May 1, 2009

Create the change you seek.

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“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” – Barack Obama

I’m tired of waiting. I’m creating the change. Well, I want to.

In an effort to keep myself sane and keep my PR mind alive after I’ve completed the program, I have a new idea.

This idea is still very rough, so bear with me as I hash it out on here and try to work it out into something that makes sense.

I was talking to Dana Lewis back and forth on Twitter earlier this week. We are both very passionate about social media and everything that it entails, and as PR students, we are having to teach ourselves how social media is impacting the industry. There wasn’t any kind of social media taught as I went through the PR program at USF and there isn’t one at Dana’s school.

Dana said it’s frustrating because it’s like the schools are intentionally handicapping us by not pushing SM. I said that right now, it’s enabling me to set myself apart from my class because I’m the only one that’s passionate about it. Dana said that it’s making our generation weaker. (MOMENT OF CLARITY) I said our passion gives us the ability to strengthen our peers and show them the ropes of everything social.

We want to create a community outreach type program to teach PR students about the impact of social media, and how knowing how to use the various tools will make you more appealing as a candidate for jobs after graduation.

In universities across the nation, there are students learning only traditional PR & Marketing principles. While this is essential to the practice of public relations and marketing, said universities are yet to realize that the scope of these industries is changing. With the explosion of social media and how it is shaping the industry, it is increasingly important that students are exposed to social media as a part of a public relations or marketing education.

With the creation of this program, we hope to teach students how to use social media in a way that can benefit their future. It’s not just for keeping in touch anymore. Social media is exploding into something incredible and extremely powerful.

We hope to target students that are wanting to know more about how SM works, as well as the universities that see how it’s changing the industry. Through webinars, multiple bloggers, an online community, and the actual tools themselves (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc), we are seeking to strengthen our generation of students and get them ready for what the industry has in store.

Editor’s note: Nisha brings up a great point in the comments section, and I am adding it here, we want to target students. Period. They need to know how SM is beneficial. I meant to say that, but I think it got lost in translation. -S

We are seeking current students, recent graduates and professionals in PR & Marketing who “get” social media to build this community.

Current students are absolutely necessary to make this happen, as they are the eyes and ears of the schools they attend, and they can provide insight as to what kind of social media exposure they are (or aren’t) receiving.

Recent graduates are important to the cause as well. They can offer experience of how social media has eased their transition into the industry. Right now, those of us that really “get it” are a hot commodity. Soon, it will be required. Employers will be asking you “why don’t you get it”. We want to make it as easy as possible to make this happen for everyone.

Finally, professionals in the industry are absolutely vital to this program. The professionals that “get it” can help students understand how it’s happening in the “real world” and what exactly they can do to better themselves before graduation. They also have the contacts to build momentum around this cause and get like-minded people on board.

One of the reasons I’m so eager to get this idea up and running came from all the work I’ve done this semester. In my capstone course for the PR program, we are given clients and form teams to run as an agency. Yesterday, during the presentations, I realized how many people were integrating social media into their campaigns, which is awesome, but they didn’t seem to fully understand how it works. They referred to social media as a “craze”, which lead me to believe that most students think it’s going to fade out.

According to this research done at my school, while 99% of students sampled use social networking sites, only 15% of the students sampled have a Twitter account. 58% of the students that do have a Twitter account rarely log on.

Those statistics alone make me want to shout from the rooftops about how valuable SM is.

So who’s coming with me?

Tagged as: gen-y, Learning, social media

  • Hi Sydney,

    I'll add on to what Bob said that you slid through our program without taking PR Writing with either one of us, which is one place where social media is strongly emphasized. You must have had one of our adjunct profs. In PR Writing, I have for several semesters had students writing blogs. They are also now recording podcasts or videos for those blogs and creating a social media press release.

    PR Research has changed a lot since you were in that class with me. The students now do interviews over Skype and create podcasts of those interviews, conduct a social media monitoring project, and use photo or video to create and share an ethnography project. All projects are not posted to their blogs. I'm always looking for new ideas.

    My hope is that students will leave the program with a blog that will serve as a portfolio for their school projects and that they will know how to work with social media. The next step is really to push them to understand strategy of social media, and perhaps that is something that could happen in the PR Issues and Advanced classes, which are two that I don't generally teach.

    You can check out my blog to see the course assignments and some of the student blogs.
  • Just found your blog via Twitter and this discussion. Kelli Matthews pointed me your way.

    We have PROpenMic.org where there are 4,600+ students, faculty & pros from around the world talking about PR and emerging digital media.

