Hire These PR Students/Grads :: Social Media Resumes from #PRCA3030

In our Social Media for Public Relations class at Georgia Southern University, one option for the students’ final project was to create a Social Media Resume for themselves. Below you will find links to all of them:

Creating a Social Media Policy :: #PRCA3030


P6033675 by afsart.

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.

The Process

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.

The Paper

Your Social Media Policy Paper will consist of the following:

  • A short description of your client
  • A description of your client’s current involvement in social media (including how leaders & employees in the organization are using social media). See the Social Web Strategy Worksheet (from Chapter 1) on the Resource CD that came with A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization: Strategies, Tactics, and Tools for Succeeding in the Social Web for suggestions of types of social media sites the organization may be involved in.
  • A few paragraphs on the need for a social media policy (for any client, not just this one). Include information on the dangers of NOT having a policy in place.
  • The policy that you create using Policy Tool for Social Media (copy and paste)
  • A recommendation for how to implement the policy in the client organization
  • An appendix, which lists your justification for each of the answers to the policy questions, along with contact information for your client, just in case I have any questions

Remember

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.

Social Media for Up and Coming PR Practitioners

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

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social media)

An Interview with Kneale Mann

View on screencast.com »

Kneale Mann shared his thoughts with me on social media, solid writing skills, the importance of commenting on others’ blogs and more.

As stated on his blog One Mann’s Opinion,

“Kneale is a twenty-six year marketing and media veteran who provides business, marketing and social media strategy for small to medium sized private sector clients through YouIntegrate.

“He is also a marketing and social media strategistic with the Centre of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing for public sector, not-for-profit and association clients.”

Tweetin’ in the Classroom

At the annual convention of the International Listening Association, Chris Bond and I will be presenting a session titled “Twitter as a Tool to Transform Listening and Speaking within the Classroom and Conference Contexts.” Chris’ focus will be on conferences, and as I have used Twitter in my public relations (and first-year experience) classes for nearly two years, I will focus on the classroom.

Here’s a sneak peek at my presentation, where I share how using Twitter in the classroom can be both an advantage (w00t) and a disadvantage (meh). If technology is working as it should, I will create an audio recording of my part of our session on Friday morning and sync it to the Prezi below.

What additional tips would YOU recommend?


(PS — When I attended the National Communication Association convention last fall, there was a bit of a kerfuffle about Twitter usage during conference sessions.)

Search Engine Optimization for Newbies

As part of PRCA 3030 (Social Media for PR), students are developing search engine optimized news releases. To help provide some background beyond the required reading of Edelman’s position paper, here are two sessions offered as part of Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing University that should prove to be quite helpful for those new to SEO.

As described on the Inbound Marketing University website,

In this class, you will learn the basics of SEO from Lee himself, as he walks you through how to optimize your website to start getting found in search engines.

So here is an introduction to SEO, by Lee Odden from TopRank Online Marketing:

 

And for those who are curious and want to know even more, there’s also a session on Advanced SEO Tactics led by Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz.

One Week of Twitter :: COMM 4333 and PRCA 3330 :: Spring 2010

Spring 2010 COMM 4333 & PRCA 3330 Students Only

(For Summer PRCA 2330 & 3330 Students, see the updated version of this assignment.)

Our One Week of Twitter assignment begins on Monday, February 15, and will end at midnight on February 22. Your blog post about this experience count as your Topic of the Week for Week Seven.

First, Learn a Bit About Twitter

  1. Listen to Laura Fitton discuss Twitter for Business.
  2. Listen to my Twitter: What’s in it for me? presentation.

Setting Up Your Twitter Account

  1. Go to Twitter. Click Get Started, and sign up. I prefer it if you use some version of your first and last name as your Twitter ID. (Avoid putting numbers in your Twitter ID, or you may appear like a spammer.)
  2. Upload a photo or avatar.
  3. Write a brief (140-character or fewer) bio. It’s good to mention that you’re a PR student.
  4. Send a tweet saying “I’m a student in @barbaranixon’s #COMM4330/#PRCA3330 class”. (Use the correct number for your class.) Be sure to include the #xxx1234 indicator, with no spaces between the hashtag (#), letters and numbers.
  5. If you haven’t already done so, complete my form that tells me your Twitter username before midnight on  Monday, February 15.

Setting Up Your Following List

  1. Follow at least 20 (why not all?) of the people or organizations in my Twitter Starter Pack for PR Students.
  2. Visit your class’ list for PRCA 3330 or COMM 4333 at TweepML. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to easily follow all the people on the list.

Using Twitter

  1. Over the course of the next week, send at least twenty tweets (Twitter messages of 140 characters or less). Tip: Rather than tweeting that you’re having ramen for lunch, instead consider what might be of interest to your classmates and followers. Perhaps point others to something interesting or funny you read online. Share a fact you learned in a class. Maybe you could even pose a question that you’d like others to answer.
  2. In addition to the twenty tweets that you originate, respond to at least five of your classmates’ tweets. To respond, click on the arrow after a tweet. Or you can type the @ symbol followed immediately by a username (such as @barbaranixon).

Additional Information

  1. Review my tips on how college students can use Twitter to their advantage and Choosing Whom to Follow on Twitter: My Strategy.
  2. Review Prof. Sam Bradley’s College Student’s Guide: Twitter 101.
  3. I find using the web interface for Twitter to be clunky. I prefer using TweetDeck, a free Adobe Air app that works great on PCs and Macs.
  4. I’ll occasionally post information on Twitter and use the hashtag for your class (either #COMM4333 or #PRCA3330).By using this hashtag, I’m indicating that I want students in this class to pay special attention to the tweet.
  5. OPTIONAL: If you’d like to publicize your blog posts via Twitter, you can it automatically in WordPress.

Blog About Your Experience

After the week is over, add a 300-word (minimum) post to your blog about the experience and what you got out of it. Include a link to your Twitter profile (here’s mine). Be sure to include at least one way you might find value in continuing your account in Twitter. Your blog post about this experience count as your Topic of the Week for Week Seven.

Questions? Just send me a DM (direct message) or an @ (reply) in Twitter!

NOTE: Many thanks to Kaye Sweetser and Karen Russell for their ideas prompting this assignment.

Best Service for Recording Guest Speakers?

This spring, I’ll be teaching several classes online for Georgia Southern University, including Social Media for PR and PR Writing. I’ve planned to include several guest speakers to enrich the students’ (and my own!) learning experiences. I was planning on just using Skype and Callburner, but then I got to thinking . . .

Which software/service is the best for recording the guest speakers?

Requirements

  • Record audio for guest speaker and me
  • Easy to post audio online (will need to embed in blog and perhaps add to iTunes U)
  • Free or low cost

Would Also Be Great

  • Record video from guest’s webcam
  • Record presentation (PPT) if the speaker is using one
  • Allow for students who are listening live to also contribute to the discussion

I’d appreciate any suggestions of what works well & what you’ve tried that didn’t live up to your expectations.