A year ago the Talk Is Cheap ‘unconference’ attracted about 160 PR practitioners and students. It was meant to encourage communicators to find out more about the growth and potential of social media. During and after the event I was often asked: “So, when is the next one?”

I hedged. Did the Web 2.0 space need another annual event? Knowing I was retiring from teaching, did I want to tackle a second one? Well, Christine Smith and Barry Waite, who both teach at Centennial, wanted to see the ‘unconference’ continue. So, Talk Is Cheap 2.0 is taking place on Tuesday Wednesday, November 12, at Centennial’s Centre for Creative Communications. Social Media tactics have grown remarkably in the past 12 months, but there’s still lots to know and talk about as we try to get a handle on how to use it effectively.

Check out the details at http://talkischeap.pbwiki.com, then, if you’re in the Toronto area, sign up to attend.

See you there!
Talk Is Cheap

In a recent post, Ann Subervi of The Ethical Optimist blog notes that PR Programs Get Failing Grade. Her concern is based on a lack of ’smarts’ she sees in recent PR grads when it comes to some of the basic media relations skills required by her agency.

As tempting as it is to wonder why the agency’s clients are only interested in “Did you get my message out there?” instead of the results of getting out the message, or why agencies tend to lean so heavily on the trying to ’sell’ story ideas, I was more interested in the challenge her concerns pose to PR educators.

The problem is this: how do we adequately prepare PR students for a field that blankets so many working sectors and embraces so many different communication activities? Ann is looking for grads who can talk (or pitch or telemarket) to the media. Other practitioners are looking for grads who can put together a realistic communication proposal or plan, or write compelling copy, or work effectively with printers, or plan and carry out events, or reseach effectively, or … (add your particular need here).

The danger in trying to capture every ‘must-have’ and many ‘nice-to-haves’ in curriculum is ending up with a diluted program that means graduates know a little bit about a lot, and not much in depth about anything.

Many practitioners profess a desire to interview grads who see the big picture and have a sound knowledge of communications planning. In practise, many of them avoid these grads in favour of communicators who can effortlessly ‘do’ what’s needed at the entry level: write the release, churn out the media list, do the media monitoring, publish the newsletter.

So, can PR programs be all things to all people? No, they can’t. Even college programs that concentrate on the applied skills that Ann seeks can’t easily cover it all. I don’t know of any programs that do meaningful role-plays to pitch media. It’s not a bad idea, but an unlikely one if you have a class of 40 students.

The best solution to developing specific skills that match the student’s strengths and interests with the organization’s needs is the internship. It’s fertile ground to help the student get relevant, realistic day-to-day training. The investment of time by the organization comes with the potential payoff of acquiring an employee who fits the culture and has the ’smarts’.

In nearly three decades teaching writing courses and pouring over thousands of student stories, I’ve been subjected to plenty of grammatical and style missteps. Some of them reared their heads more often than others. Here’s a look at 10 prevalent violations:

1. Its vs. It’s. I doubt you’re particularly surprised by this one. It has plagued writers because common sense would love to nudge us to towards seeing the apostrophe as a possessive instead of its (not it’s!) role in a contraction. Okay, it’s (not its!) not logical. All the more reason to commit it to memory. It-apostrophe-s has only one meaning — a contraction for it is. Everything else is its.

2. Comma Splices. Sentence structure doesn’t appear to have the same palatability it once had. More and more students aren’t done once they’ve delivered their subject-verb-object content. Instead, they attach a comma to the hind end and launch into another discrete thought. And sometimes, they go at for a third or fourth time before the sentence(s) gets its period. Where is the phenomenon coming from? E-mail?

3. Overuse of ‘that’. I truly believe that the word ‘that’ is one that is used so much that it’s overwhelming. It would be nice to be able to develop a little Word macro that would flag each time that the word ‘that’ appears and ask: “Recite the sentence without the ‘that’. Does it have to be there? If yes, great. If no, kindly annihilate it.”

4. The ‘ize’ have it. Sure, in a business that loves to ’strategize’ and ‘prioritize’ everything, this is a tough one to avoid these days — some dictionaries have already caved in on the above examples. Still, it behooves effective corporate writers to take the trouble to see if the word actually exists. Then again, maybe I should just sanctionize the practice and move on.

