Writing a news release is all well and good . . . but if it is not sent to the media for (potential) distribution, it’s a futile effort. I created this small crossword puzzle to help students understand some of the wide variety of options when it comes to news distribution channels. Try it out!
NOTE: Most clues in the puzzle come from:
Wilcox, D. (2009). Public Relations Writing and Media Techniques (6th Edition). Boston, MA: Pearson Education.
Based on the presentation Crisis Management: The Savvy Communicator by Kami Huyse. Used with permission.
For your final assignment in Public Relations Writing, you have a choice between two projects. You can either prepare a Social Media News Release OR write a detailed blog post about Social Media News Releases.
See GeorgiaVIEW/BlackBoard for the due date.
Due: April 28 by 11:59pm in GeorgiaVIEW
Worth: 200 points
For the final project in PRCA 3030, students have the option of creating their own Social Media Resume or writing a Social Media Policy for a client organization. This blog post describes the Social Media Policy assignment.
Using the Policy Tool for Social Media, a free service of PolicyTool.net, create a Social Media Policy for your client. (Choose your own client.) In order to do this, you will make and justify several decisions, including the following questions (taken directly from Policy Tool for Social Media):
- Who can use social media in your company?
- Must employees obtain permission from someone to use social media?
- May employee login ID’s or user names include the [“Organization Name”] without approval?
- Are there certain well known employees who must follow these rules even for personal social media?
- Are there any ethical standards that your employees must normally follow for publishing or commentary?
- Do you offer internal assistance in setting up social media accounts and settings?
- Must the user’s social media profiles be consistent with [“Organization Name”] website or publications?
- Must official corporate photos be used for profile photos?
- Should the employee include a disclaimer stating that they are not speaking on behalf of the company?
- Do you want to add tips for successful use of social media that are helpful, but not strictly speaking required for a policy?
At each stage of the creation process in the Policy Tool for Social Media, you are asked to make a decision about the above questions. For each decision you make, provide a paragraph or so description of how you made the decision. You will want to get input from your client, rather than making these decisions in a vacuum. Put these questions and how you arrived at each decision in the Appendix of your paper.
Your Social Media Policy Paper will consist of the following:
If you use information in your paper that you did not write yourself (for example, the client description), it’s critical for you to cite your sources. For the policy portion of your paper, you can simply indicate that you used the Policy Tool for Social Media to create the policy. As is common in our field of study, use APA Style for citations.
All successful public relations practitioners have their own media contact lists that they maintain on a regular basis. They will contact different members of the media depending on the messages they are seeking to share on behalf of their clients. In the “olden days,” we would maintain our contact lists in our desktop Rolodexes.
For our PR Writing class, create a Media Contact List. With your specific client in mind, create a media contact list that will be helpful when you are seeking to share messages on behalf of your client.
At a bare minimum (to earn a C), your media contact list must include at least one radio station, one TV station, one blog and three print publications. Use a table to compile this list; you can use either Word or Excel.
One way that nonprofit and government associations get the word out is through public service announcements.
For our PR Writing class, create a 30-second public service announcement or radio news release for your client. (If you have a nonprofit or gov’t client, write a PSA. If you have a for-profit client, write a radio news release.) Review the information in Chapter 9, especially pages 208-222 for tips on how to write.
In my Honors Speaking class, we’re discussing using Monroe’s Motivated Sequence as a way to persuade listeners. This tried-and-true process has five steps:
I discovered this short video this morning which explains the process well:
This one-page handout offers additional details on Monroe’s Motivated Sequence.
Florida Southern College‘s Chris Fenner, Communication Division chair, invited me to be a guest speaker for his Principles of Public Relations class. Here’s my presentation, along with a link to the websites, blogs, etc., that I’m discussing:
http://delicious.com/barbaranixon/fsc_pr_links
In several of my classes this semester, public relations students are writing resumes and cover letters as one of their assignments. I tend to see the same errors over and over again.
Here are some of the common errors I find:
Mark Ragan, CEO of Ragan Communication, offers five tips for taking better corporate photos:
Wondering why “execution at dawn” is part of the headline of this blog post? See what Mark has to say about group shots in the video below.
