mediations

The Mediations Tweetcloud

http://tweetcloud.icodeforlove.com/mediations/17111

Teaching Social Media: Stirling21 & EuroBlog Bucharest

Here is the presentation of a paper on Teaching Social Media, written by Richard Bailey, Gareth Thompson, and myself. Richard presented it at the Stirling 21 conference and I used it as the basis of my contribution to the panel I chaired at the Euprera Congress in Bucharest.

As part of Euprera's EuroBlog project, Richard and I are now working on a generic module to help academics who are meeting the challenge of teaching social media. This will be developed through a wiki - please contribute!

Teaching Social Media

View more presentations from Richard Bailey.

Why blog (2)?

Here's how I should have written the previous post: my favourite PR blogger, Tom Murphy, interviewed on Sarah Stimson's  Offer and Acceptance. Excellent stuff (and very useful for my keynote at EuroBlog next week...).

Proud to see the name checks for Delivering the New PR - and for Richard Bailey, whose PR Studies sets the standard for everyone else trying to both teach and understand social media.

Why blog? Self-interest as motivation...

An obvious question for people taking my Intro to Weblogs module is "Why blog?" The obvious answer from my perspective is "Because you get more out of it than you put in." In PR Strategy we are looking at persuasion, and recognising that self-interest is one of the most powerful forces PR can harness.

Here's how it works for Mediations. Yesterday, I was writing a lecture on wikis, and drew heavily on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody (review copy sent to me because I blog); Chapter 5 Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production is particularly strong and Shirky's observations around notions of co-operation and user-generated content will help in many other contexts.

I then started thinking about a project that forms the spine for my Level 2 PR Strategy module, a campaign to persuade 18 to 25-year olds to read books (the teaching will soon be wiki-based). As well a newspaper-based promotion, we are looking at social media channels and, right on cue, Mediations reader Lee Henshaw emailed with details of his new novel, Queer Fish in God's Waiting Room. Lee works for Silence Advertising and is using a range of techniques to get his book noticed, including this You Tube video and putting a big chunk of it online here.

Rather than do the hard work myself, I have also used materials created and distributed by fellow bloggers, for example to explain social bookmarking.

Oh, and my gruelling programme of academic begging and borrowing was interrupted by the arrival of a shiny new Xda Orbit 2 phone from O2, sent to me by Steve Cater of VCCP; I will try hard to make sure it doesn't go the same way as my Cocoon. The Xda has sat nav!!!!

Why blog? Because it is fun.

My week in media meme

Stuart Bruce has just tagged me in the "My week in media meme" so rather than think about the desperately needed relaunch of Mediations, or mourn the departure from the blogosphere of one of my favourites, No Copy, here goes.....

What I've read

I have the Guardian delivered at home, along with the Sunday Times and Observer, and we get all the nationals delivered to our lecture rooms so I try and read most of them, most days. I subscribe to UK Press Gazette, and haven't got round to cancelling Uncut (it makes me feel old). I read The Sun online most mornings and my home page is BBC News.

My favourite medium is books, and am usually reading one PR/ ethics text, one novel and one non-fiction/ non-work title at anyone time. At the moment that means Jacquie L'Etang's new Public Relations: Concepts, Practice and Critique; Blair Unbound, by Anthony Seldon (essential reading for anyone who has waded the Campbell's Blair Years, Stuart); and Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson. I am also halfway through the Martin Beck series of Swedish (Marxist) crime novels - splendid.

What I've watched

I watch very little TV except Manchester United and Newsnight. I enjoyed Nirvana Unplugged on DVD (Christmas present), and am desperate to add to my collection of Kurt Wallander DVDs. 

What I've listened to

Unless it's for football, my radio dial seldom leaves Radio 4. Today is a vital part of waking up and I seldom miss Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time or Laurie Taylor's Thinking Allowed. The 70mile return drive to Sunderland gives me a lot of time for music... My Desert Island Discs for 2007 were: Soul Kitchen, Patti Smith (Twelve); Here Comes That Day, Siouxsie (Mantaray); Shine, Leszek Mozdzer and Adam Klocek (Live in Warsaw); 21st Century Schizoid Man, Crimson Jazz Trio; Tuesday Wonderland, Esbjorn Svensson Trio; Amiina, Kurr; Walking the Dog, John Cale (Live Circus); and Locomotive, Stan Tracey and Bobby Wellins.

Where I've surfed

Naturally I subscribe to a host of PR blogs, but I also enjoy The Local, a slightly irreverent (English) take on Swedish news and can spend hours tracking cycle rides on Google maps.

