Midterm exam review

Here are the main topics that will be covered on the midterm.

Please ask questions and post possible exam questions in the comments below.

Organizational theory approaches:

• Taylorism
• Bureaucracy (Weber)
• Network theory
• Complex systems/chaos (*)
• Organizational culture

History & Definition

Web 2.0 O’Reilly – defining principles of Web 2.0

McAffee’s definition of Enterprise 2.0 – ESSPs

Adoption of innovations articles

UTAUT model

Can you discuss a couple of factors that influence the adoption of technology?

Social media for cooperation – social bookmarking; file sharing; network effect – importance of tagging & folksonomies(*)

Social media for communication and collaboration – collaboration framework, the role & importance of the elements.

Study Guide for Midterm Exam

[NOTE: I’ll keep updating this post as the semester goes on]

Everything covered in the textbook, on this blog, in class lecture & discussion and even on twitter is fair game on the test.

The test will not only ask you to recall these concepts, but also make critical and ethical judgments about best courses of action.

Evaluation

• See PowerPoint slides on BB
• Different methods for evaluating awareness, acceptance, and action objectives

Implementation/Tactics

• various ways to classify tactics
• know what the tactics are, be able to tell a news release apart from a media advisory, a fact sheet, etc. See the PowerPoint slides & PR Tactics portal on BB, and textbook chapter.

Planning: GOST

• Goals, Objectives, Strategies & Tactics:
  • what they are
  • how to tell them apart
  • how to write good ones
• Types of PR plans
• Rationale for PR planning
• Strategic PR

Research

• Situation Analysis
• Background Research
• Communication audit
• Stakeholder Research (audience analysis)
• Opinion leaders
• SWOT (problem/opportunity)
• primary vs. secondary research
• 2 research mantras 🙂

RPIE – PR Process

Publics

• traditional-nontraditional
• situational theory of publics
• intervening
• primary – secondary
• internal – external
• opinion leaders – decision makers
• coorientation theory
• media convergence
• demographics & psychographics
• stakeholder theory approach vs. value-driven approach
• see also: stakeholder theory

History of PR

• Key people & ideas in the history of PR – see slides on BB

Jobs in PR

• boundary spanning
• employee relations
• media relations
• government relations
• community relations
• B2B relations
• consumer relations
• investor relations
• job titles in various PR settings i.e. an account executive is most likely to work at a PR agency; a public affairs officer… etc.
• PR manager vs. PR technician

PR-Marketing-Advertising

• what is and what is not PR
• be able to recognize and classify examples

PR definitions & theories:

• systems theory
• 4 models of PR
• relationship approach
• relationship dimensions
• rhetorical approach
• issues management
• issue life cycle
• stakeholder theory

Blogging terms & best practices

• blog, page, post
• blog URL, permalink, trackback/pingback, comment
• tag, tag cloud, category, blogroll
• RSS feeds, RSS feed reader
• blogging, microblogging, blogosphere