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Getting a Jumpstart on Prof. Nixon’s Spring 2011 Classes

If you’re looking to get a jumpstart on my classes this spring, here are the books and other required resources that we will be using. I’ve linked to many of them at Amazon.com, but of course you can purchase them from anywhere you like. I recommend you try the Facebook Marketplace first, so you can get a good deal AND help a fellow student.

Public Relations Applications (COMM 2322)

Public Relations Writing (COMM 4333)

Introduction to Journalism (COMM 3333)

Social Media for Public Relations (COMM 4633)

Honors Speaking & Writing (COMM 244L)

Questions? As always,

(PS: Syllabi for my classes will be posted in early January.)


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A Look Back at My 10 Favorite Floral Photos of 2010

As many of you know, I love to take macro photos of flowers; since I can’t grow a thing, it’s my little contribution to the gardening community. All of these photos were taken with either my Canon Powershot SX110IS or my Samsung Epic 4g mobile device.

Here’s a look back at the 10 floral photos I took in 2010 that I liked the best:

Image Credit: 2010 in Flowers, by Barbara Nixon

In 2011, I intend to do even more floral photography. Since I carry my Samsung Epic 4g with me everywhere I go, it’s easy for me to snap a picture of a perfect (or not-so-perfect bloom) and share it with my friends.

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The Top 5 Posts in 2010

Image Credit: "Logo Top 5 de las 5" by Alberto Carlos Diéguez

The traffic at my blog Public Relations Matters ebbs and flows, much like with most blogs. When my classes are in session, I know for sure that certain posts will gain hundreds of hits, because I post all my assignments on my blog. For the purpose of today’s Top 5 post, I am not counting class assignment posts. Below you will find my five posts that had the most traffic in 2010.

  1. The ONE job interview question: I asked Phil Gomes from Edelman what the ONE job interview question was that he tended to ask in almost every interview for a public relations position. He gave me his choice, in video form, and proceeded to interview several colleagues at Edelman for their choices as well. I show this short video in my classes each semester when I discuss job interviewing.
  2. Five Ways to Keep Current in Public Relations News & Trends: Occasionally, my students ask me how I know so much about what is going on in the world of public relations. It’s simple: I actively try to stay up on news and trends. This blog post explains how I do it, and how PR students should do it, too.
  3. How NOT to Hashtag in Twitter: In early December, the person running the CNN’s Breaking News Twitter account chose to use some tasteless hashtags in a tweet about the murder of a child. I contacted a CNN producer about it. Then I blogged.
  4. AP Style Bootcamp :: Flagging Your 2010 AP Stylebook: Whether you are a journalist, PR pro or student, sometimes it’s hard to find what you are looking for in the AP Stylebook. In this post, I shared my strategy for using Post-It Notes to flag the book for easy use.
  5. 10 Tips for Polishing Up Your Blogs, Fall 2010 Edition: Students in all my PR classes blog as part of the course requirements. I’ve read hundreds of student blogs over the past few years. Students typically make the same mistakes from semester to semester. I thought writing a post with the 10 most common mistakes would help my Fall 2010 students. Sigh. If only all of my students had taken the tips I shared to heart.

Are there other posts that you read at my blog in 2010 that resonated with you, but aren’t listed in the “most popular”?

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Top Ten Takeaways from #COMM4363 Corporate PR


Photo Credit: 10 by Leo Reynolds

Students in my Corporate Public Relations class at Southeastern University shared the top ten things they learned during the semester. I’ve summarized the highlights of their lists here, in alphabetical order by author. Some discussed the class in general, while others took a more focused approach on presentation skills.

Jen Cicotta

  • “Learn from the world around you – One of the greatest classes often is not in a classroom. Everyday in class we talked about different things that were happening in the world and how it relates to our field of interest. I think by scanning the days news headlines you can really learn from what people are doing in real life situations.”

Whitney Gonzalez

  • “Opportunities Are Everywhere: Connections can be made everywhere you go so it is always important that you be prepared to be professional. Tweets may even connect with a PR practitioners in Sprint who can let you conduct a project with a Sprint phone.”

Gracey Hulbert

  • “Actions that could effectively prevent any harm to a company‘s reputation on Day 1 may be completely ineffective on Days 2, 5, or 10.”

