that your plan is feasible. Work out a schedule. Since I was using my 2 years from LSU in my tenure clock here at UGA, I had to get the timing just right on my 3rd year review then tenure package. If my dept head hadn’t realized in enough time what my intentions were, I might have been delayed. Once you are a year out from putting together your package, make a checklist of what paperwork is due when so you can start to create deadlines & get samples of the packages. Dossiers are odd little documents and likely your university has a very specific format for yours.
• get examples! Ask colleagues who have recently successfully completed the tenure process if you can see their dossiers (Dr. Bryan Reber and Dr. Lynne Sallot at UGA both gave me copies of their recent dossiers – Bryan’s for associate with tenure and Lynne’s for full). You can copy the format and it also helps you in knowing what to write in your own.
• start writing your dossier about 2 months before it is due. Mine was due in Mar. 2009 to my dept head, so I wrote it over winter break 3 months before. I sat down with Dr. Bryan Reber’s dossier and nearly word-for-word typed in what he had in his about his career but replaced the facts with those about my own. That made writing the 1st draft so much easier than I believe it is for others.
• talk with other new professors in your same cohort about tenure. Socially, I used to take weekly walks with Dr. Lisa Lundy during our 1st 2 years at LSU & we were both picking up different pieces of what was expected for us thereby able to combine notes. Plus it is nice to have someone to talk to about expectations & the tenure journey!

I didn’t sell out. I didn’t burn out. And I reached my goal. Nothing too exciting, but it is nice to be here none-the-less.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a revision I have to finish.

Thanks to the fine people running things at UGA’s Grady College, I’ve been able to secure two amazing offers that will help pre-luncheon attendees fast-track their social media training.

It’s a very simple contest. The top two pre-lunch attendees who post the most tweets during the pre-lunch using the hashtag #UGAsocialmedia will win:

• Grand prize: $50 off registration for the October 24 Strategies & Opportunities in Social Media (S.O.S.) seminar led by Dr. Karen Russell and me in Atlanta

• Runner up: $25 off registration for the September 19 Connect conference in Athens

Your tweets must be public (so we can see them) & you must use the #UGAsocialmedia hashtag for a tweet to qualify. Only tweets posted during the pre-lunch qualify.

So get to twittering!

Creating Your Social Media Playbook: A Pre-Season Training Camp

Are you ready to jump into the social media game, but you don’t know all the X’s and O’s to get a win for your team? This pre-luncheon seminar will help you assemble a playbook sure to make you the company MVP. Learn social media tactics from all-pro social media scholar and practitioner Kaye D. Sweetser, Ph.D., APR. Dr. Sweetser will coach you on a mix of best practices and case studies covering a wide range of social media tools, including Twitter, Facebook and search engine optimization, among others. We’ll watch game tape of what others have done – both successfully and not so – in social media spaces to develop plays that will have your fans cheering in no time. Join us, and go from powder puff to pro.

This PRSA chapter is the second largest in the nation & Atlanta is home to many Fortune 500 companies – so it is an understatement to say that I’m honored to be invited.

We’re going to be drinking from the firehose, so come join us for the crazy fun!

The client this year is the U.S. Census.

Interested students should complete the application (.doc) and return it to Journalism 223-C (my office) no later than 5 p.m. on Sept. 21.

I will conduct interviews:

• Wednesday, Sept. 23 from 1:30 – 3 p.m.
• Wednesday, Sept. 23 from 5-6:30 p.m.
• Friday, Sept. 25 from 10 a.m. – noon

Let’s continue the great tradition of Grady excellence!

• identify their audiences
• determine the correct appeal
• create a message that would resonate.

To ensure this wasn’t just a “cool YouTube assignment,” I had students turn in storyboards which I graded as an assignment & gave feed back on publics, appeal and messaging.

In preparation of this month-long team project, we welcomed Converseon’s Paull Young into our classroom via Skype to tell us the secrets of making videos so good that they just can’t help but go viral. (watch here and here.)

I invited our client for the project, UGA Admissions, to come in to talk about their admissions recruiting process, the distinctly different audiences (parents, high school students, transfer students, etc.) and what they’d like to achieve with the video project. I asked the NOT to tell us the content of the videos they’d like — let us creatively see what we can come up with — but focus on an end-project goal with us instead.

Student were promised bonus points if UGA Admissions picked their video for use in the recruiting efforts. I also held a “viral showdown” where all the videos competed against one another and the top two most popular videos (videos with the most views) got bonus points as well. Interestingly, there was some difference in the make-up of the winners for the Admission-selected videos and the most viewed videos.

In grading the viral videos, I created a standard rubric looking again at publics, appeal and message. Given Paull’s advice to the students, I also looked for whether there was a call to action. Additionally, I looked at the technical quality – could you hear the dialogue, were the transitions adequate, etc. All copyrighted material (music, images) was both acknowledged in the credits of the film and students provided me proof of permission for use for everything. (We don’t believe in stealing music or photos here & that was another lesson I wanted to teach.)

Because these videos were posted on my YouTube account, I was able to look at the YouTube InSights data for each video. Along with the graded feedback from the rubrics sheets, students received print outs of the InSight data on who was looking at their video (gender, ages, location), how they found the video (referrers & search terms) as well as the neat “hot spots” graph which I annotated to show where people might have rewound the video or at which point they abandoned watching it.

