Image Credit: "Fondo de escritorio. Calendario del mes de abril" by Trinamita
Just like with most publications, blogs should have Editorial Calendars. Why? Editorial calendars will do the following:
Fulfill a requirement for the Blog assignment in my classes 🙂
Help you realize the scope of your work on the Blog
Keep you on track for deadlines
(And once this class is over), Editorial Calendars help ensure that your readers are receiving fresh and relevant content on a regular basis.
To create your calendar, use the template provided: Blog Editorial Calendar Spring 2012. Be sure to see the second tab of the calendar for an example of a few weeks of what your calendar might look like. The more detail you include in your calendar, the better. Submit the calendar using BlackBoard.
Some tips:
Be as specific as you possibly can in your descriptions for the posts. For example, rather than just saying TOW #1, type in the actual topic after you type TOW #1. With PR Connections, you can be general for now by indicating when you need to post them, but update the calendar for yourself when you choose the specific topics.
For your Blog Comments, put in reminders to yourself to include a certain number of comments by specific dates.
Though your blog has specific due dates for most posts, you can post them before they are due. Take a look at your OWN calendar, and schedule your blog writing so that it fits around other assignments and commitments.
Include the due date for your entire blog.
If it helps you, feel free to color-code this editorial calendar. Put TOWs in one color, PR Connections in another, etc.
In Week 3 of my Social Media for PR classes, we’ll be discussing what PR students need to know about social media (in general), then have an overview of Section One in Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. The slidedecks that accompany my presentations are below.
As we have seen, news releases and the messages they contain increasingly end up on the Internet where they get indexed by search engines. Since these messages have become searchable, it is important to include words and phrases Internet users would use intuitively when searching for content related to that message. Having read Edelman’s position paper on the issue and having discussed search engine and message optimization in your blog, it is now your turn to take a news release and optimize it.
For this assignment, you will need to identify a set of keywords/keyword phrases for use in your optimized news release. Use free tools such as Wordtracker, Google Insights, Google Adwords, or Microsoft’s AdCenter Labs to do so, or use your Radian6 or CustonScoop account. You may also want to check Twitter Search to get a sense for the natural words and phrases people use to talk about your type of topic.
Accurately reflect how people talk & search (natural language)
Face little competition from other keywords
Once you’ve decided on your keywords, strategically incorporate them into your news release (see the Edelman position paper for tips on how to do so).
Deliverables (in one file):
The original news release (that you wrote in a previous course or as part of an internship)
Your revised & optimized news release with the keywords highlighted in bold print
A short paper listing the keywords/keyword phrases you decided on and explaining why you chose them and how they fit the two keyword requirements outlined above. Include screenshots of the visuals generated by tools such as Google Insights to back up your argument.
A Twitter pitch for your news release of no more than 140 characters. Use a separate page for this pitch. Your pitch should incorporate at least one of your keywords. Since this is not an official news release, do not send it out over Twitter. For tips on writing effective Twitter copy, check out this example.
NOTE: Many, many thanks to Corinne Weisgerber at St. Andrews University, who gave me permission to use her assignment for my class. I have made only minor tweaks to her original assignment (which appears at her Social Media for PR Class blog).
UPDATED INFO BELOW (as of 2-22-2010)
FAQ About the SEO News Release
How do you create a SEO release?
A SEO news release is just a “regular” news release, but with keywords chosen & used in the headline/lead/body to help ensure that search engines can index it easily, which leads to making it easier for people to find it. For this class assignment, be sure to put the keywords in bold so that I can see what they are.
What do you use to get a higher rank?
Choose good keywords.
What topic can we do?
Use any topic you want. As the assignment stated, you can reuse an news release you wrote for a previous class. The key here is that the news release needs to be one that you actually wrote, not one that you have found online.
Make ONE document using Word (or PDF), with multiple pages. Name the file with the following naming convention: YourLastName SEO NR (for example, Nixon SEO NR.docx.) Southeastern U students should submit the assignment in BlackBoard.
This is all so confusing to me. Help!
Follow the directions and do your best. This assignment is a small one, as far as points go (50 of our 1000 in the class). It’s designed to give you a taste of SEO, not a deep dive into all of its nuances.
Do you have anything else that will help me?
Yes. See the presentation below by Corinne Weisgerber.
Image Credit: "21:365 :: Stack of Social Media Trade Books" by Barbara B. Nixon
For my COMM 4633 & SPC 4350 Students
One of our assignments this semester is for you to read and review a trade book on social media. In class, you’ve already been assigned to a Public Relations Trade Book. Your book review is due in class during Week 10.
Your book review will take the form of a five-minute presentation in class. For your presentation, create a professional-looking PowerPoint presentation of no more than ten slides. Rely more on images to tell your story than bullet points. (We’ll discuss more in class about how not to create a “Death by PowerPoint” slidedeck.)
Your presentation should include:
Opening slide should include an image of the book’s cover
Short bio of the author(s) of the book (perhaps with a photo of the author)
What did you learn by reading this book?