5. Everyday vs. every day. This one is downright rampant and I blame advertising for it. Huge companies (McDonald’s and Loblaws supermarkets to name only two) are spending big dollars to install banners and run ads full of slogans that promise savings, quality, or freshness everyday (sic). Everyday is an adjective — that’s it. Otherwise, the copywriter should be choosing option two: ‘every day’. I’m waiting for organizations to start promising savings, quality or freshness everyweek or everymonth.

6. ‘Then’ instead of ‘than’. I keep hoping it’s a typo, but my confidence begins to sink when I’ve tripped over three or four of them in one story. That’s when I know it’s a bigger problem then I thought.

7. Verb creations. Whether we’re impacting shareholders or trashing parties, there’s something very leading edge about coining new verbs that are pedastalled (my word; I hope I’m the first to use it!) on nouns.

8. Cliches. Sorry I didn’t go the whole nine yards and include the accent over the ‘e’ on this puppy; it hurts me more than it hurts you. Sometimes I think cliches are hotter than a snake’s ass in a wagon rut — if they serve a purpose the writer can defend. Most times? Just a sign of lazy writing.

9. Use vs. Utilize. Past students can tell you this one was a particular Schlee bugbear. In most cases you don’t need to utilize ‘utilize’. Simply use ‘use’.

10. High school. If you’ve been raised on a diet of local sports coverage in your community paper, I’ll buy the excuse. This typo is almost the norm in collegiate sports reporting. Google the non-word ‘highschool’ and see what you get. The search engine behemoth simply ignores the yahoos who think the term is one word.

I’ll stop at 10, but I can’t resist adding two of my favourite malapropisms. On more than one occasion, students writing about compiling materials referred in stories to the ‘copulation of results’. Another student writing about the subject’s work in health care had me confused about the person’s work with ‘leopards’. It took me awhile to realize it was meant to be ‘lepers’.

A comment by recent Centennial grad Brandon Carlos to a post by Judy Gombita on PR Conversations about the launch of PR Week’s Canadian newsletter, rued the lack of a Canadian PR textbook and similar resources. The observation prompted a second posting from Judy who was on the hunt for materials about Canadian corporate communications and public relations.

The result has been a wonderful, if sometimes frustrating, conversation about PR education and research in this country (and others, like South Africa). Check it out at http://www.prconversations.com/?p=452. Fraser Likely’s bibiography alone makes it worthwhile to move your cursor back to the end of the previous sentence and press down.

One of the nice things about teaching folks who go on to make part of their living through their writing is seeing their bylines in unexpected places. So, it was a pleasant surprise last week to stumble across a graduate’s name attached to a story in the feisty entertainment tabloid, The Georgia Strait, in Vancouver where I’m on vacation. Bernice Chan has been living in Beijing for more than a year now and has had a front row seat to the city’s sometime rocky preparations for the Olympic Games set to start in about two weeks.

Her article in The Georgia Strait was billed as a travel piece and it’s a wonderful view of the irritants and joys she’s found since moving there. She indicates that when she arrived she was “intent on witnessing the changes in the city, and hoped to learn more about the place and its people.” What follows is a concise, anecdotal overview of some of her findings.

To get an even better sense of her cultural and Games prep experiences, simply go to the continuing story found on her blog: Beijing Calling. (You’ll note that Bernice is listed in my blogroll to the right.)

As Beijing becomes a focus of world attention in August, check out Bernice’s exposure to cuisine, security, transportation and entertainment in China’s capital city. It will be a refreshing alternative to the generic pieces served up by the sports networks during the actual Games.

Vancouver pavilion in Beijing

The Beijing Summer Olympic Games haven’t yet begun, but a pavilion in China’s capital city promoting the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games in 2010 is already in place. Photo by Bernice Chan.

nmas_logo_2.jpg prweek_logo_001.jpg Dozens of PR educators from across the U.S. (with one or two Canadians thrown in for good measure) gathered in Chicago last week for the second New Media Academic Summit, sponsored by Edelman and PR Week. Eleven panels over two days prodded the social media phenomenon from a variety of angles and I came away having discovered some new case studies and having some SM truisms reinforced. Let me share five thoughts:

1. Trust is earned by yielding control, Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman, reminded participants. Giving up some control of the communication process continues to be one of the toughest characteristics of interactive media tools to sell. In many ways it’s a sad commentary on the level of confidence organizations have in their own workforces. Those who have taken the risk have generally found the benefits outweigh the possibility of an indiscretion.