Juliet Jones

  • “Crisis Management – The Ford Fiesta [project] really pushed us to use our “Crisis management” skills. I learned it is always important to have a back up plan and to be prepared for ANYTHING.”

Mikelle Liette

  • “It is great to use PowerPoint to create a visual that your audience can relate to, or take notes from, but be careful! Make sure the PowerPoint doesn’t do your presentation for you. For the presentation simply put key words up that you can expound upon. If you put everything that you are going to say up on the PowerPoint, then you might as well let someone else stand up there and do your presentation for you.”

Josh Massaro

  • “Prepare. Prepare. Prepare. Preparation is something I always have known the importance of, but it seems that it is such a vital aspect in Corporate PR. If you are not on your toes and prepared for anything, then you are only making it harder on yourself and your company.”

Jeni Molitor

  • “Planning a campaign is difficult. We were given the task to put together a mini-campaign and there is a lot more that goes into it than what I originally expected. There is so much more that goes into researching a company and promoting a company. Sometimes you have to do it even if you don’t use the product or care for what they are doing, you still need to do your job to the best of your ability.”

Jessica Nguyen

  • “Be engaged. Connect with your audience. Draw them in. Ask them questions or talk to them as if it were one on one. People appreciate it if you connect with them. It makes them feel special and appreciated, and we do appreciate them because they are our audience.”

Michelle Paulino

  • “You Never Stop Learning After College. Professor Nixon continuously tells us that as PR practitioners we have to keep up-to-date on what is going on in the world of PR and in general. A great way in keeping up-to-date is reading the news, listening to podcasts, reading blogs, and reading books about your related field.”
  • “What You Post Online Will Be There Forever. I have been taught this my whole life, but it was not until Professor Nixon’s class that I fully understand. She showed us a website where you could look-up anything that has been posted online, even if it has been deleted. Made me take more precaution when I am posting things on the Internet.”
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How NOT to Hashtag in Twitter

[UPDATE 12.06.2010: Jen Zingsheim and Mark Story had a discussion of this blog post
in last week’s Media Bullseye Radio Roundtable podcast.]

I started this morning just like I start most mornings, with a cup of chicory coffee and a review on my Samsung Epic of what’s been written on Twitter overnight. Things looked pretty calm and innocent until I saw this tweet from CNN Breaking News:

My first reaction to the tweet was: “How horrible for the girl!” Then I reread the tweet. My feelings for the plight of the girl intensified when I noticed that the CNN Breaking News Twitter account had used the hashtags #dead and #raped. My stomach actually turned.

Within seconds of me reading the tweet, I responded with this:

It just seemed best to contact CNN Breaking News directly with my displeasure, rather than complaining about it without “talking” directly to them; I have yet to receive a response, but I wasn’t really expecting one via that account. I also DM’d (direct messaged) a CNN producer to let him know about the firestorm of complaints about the inappropriate hashtags.

Let me back up a little.

  • If you’re new to Twitter, a hashtag (what we used to call a pound sign) is often used in front of a keyword in a tweet. It helps people to search for tweets with that keyword in them.
  • For example, when I am watching a NASCAR race, I will set up a search in TweetDeck to find all tweets with the keyword #NASCAR in them. This allows me to see tweets from people who are interested in the same topic as I am — without having to follow them. When the NASCAR race is over, I simply close the column in TweetDeck, and I no longer see #NASCAR tweets, except from those whom I am already following.

Let’s get back to the tweet I saw this morning from CNN Breaking News. I have several issues with the way this tweet was written, and they all revolve around the use of the hashtags. If I saw the tweet without any hashtags, I would have likely clicked on the link to read the story and not had the gut-wrenching reaction I did.

  • Why would CNN want people to search for the terms #dead or #raped? I could understand it if it was a different tweet with #CyberMonday or #WikiLeaks hashtagged. But “dead” and “raped”? Who actually searches for those terms in Twitter? And why would CNN want to be associated with this? As I mentioned in my tweet to them, it seemed insensitive.
  • Was CNN trying to create a trending topic? If so, those words are not ones I’d ever want to see trend. Ever.
  • And as for “#N.C.” — when hashtagging in Twitter, you have to use one word or phrase, with no punctuation, or the hashtag doesn’t work as planned. The link will only “catch” the letters/numbers that are right after the hashtag. If there’s a period, the link stops. So if someone clicks on #N.C., the search will return tweets where people have hastagged the letter N alone. Not very useful, no?