In the end, the students loved the project and I feel it showed the professional approach PR can take with making social media content. Just because it is on YouTube does not mean that you can steal music to play in the background or that you should forget everything you learned about messaging.

I gave students a month to work on it outside of class. They were in teams of 3-4 people, self-selected. They were given full creative control of their content for the video & just received consultation-type feedback from me. They checked out my flip cams to record the videos (2-day check out for each of my 2 flip cams) & most of them taught themselves how to use iMovie to create the video. While I offered some level of tech support, few asked me any questions at all.

If you’re curious, UGA Admissions selected:
#1: Lessons Learned: Katherine Durham, Danielle Sender, Devin Zimmerman
#2: My UGA: Kristin Ballard, Ryan Barnes, Magan Cowart, Meredith Schneider

The viral showdown winners were (views as of April 28, 2009):
#1: My UGA: Kristin Ballard, Ryan Barnes, Magan Cowart, Meredith Schneider (1,922 views)
#2: There’s no place like home – UGA: Staci Dale, Katie Brown, Katie Holcomb (1,369 views)

You can watch all the videos, some admittedly better than others, at this YouTube playlist.

This was cross-posted at the PR Profs blog.

And so I created a little video in the style of MTV’s “True Life” series.

This video interviews 5 Grady graduates a year after graduation. They talk about what they liked most about campaigns, least and how it was working with other people. They also take a look back at the class campaigns process from their current perspectives.

Even though students hate campaigns in the middle (& some still at the end), I could fill up my UGA inbox limit with the e-mail I’ve received from graduates saying that now that they are in the real world they totally “get” campaigns. And all the bull that went along with it.

Juxtapose this to the next generation of practitioners professors like me have sitting in our classrooms right now. These students know the tools and want to use them professionally, but they just don’t really have the best grasp on the practice of public relations at this point to make it really work.

And so we’re in a gray area right now.

We have the establishment grappling with understanding the tools and the future work force fumbling to turn their playgrounds into professional PR places.

That’s where professors come in.

Perhaps rightfully so these days, a staple component of nearly every campaigns class capstone project includes social media.

But we have to be careful.

We have to try to bridge these two perspectives – the wise strategic capability of the establishment in how to practice excellent public relations with the understanding of ethical and quality integration of social media tools where appropriate.

We don’t use it just to use it, we use it when the research shows that is where the audience lives.We use it as a tool & tactic to meet our goals & objectives, we don’t create a separate strategy for it.

Here’s an example from my own teaching this week. Most everyone who knows me personally knows that I’m a total Twitter addict, but when my campaigns team this semester discovered that Twitter is not among the social media in which their key publics reside, my heart will just have to break a little & they’ll downgrade their Twitter engagement plans to focus on tool that really does hit the mark. Hurt as it may, Twitter isn’t the vehicle to successfully communicate this message.

Compare that with the research done by the most recent UGA Bateman PR competition teams, led by my colleague Dr. Karen Miller Russell. Last year her Bateman team did a video showdown on YouTube with local middle schools and this year they created meaningful testimonials of “people like me” from high schoolers who are just coming to realize how they can make their college dreams a financial reality. [Plug!! To see all the videos from this UGA Bateman team, visit their YouTube channel.]

As the bridge between today and tomorrow, PR professors have a big responsibility. We have to be able move beyond “shiny object syndrome” that captivate many with regard to social media, & we have to identify how the tactical use of social media fits into the overall traditional campaign strategy.

So my plea to PR professors comes down to 3 easy requests:

• Don’t wing it when it comes to integrating social media into the curriculum. Approach it as you would any other serious topic in the syllabus.
• Ask yourself how integration of the social media tactic fits into the strategy, do research to find out which social media spaces your target publics are in, then most importantly understand the unique varying culture that occurs in different social media spaces.
• Know ethics backwards & forwards, & spend time talking to students about getting the lay of the land before jumping in.

Why am I writing this post covering the obvious? Well, simple. I’m seeing my peers teach their students “how to use social media” & they are getting it wrong.

So, professors, do your homework before you assign homework to your students. There is a lot riding on this & we need to get it right.

[This was cross-posted on the PR Profs blog, sponsored by the NCA PR Division]

This is probably the first assignment in the history of teaching that I can’t wait to grade.

But before you go thinking I sent these digital natives off into the wild world of YouTube uninformed, I want you to know we stole about 15 minutes of time from Converseon’s Paull Young recently as he Skype’d into my class as a guest lecturer to talk about viral video.

First thing out of his mouth is that “viral makes my skin crawl!” Then he told us you shouldn’t set out to make a viral video; just set out to make a good video. He walked us through considerations and best practices. I’d call this “Viral 101″ if I had written it on the syllabus. Very informative, even for the people who think they know it all about consumer-produced media.

Then he dove into two really great case studies about Graco Baby and Second Chance Trees. Solid examples of when video really becomes the best way to communicate.

My students were so impressed with Paull (though it could have just been his accent) & I know I certainly appreciated him taking the time to talk us at University of Georgia.

And just checking here … anyone else amused that I turned his lecture – delivered via Web video from his NYC office to my UGA classroom – about viral video into a video that has the potential to go viral? Oh. Just me? Okay, then. Whatever.