so this is mass communication?

Here is the question I raise … is it really such a coup when a blogger wins a big investigative journalism award but it turns out he is a very well-known & respected freelance journalist?

Not to diminish the work of Talking Points Memo’s Joshua Micah Marshall or his recent honor of the Polk Award for excellence in investigative journalism (because I really do think it is great) — but I just find it interesting that a blogger that wins such an award is actually a “real journalist” anyway.

I found out about this story the old-fashioned way. I was making copies at work & my colleague Dr. Hugh Martin, a journalism professor, came up to tell me about this. Hugh gave me a run-down on the history of the award & its importance in the journalism community. When he told me a blogger won this year — & the story about how that blogger had basically employed his army of readers to sift through public record materials to get to the bottom of a story — I was not as amazed at the story of bloggers & readers uncovering a story as I was of the journalistic community actually embracing it! Not *that* was news!

Then Hugh told me the name of the blogger & I realized: False alarm. This wasn’t the earth shattering event I had thought it was. They had picked the “safest bet,” one of their own if you will.

Is this what some have called “a landmark day for a certain kind of journalism?” Ehhh. Not so much.

Don’t mistake me, I really am thrilled about the award & marvel at the ingenuity of a blogger to use his readers to help get to the bottom of a story. But is a “blogger” who wins an important investigative journalism award the coup I thought it was? Not when that bloggger was already a card-carrying member of the industry already.

Thanks to: Dr. Hugh Martin for telling me the story & socialmedia.biz for blogging about it this morning to prompt this post I had planned.

Everyone knows that YouTube is a great way to try your chances at becoming an Internet superstar. But what about using YouTube locally to engage your publics in your own community for your PR campaign?

I really started to think about this last semester when studentLizzie Azzolino wrote a proposal for a YouTube contest, using the Georgia drought as her client topic. While Lizzie’s proposal was just for a class assignment, I imagine that had the State of Georgia actually employed it as a part of their water conservation campaign they might have gotten some really good gems like this home-made PSA.

When I saw that UGA’s Bateman PR campaign team had a similar YouTube “show down” locally as a part of their campaign to get adolescences to wear seat belts, I was again struck by how you can use YouTube locally. The campaign team went to local schools, turned over cameras to two classes then let them film their own PSA. The campaign team edited them together and the “show down” was born. The 6th graders PSA was pitted against the 7th graders PSA. Locally, this video channel has become quite a hit and computers across Athens are going to the site to watch their favorite video to try to get the most hits so their team will win a party. The newspaper article alone generated more than 150 click-throughs to one of the videos.

If you haven’t seen the videos yet, take a look. The first one is here.

And the other here.

To me, this is what social media is all about. It’s social. It’s about engaging your public (no better way to get your publics to really invest in your message than a video contest). And really, what most people fail to think about, is that it can be quite successful when it’s done locally. Mixing these social media tactics with good old fashioned PR techniques of media relations & relationship building can help you get the message resonance you want.

A piece from my disseration (man, was it that long ago?) was just published:

Sweetser, K.D., & Kaid, L.L. “Stealth Soapboxes: Political Information Efficacy, Cynicism, and Uses of Celebrity Weblogs Among Readers.” New Media & Society, 10, 67-91.

This study tests the effects of personalized and `stealth’ political discourse on weblogs (or blogs) and the repercussions on levels of political trust, information efficacy and political uses/gratifications. By surveying readers of three different blogs (N=1838), this study identified significant effects as a result of exposure to political statements on blogs. Indeed, there were differences in the levels of political cynicism depending on how political statements were communicated. Readers of non-political blogs were more confident in their level of political information and their ability to participate in politics. Finally, political uses/approaches and avoidances were examined, as were differences based on gender and age.

Keywords: blog, celebrity, cynicism, Internet, online, political information efficacy, uses and gratifications

My univerisity doesn’t have acces to the journal online so I can’t download the PDF. If someone out there can & would be willing to send me the PDF then I would greatly appreciate it!

I’ve always tried to infuse social media into all of my classes — especially the traditional core curriculum classes. This interest became more formal quest since I became a Research Fellow for the Society of New Communications Research, where I sit on the educational committee.

So you can only imagine how pleased I was to see this blog post on the “official AEJMC blog”, and a more in-depth piece by David Parry at the University of Texas at Dallas. There is even an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education!

Teaching twitter and teaching through tweets is legit!

David does the same assignment both Karen Miller Russell & I (and many others!) have done: Twitter tweets for 2 days. My experience is that when you throw students into Twitter together as a group, where as a part of the assignment they are required to follow one another, it is an instant community for them that really helps show what the tool is all about.

He makes some other great suggestions for how to use Twitter in teaching to expand the classroom experience, so do check out his longer blog post on the topic.

Lest you think I’ve lost sight of what is really important in education, let me be clear:

The point is that it shouldn’t be about teaching a specific technology — it should be about showcasing creative professional uses through emergent technology. Today Twitter, tomorrow …. what ??? As Karen said when I popped by her office last week, we’re here today to show them how to use the killer app now, but we won’t be there for the next big thing — so we have to teach the skills to them so they can teach themselves. In doing so, we lay the groundwork for creative but ethical practice using tools as they emerge.

Other resources:

• Social Media class twitter tweets for 2 days assignment
• Karen Miller Russell’s 48 hours of Twitter
• Karen’s suggestions for PR student tweets
  
• Web 2.0 teaching tools: Twitter tweets for higher education
• Collaborative writing, 140 characters at a time

Update Feb. 11., 2008 at 7:46 p.m.: opps! got registration wrong – $25 for students
Update Feb. 11, 2008 at 11:04 a.m.: read the press release

UGA & the major PR firm, Edelman, are hosting the Edelman Digital Bootcamp for PR students & educators in the Southeast on March 1.

Mark your calendars! Book your hotel room! Register! … and get ready for an amazing hands-on experience.

The purpose of this event is to provide hands-on instruction of how to properly use social media in PR campaigns. We want folks from all over the South to come, so if you are in a 5-hour radius to Athens then you should definitely plan on coming!

• event is March 1 at the University of Georgia Student Learning Center
• registration for students is $25
• all PR students from any university are welcome to attend
• students to be broken up into teams & work through a campaign client scenario to find the best social media solution
• special track for educators will help attendees work through creating social media-themed assignments for traditional PR classes
• rooms are blocked at the nearby Holiday Inn on Broad St.
• Contact Cindy Schnably (e-mail: schnably@uga.edu) for more info

Registration is limited, so you are interested in this one-day event then be sure to contact Cindy ASAP. Then ….. I’ll see you in Athens on March 1!

I tried something new with my PR Research class last semester. In addition to having the students write a press release about their research projects (which I’ve always done), I recorded the audio of their presentations then put that with a group picture up in my Facebook. So now future PR Research students can see what previous student groups researched & well … more than just 20 people get to “experience” their class project.

Slowly but surely the press releases are being posted on the Grady College Web site … so far you can find out about the party school experiment or how the candidates used dialogic communication in the primaries on their blogs.

If you can’t wait to find out more about the other 3 projects, check out my Facebook:

• Atlanta-based PR pracititioners’ use of social media
• dialogic analysis of primary candidates’ blogs
• experiment testing credibility of crisis alert systems at a university
• impact of “party school” image on a university’s image
• uses and grats examination of media (video, music) downloading

Enjoy their research!