What surprised you in this book?
What do you want to learn more about, now that this book has piqued your interest?
Would you recommend other students to also read this book? Why or why not?
If you’re using Twitter, search for the authors of your book there and connect with them. You may be surprised how willing most of them are to reply to you when you @ them.
Leave a comment about your thoughts on the book on the author’s blog.
Post a review of the book on the book’s page at Amazon.com.
This assignment gives you an opportunity to learn how to monitor blog and other social media content in a way that provides similar insight offered by more traditional environmental scanning methods.
Many people will discuss your client or organization and its products/services on their own web sites or on social media sites, outside of realm traditional media. Just as it is important for you to know what the media and your community are saying about your organization and its products/services, it is important to know what is being said in social media sites like blogs, social networks, and message boards. For this assignment, you will
monitor the online conversation that has occurred about an organization or brand of your choosing since February 1, 2011,
create a table for your data, and
write an analysis of the conversation with suggestions for action.
You might find bloggers who are blogging about your client organization or brand, people who are creating Web sites about it, message board members who are discussing it in forums, Twitter users who are twittering about it, social networking users who are commenting about it, or online video producers who are posting YouTube videos about it.
Let me know by Week 4 how you choose to complete the project (individual or teams) and which organization you are choosing in class. Teams will collect much more data, but write one cohesive report. NOTE: The first person (or team) to “claim” a Fortune 500 company or large non-profit organization “gets” the company. No duplicates, please.
Step One: Complete Background Reading
See these resources for advice on social media monitoring.
For my Social Media for PR classes (COMM 4633 and SPC 4350)
In addition to our in-class meetings, we will learn from professionals in the social media space each week this semester. Be sure to view or listen to the webinar by Saturday at midnight each week; we’ll discuss the webinars during the following week in class. For many of the weeks, the webinars dovetail nicely with our theme for the week. A vast majority of the webinars will come from Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing University.
Students in my SPC 4350 Social Media for PR & Adv course at Florida Southern College have started blogging. They will be adding to their blogs weekly throughout the Spring semester.
If you are a student in this class and your name does not show up on this list, please be sure you have at least one post on your blog, then complete this Google Form; it’s a manual process to build the blogroll, so your name will not show up immediately.
For this semester’s public relations and journalism courses that I’m teaching for Southeastern University, I am again augmenting my own content and our textbooks with several courses offered by Poynter’s NewsU.
First, create a free account at NewsU. (NOTE: When you enroll in NewsU, the form will ask you for a course code. We do not have a code for your course, so just leave it blank.) Then come back to this blog post.
Next, it’s smart to enroll in all the courses you will need for the semester. It will make your life easier later on. To enroll, first click on the name of the course(s) below, then click on Enroll Now under Course Overview.
Send me your Course Report to my Southeastern University e-mail address. The short screencast below shows you now. Have the report come to my university e-mail address. (NOTE: This screencast was recorded earlier this year, so some of the dates are old, though the process remains the same.)
I’ve created this short screencast to walk you through the process.
For some courses, you’ll blog about what you learned as a Topic of the Week. For the ones that are not required as TOWs, you can choose to have them be PR Connections, if you wish.
[NOTE: In order to get credit for completing the a NewsU Course, you need to complete the course, fill out the form & send me the course report — by Saturday midnight during the week it’s assigned.]
These slides accompany a class discussion in COMM 2322 Public Relations Applications. The textbook for the course is Public Relations: Strategies & Tactics by Wilcox & Cameron.
For our first “real” day of class, we’ll have a short scavenger hunt to find useful sites for public relations writers.
In pairs, look up your assigned site(s) below. (I have intentionally NOT hyperlinked to the sites in this post, to encourage independent searching skills.) Take specific note of the following:
Name of site
Types/categories of information you found there
One specific topic that you found interesting
How this site might be useful for PR Writing students
Reply/respond to this blog post with what you have found. Then, if you wish, you can use what you found as the basis for one of your PR Connections on your own blog later.
PR News Sites
PR Week
PR Tactics
Ragan Report
PR Daily
Public Relations Organizations
Public Relations Society of America
International Association of Business Communicators
International Public Relations Association
Florida Public Relations Association
Public Relations Blogs
Communication Overtones by Kami Huyse
PR 2.0 by Brian Solis
PRos in Training by Kelli Matthews
PR Communications by John Cass
Bad Pitch Blog by Kevin Dugan and Richard Laermer
PR Squared by Todd Defren
Waxing Unlyrical by Shonali Burke
Social Media Explorer
Podcasts on Public Relations, Writing and/or Public Speaking
For Immediate Release
Inside PR
Quick & Dirty Tips: Grammar Girl
Quick & Dirty Tips: The Public Speaker
Additional Resources
AP Stylebook
The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr.
(Though this post is written specifically for my COMM 4333, PR Writing, students at Southeastern University, others — especially PR professors — might find it useful. Please feel free to adapt as needed for your own use.)