I am tagging all the students who are about to take my MAC250 social media module....   

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

This is splendid! Thank you very much, Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University for Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us.

Hackwatch

Martin Stabe continues to provide one of the best at-a-glance, top-of-my-feeds, guides to what is happening in UK new media and online journalism. A couple of recent links highlight sites which in different ways put the activities of journalists under scrutiny:

VickyWatch keeps an eye on The Sun's showbiz editor Victoria Newton, and 'Abby Lee' who was outed by the Sunday Times last year as the blogger who wrote the sex blog (and book) “Girl With a One Track Mind”, has posted a rather unflattering e-mail that she received from a the Sunday Times journalist shortly before being exposed. 

Quote of the Year - 2007

"I walk my dog without the need to subscribe to its RSS feed."

Tom Murphy, January 5, 2007

Gerry's disastrous blog... and other must-reads

Gerry McCusker (above), author of Tailspin, is now blogging at PR Disasters. Here's how he describes it...

‘PRdisasters’ helps you avoid killing your PR career or crippling your corporate reputation by showing how ‘not’ to manage your PR efforts.

We track the real PR cock-ups; the gaffes and howlers made by spin doctors, PR consultants and the client organizations they represent. You’ll also find news, views and trends from the world of public relations and related business, offering a perspective that, hopefully, helps you in your work.

One to add to your feeds...

As is this - Alan Geere Online. In one of the longest and most prominent About Me's I have seen, Alan explains he is "a newspaper editor, consultant and academic with an international reputation for innovation and originality." It goes on in a similar vein for a while... but the thing is, it's all true! The Trinidad Express will never be the same again...

Read this post to get a feel of the adrenaline and and misery that are all part of an ordinary newspaper day. 

Reporting suicide is always a very tricky call... and although I am not sure Alan got this one right, it is a strikingly honest post.

Alan also alerted me to Karel McIntosh's Carribbean Public Relations blog which promises some very interesting insights - especially for those of us who find it all to easy to see PR from an Anglo-American perspective.         

Whose blog is it anyway?

Again, what is a blog for? One of the reasons I am asking is that I was challenge in a private correspondence by the claim that blogs are 'publications' and should therefore be held up for scrutiny and criticism in the same way as any other publication. Instinctively, I objected on many grounds (including some which probably wouldn't stand close scrutiny). One argument I made was that there must be a distinction between, say, a PR practitioner musing about the discipline and a 14-year-old girl's My Space posts about her love for dolphins. Not so, said my correspondent; both chose to put their thoughts on public display and both should be open to an equal standard of criticism.

Now I don't think I am the only person who would react quite strongly to a middle-aged man criticising either the spelling or the sentiments of a 14-year-old but there is a logic to the argument.  My response, and it is wide open to challenge, begins to suggest that permissible engagement and criticism is connected to the perceived purpose and function of the blog.

Take Mediations which I can visualise as beng some sort of social event where I know some of the guests quite well, but it is also open to complete strangers who come and go at will. Whether I like it or not, I am wearing one of those horrible name badges on a piece of ribbon things which inescapably says University of Sunderland, and I should bear that in mind all the time. Over the course of the evening I move from group to group, changing topic and tone as appropriate. Once in a while I may chance upon someone I don't know, or I know only by reputation, or simply don't like the look of. Our conversation maybe warm or frosty; I may put my arguments diplomatically, tactfully or quite forcefully, but hopefully I will remain polite.

All the time I will be aware that I am holding these conversations in a public place, that I can be overhears, or that within a circle that is made up mostly of friends there are people I don't know, and who may have different views than mine. If it is like most of the social events I intend, I will probably say something I will later wish I hadn't, but generally I would be well advised to keep my most frank and personal opinions for another time.

What I won't do is march over to a complete stranger and launch an attack on his dress sense, choice of partner or his less than perfect elocution. Although the next day I might be scathing in my comments on a student's essay I won't assail a fellow guest for their misplaced grammar in a conversation that wasn't really addressed to me. It wouldn't be very good manners, would it?

To take quite a leap forward, it occurs to me that some public relations people need to take a little time to think about the function of blogs. All good practitoners are adept at segmenting people into publics (stakeholders); perhaps some of those who are critical of the blogosphere need to try and do something similar.

Yes, all postings on all platforms maybe similar on one most fundamental level, but a key understanding for a PR practitioner is to appreciate that different publics demand different channels, modes and styles of communcation.

One of the impacts of the internet and of social media, particularly weblogs, is to vastly multiply the number of interelated and overlapping publics that a practitioner may want to - or have to - engage with. Practitioners have an obligation to try and understand these changes.