Evaluation

As promised in the lecture, here are some tools you can play around with to monitor online conversations and analyze sentiment for free:

Twitter

• Twitter search – type in Clemson and see what people are saying about your university.
  (here’s a bonus search for you You can also use search to keep track of conversations on twitter. For example, PR practitioners engage in a weekly conversation they mark #pr20chat. By searching for #pr20chat you can follow the conversation, and find PR practitioners to follow on twitter).
• See an example of monitoring Twitter with detailed instructions from Chris Brogan
• Twendz is a fun tool – type in a search term, wait for the tweets to load and watch the instant sentiment analysis on the left side. The interface is not very precise and scientific, but it gives you an idea of what can be done with more expensive software.
• Here’s a blog post describing a few other tools for monitoring twitter conversations

Blogs

• The easy way to monitor blog conversations for free is to use a search engine that searches only blogs – for example, Google Blog Search. (Similarly, you can use Google News to search for news. Clemson has been in the news lately, check it out.)
• Google Alerts – You can very easily set up an alert and Google will send you an e-mail every time a certain topic of your choice (say, Clemson) is mentioned in the news. This can also be delivered to your RSS feed reader instead of your e-mail. You can use Google Alerts to monitor news, blogs, group discussions, even online videos. Awesome tool – and it’s FREE!
• Technorati – is another famous blog search and indexing service. Try searching the blogoshpere using Google Blog Search and then Technorati, using the same search term (i.e. Clemson). Note if the search results are different, and if so, how.

If you want to learn more about PR measurement and evaluation:

• subscribe to Katie Paine’s Measurement Blog – also check out the blogs she links to from her blogroll (on the left side)
• read Katie Paine’s book Measuring Public Relationships

News Releases

Please head over to PRWeb and BusinnessWire (two major news release distribution services) and read at least 6 news releases of your choice.

Here are the latest news releases on PRWeb

Here are the latest news releases on BusinessWire

As you read the news releases, try to pay attention to the following:

• what is the news the release is communicating? is it newsworthy? for whom?
• what are common format elements that all news releases seem to have?
• what is the writing style of news releases?

It might be a good idea to write a blog post on your PROpenMic blog summarizing your observations.

Then, listen to the lecture about News and News Releases, and start tackling the news release assignments on Blackboard.

PR examples mentioned in implementation lecture

• Edelman New Media Academic Summit (follow the twitter conversations from the summit)
• GM blog & twitter account
• Clemson online news room
• GHS website
• Bi-Lo charity golf tournament

Please head over to PROpenMic to post and discuss your PR examples.

Media Relations readings

1. The Pitch That Cried Wolf – reminds you that you have to have NEWS
2. Making of a Media Darling: A Simple How-To – tells you how to pitch when you have news
3. What All PR People Should Know about Journalists – know your audience!
4. Back to Pitching Basics – the ingredients of a tailored pitch
5. How to Send a Personal E-mail – great tips

If you don’t do so already, please consider subscribing to and following all these blogs.

Public Relations Ad

In the previous post (video) I mentioned the difference between product (marketing) advertising and public relations advertising.

Here is a timely example of a public relations ad, scheduled to start airing today on TV.

(If you need a bit of context, it’s about GM declaring bankruptcy.)

See also this interesting post by Shel Holtz (twitter) about GM’s online communication strategies.

Advertising-Marketing-PR

Here is a brief explanation of the main differences between advertising, marketing, and PR:

Advice for PR students

Here’s a post by Richard Edelman, president of one of the largest multinational PR companies, with advice for PR students & grads.

Also, you might enjoy this video, also prepared by Edelman, that interviews senior PR people from the largest PR agencies worldwide on the skills of the PR pro of the future.

If you’re considering a career in PR, both of these are very useful to help you prepare for success

So, what do you think? What skills do you already have? What do you want to work on?

You will fail (at first)

I thoughts students who are just beginning to learn social media will find this post by Mack Collier encouraging: You will fail at social media. No, really, read it, it IS encouraging.

Follow Mack Collier on twitter.

PR ethics

Before creating your own list of ethical guidelines, check out these cases of PR gone bad:

• Target rounders
• Pitching & hype
• Dishonesty in viral videos

Please post any questions and responses in the comments section.

Former PR students on learning Twitter

I posted on my other blog, PR Connections, the results of an open-ended survey. Head over there to read what last semester’s PR students had to say about learning Twitter.