    I would love to work with you to enable your dream to come true. As you've heard discussed, PROpenMic can be your platform. Write to me and I'll do whatever I can to help you!
  • Hi Sydney, interesting post. I'm obviously late to the conversation, but thought I'd add a couple points. Being an educator in a discipline such as public relations is interesting, because there is a delicate balance between applied communications, historical knowledge/information, and theory that must be balanced. In my experience, students want nearly all their education to be applied. However, we need to walk that tightrope of all three. As such, there is no way to include everything regarding the three in a 15-week course.

    That said, university curriculum should reflect the current state of the field. The challenge there is that some educators have limited practical experience. As a result, they focus on what they know: research and theory v. applied communications. I don't know what to do about this, it just is, and the academic hierarchy is set in place to facilitate it.

    There are also academic limitations based on the current curriculum. Our major takes place over three semesters and due to limited resources, there isn't much room to add new classes. I'm all for having an entire course (or two) on social media, but the department does not have the resources to offer them. It's a challenge, but the kind all communicators face: do more with less.

    Finally, I might add, the only reason you had little or no SM training at USF is because about 10 percent of PR majors make it through without having my classes. If you would have, then you would have joined a long line of students who use the experience to start their own social media journey. You've done wonderfully, given your passion. I expect even bigger accomplishments in the future.
  • Interesting point, Sydney, and it touches on something I think has been a central question about higher education for a long time.

    What's the role of college? To teach you to think? Or to give you tangible skills you can immediately take into the job market?

    Ideally, it's a marriage of both. I don't want this to turn into a "when I was your age" kind of post, but I went through the advertising program at U of I in Champaign longer ago than I'd care to admit. It's a great program. I learned a lot. But my teachers were not futurists by any stretch of the imagination; they said that potentially, we would be creating ads on computers. That maybe illustrator programs would be used. Yet there were pockets of us who thought that was definitely the way the world was moving.

    The fact that you've formed a POV on what you think may be lacking in your education means, in a way, you're more than armed to start your career.
  • Kristen (@KristenEJ)
    Sydney, great idea for hanging out a shingle. I too am working on an alternate idea to help me keep my PR skills sharpened. Also, I'm looking forward to the webinars you guys want to have, I could learn so much from them.
  • Just wanted to say kudos to you for going for it! I think it's definitely true that so many people haven't caught on to social media yet. In fact just the other day my friends told me they discovered my blog and they were amazed - but I felt like a total geek. My other friend was SHOCKED I bought my own domain. Some of my friends have joined Twitter recently, so I think it's catching on and becoming more mainstream..but there's still a long way to go. People might do it for fun but getting them to understand the personal branding part, and how it can impact their career - is important and difficult. Best of luck!
  • amy
    i just found your blog randomly through 20sb and i'm so glad i did! i work for an advertising/marketing agency in canada (http://www.colour.ca) and we are big into social media--it's awesome because very few agencies are, even now. we're just ramping up our social media division and i'm loving it. i like working in traditional media too, but SM is absolutely key if we want to stay relevant in the marketplace. i think what you guys are doing is fantastic and by getting this program going now you're way ahead of the curve. by the time schools get around to adding it to the curriculum, who knows what will be happening?
  • Aaron Strout
    Ryan - you are too kind. Thanks!
  • Sydney -

    I think Nisha pretty much articulated exactly what I was going to say, but I've come this far so I want to contribute anyway!

    Less than a month after I graduated I e-mailed the head of my graduate program with articles, etc. explaining the importance of social media. I also got other students that graduated with me to articulate the role social media was playing in their lives (and jobs). Note: Most of them didn't even know they'd have to deal with it.

    I spent the better part of a year trying to get GRADUATE students to understand why they need to be on LinkedIn.

    The real challenge is going to be convincing them that it's important, that it's going to impact their future.

    I wish you all the best with this initiative. I think it's going to be a good one.

    That Aaron Strout guy is pretty darned cool.

    Ryan
  • Any post that can quote Barack Obama so eloquently is a winner for me. As we discussed on the phone, I LOVE this idea. Putting the wheels in motion with my network.

    Best,
    Aaron | @aaronstrout
  • Sounds like you're doing fantastic things as always :) One thing I would point out - you say you want to target students who want to learn more about SM. The problem is bigger than that thugh- most students DONT have an interest in learning more about it, because they don't realize the effect it can have; they don't see the business purposes in it. First you have to make them understand why it's important before they're ever going to want to learn more about it.
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