So what’s the lesson to be learned from this morning’s tweet from @CNNbrk?

Think carefully about what words you hashtag in a tweet. Will clicking on the keyword be beneficial for your readers? If not, then you can still use the words (if they are necessary to get your message across), but avoid the hashtag.

What are your thoughts about the @CNNbrk #hashtagfiasco?

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Corporate Public Relations (#COMM4363) :: Our Semester in Review

To wind down our semester in Corporate Public Relations, each student will create a short review of his or her chosen chapter from the book Reputation Management by John Doorley and Fred Garcia.

Create a three- to five-minute interactive overview of your chapter for our class. Be sure to include at least three things that PR students should know about your chapter. Get creative! But remember that you only have five minutes maximum; after that, I will get out my hook and pull you off the stage (metaphorically speaking). We’ll do our review session in class on Tuesday, Dec. 7.

Also, write a blog post that covers the highlights of your chapter. You may want to look back to your Reading Notes that you’ve already prepared and posted on your own blog. When the post is done, reply to this blog post with telling me the hyperlink to the new review post you have written.

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Personality Profiles :: More than Pre-Obituaries

Photo Credit: "REBOOT!" by Mark Magnusson

In reviewing the Personality Profiles written by my PR Writing students over the last several semesters, I’ve discovered that there are several common errors that seem to show up. Avoiding these common errors will help ensure that someone might actually want to read the story you have written.

  • Treating the story as if it’s a pre-obituary… you know, the obituaries that newspapers and TV stations have waiting, just in case someone famous dies. They tend to simply recite a few key facts from the person’s life. These pre-obituaries, posing as personality profiles for my class, are flat and fail to engage the readers. Yawn.
  • Telling the story in chronological order.Just because we live our lives in chronological order doesn’t mean that is how the stories should be told.
  • Writing a snoozer of a headline. Something like “A True Leader in Our Community!” is not something that would entice someone to read the story.
  • Not reading well-done personality profiles before starting out to write one. People magazine and Sports Illustrated always have numerous profiles in each issue.
  • Not interviewing the person you’re writing about. You can typically learn more about your subject in a face-to-face interview in 30 minutes than you can by reading things others have written for three hours. (Okay, I made up those numbers, but you get my point.) Spend some time learning who the person IS, and then you can better write about what the person DOES.
  • Lack of quotations. Using the words of the subject of the story and those who know the person well can bring the story to life. Aim to incorporate quotations in every three to four paragraphs. They don’t need to be long ones, just ones that punctuate the point you are trying to make.
  • Using the first paragraph or two to recite the subject’s job description. Try leading off with something that might be interesting to the readers instead. You can add in bits and pieces of the job description throughout the story if needed, but please don’t lead with them.
  • Focusing on only one part of the subject’s life. In addition to describing the subject’s connection with the client organization, it’s smart to also sprinkle in some details about outside interests.
  • Making the subject seem superhuman or saccharine. Even if the story is for your internal company newsletter, it’s important to make the subject seem like a real person that others can aspire to becoming like. If you put the subject too high on a pedestal, there’s the danger of creating a persona that is not likable.
  • Failing to use standard news release format. Remember that a personality profile is just a specific type of news release. Datelines, contact information, -MORE-, slugs, end signs and perhaps even boilerplate information are still needed.
  • Neglecting AP Style. See my post on 8 Common Errors for more details on this.

What other tips would you add for creating an effective personality profile?

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Don’t Text in Class . . . And Here’s Why

Text Messaging in Class
As a professor, I'm not ROTFL about cell phones in class

A colleague and I were having a discussion today about cell phone use in class, especially during student presentations. We were of the same mindset that it’s especially rude to be texting while a peer is doing a presentation for a grade. It’s tough enough to be standing up in front of a room full of peers; it’s doubly or triply tough to do it when your peers are (apparently) more interested in a tiny electronic device in their hands than whoever is baring his/her heart and soul by doing a presentation. A great majority of student speakers I have worked with would prefer eye contact and other forms of engagement to the appearance of boredom by the audience. Wouldn’t you?

NOTE: I do have a different view of tweeting in class, if the students are distilling the presentation and sharing soundbites in 140-character segments so that others can also benefit from the presentation. At times, I even encourage tweeting in class.

This reminded me of a blog post I wrote on my Becoming Learner Centered blog a while back. Below is a cross-post of what I wrote in 2008. The sentiment remains the same here in 2010.

Like many educators, I have a short statement in my syllabi stating that I do not want my students to be spending time in class text messaging or surfing the web. But many of my students probably believe this is just because I want them focused on me instead of elsewhere. And that’s partially true.

Why don’t I want them doing other things in class? Read this syllabus excerpt by Professor Cara A. Finnegan. (Cara gave me permission to reproduce her article from her First Efforts blog.)

Technology and the Problem of Divided Attention

In recent years the saturation of cell phones, text messaging, and laptops, combined with the broad availability of wireless in classrooms, has produced something I call the problem of divided attention. A March 25, 2007, article in the New York Times summarized recent studies of productivity in business settings. Researchers found that after responding to email or text messages, it took people more than 15 minutes to re- focus on the “serious mental tasks” they had been performing before the interruption. Other research has shown that when people attempt to perform two tasks at once (e.g., following what’s happening in class while checking text messages), the brain literally cannot do it. The brain has got to give up on one of the tasks in order to effectively accomplish the other. Hidden behind all the hype about multi-tasking, then, is this sad truth: it makes you slower and dumber. For this reason alone you should seek to avoid the problem of divided attention when you are in class. But there’s another reason, too: technology often causes us to lose our senses when it comes to norms of polite behavior and, as a result, perfectly lovely people become unbelievably rude.

For both these reasons, then, turn off your cellphones or set them on silent mode when you come to class; it is rude for our activities to be interrupted by a ringing cellphone. Similarly, text messaging will not be tolerated in class; any student found to be sending or checking text messages during class will be invited (quite publicly) to make a choice either to cease the texting or leave the classroom. You are welcome to bring your laptop to class and use it to take notes, access readings we’re discussing, and the like. You are not welcome to surf the web, check email, or otherwise perform non-class-related activities during class. Here’s my best advice: If you aren’t using it to perform a task specifically related to what we are doing in class at that very moment, put it away.

Thanks, Cara, for explaining why texting in class is not a good idea.

Photo Credit: “Spink!” was originally uploaded to Flickr by apples for lylah

So, what are your thoughts about students texting while other students are giving presentations in class?

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COMM 4363 Final Project Presentations

Photo Credit: The Perfect Software Architect, by Martino Sabia

For your Final Project Presentation in COMM 4363 (Corporate PR), please keep these guidelines in mind. Both the presentation and the final project are due in class on Tuesday, November 16.

In General

  • Share with your class 10 Things People Should Know About [Your Company], based on the research you did for your series of blog posts. Pick and choose the information you find to be most relevant and important to share with your classmates.
  • Dress professionally (business casual at a minimum), just as you would if presenting directly to a client.
  • Follow this basic format (just like you learned in your public speaking class)
    • Introduction (remember to start with an attention getter to lead into your introduction)
    • Body (the 10 Things)
    • Conclusion
  • Please use either PowerPoint or Prezi to augment the spoken part of your presentation, but no Death by PowerPoint. If possible, embed your presentation or presentation slides in your blog.
  • You will use your own computer, not mine. I can help you set it up. (If you have a Mac, bring the appropriate adapter.)
  • Though I love gum and hard candy as much as the next person, avoid them when you are in front of the room.
  • Review my tips on How to NOT Suck as a Guest Speaker; even though this post was about being a guest speaker, not doing a class presentation, many of the guidelines still work well.

Solo Presentation, 5-7 minutes

  • See above

Team Presentation, 17-20 minutes

  • In addition to the 10 Things, also include approximately 10 minutes on an overview of your mini-campaign. Use visuals, as applicable, to back up your points. Be sure to include a section on what you’d do differently if faced with a similar campaign in the future.
  • Each team member must have a speaking role. Practice transitions between speakers, in addition to practicing the content. Also think about where people who are not speaking will be when one of you is presenting. It’s important that the entire team appears engaged during the presentation.

As an Audience Member

  • Treat the speakers with the same level of respect as you would wish for your own presentation.
  • Tweeting during presentations is acceptable. Use the class hashtag of #COMM4363 with any tweets. (Avoid any other use of electronics, please.)
  • Develop a question or two to ask the speakers. I expect to hear at least one question from everyone in the class on the day of presentations.
  • Applaud when the presentations are over.
  • See additional tips on being a good audience member by Cathy Stucker.