2. One of the most needed skills in social media is experience with change management and negotiation. Reread the preceding paragraph, and it becomes obvious why Charlene Li, Forrester researcher and author of Groundswell, thinks these skills are every bit as important as picking up some mastery with the social media tools. Those communicators with the ability to make a case when blogs or wikis or podcasts or networks are the right tactics to slap onto an objective are the ones we should value.

3. If an idea is timely and has merit, stick to it. Drew McGowan inherited sagging sales of the Brita water filter when he joined Clorox as a marketing communications manager. He saw the growing concern about the plastic waste in water bottles and worked hard to convince the company to promote it’s simpler alternative: Brita. The FilterForGood pledge campaign, along with a supporting Facebook group and Google map, raised Brita’s profile as a way to be more environmentally friendly. Brita sales have reflected the success of the strategy.

4. Watch out for mobile. A variety of presenters, from Jay Bernhardt of the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention to Sean Moffitt of Agent Wildfire, indicated that mobile technology is the logical direction for new media when it comes to actually accessing it. Cell phones and their offshoots are already in the hands of many people who may not have easy computer access.

5. Virtual interaction is wonderful. Face-to-face: more so. I have thoroughly enjoyed the conversations I’ve had in the blogosphere and equally enjoyed listening to knowledgeable people chat on their podcasts about things of interest to me. But even better is the chance to meet virtual acquaintances in person. I was particularly pleased to meet Robert French of Auburn University, Karen Russell of the University of Georgia, and Neville Hobson of For Immediate Release, at the Summit.

The number of posts on this blog since the beginning of the year hasn’t even kept pace with the frequency of issues of many magazines. Sorry about that. There are a couple of reasons for my posting sloth . One is that my attention has been diverted to a handful of other blogs — both academic and personal. Another is that the winter semester was particularly busy.

Well, enough of the excuses. It’s time for change. First of all, the next semester won’t be as busy. That’s because there won’t be a next semester — for me. At the end of June, I retire from Centennial after 28 years of teaching. It’s a move I’ve been contemplating for awhile. Having decided to take the leap feels rather exhilarating. I’m looking forward to spending more time writing, reading and perhaps consulting. I’m also looking forward to spending some time doing things that have nothing to do with corporate communications and public relations.

So what does this all mean for a blog that purports to be about Public Relations Education in Canada? In the short term (after a quiet summer), I’ll likely continue to comment on subjects relating to PR academia. It’s tough to break a habit developed over nearly three decades! As for the longer term … not sure. I do know I enjoy blogging and the potential social media brings to public relations.

For those who have been kind enough to drop by and read, don’t cancel your subscription. Perhaps my perch located an arms-length away from day-to-day teaching will add a different hue to my ramblings.

For those I’ve met in the non-virtual world, please consider dropping by for my official send-off. A few details:

When: Thursday, June 12, 5:30 to 8 p.m.

Where: The Courtyard, Centennial’s Centre for Creative Communications, 951 Carlaw Avenue, Toronto

RSVP by June 6 to 416-289-5000 ext. 2750 or e-mail rsvpccc(at)centennialcollege(dot)ca

Every semester when it’s time to look at writing effective news releases, I relaunch my search for good examples. It’s not an easy task. Well-written releases seem to be a rarity, even though the World Wide Web gives me access to thousands of them.

Why is that? The chasm between the content of most releases and the information actually used by journalists is usually very wide. Year after year, nothing seems to change; news releases continue to be unclear, wordy, hyped-up missives littered with phony quotes.

It’s worth remembering that the move towards social media releases was not initially prompted by the allure of all the new multimedia tools in the digital world. It was prompted by the sad quality of most current releases. Check out Tom Foremski’s original diatribe that sparked the debate, and a great conversation by Brian Solis and Shel Holtz on the IABC Cafe2Go podcast for more about that.

Ultimately, tools and formats won’t help a poorly written release. Although I realize many releases suffer from endless rewrites and approvals that turn them into semantic mush, we need to do better.

Here are five reasons I think many releases stink:

1. Lengthy, tedious leads. The first paragraphs of most news releases are insufferably long. If published that way, they’d form daunting blocks of text designed to thwart eyeball-appeal. Which, of course, is why most publications have to rework them. In my introductory writing classes, students are not allowed to write lead paragraphs that exceed 30 words. I’ve seen nothing over the years to convince me to stop using that guideline.

2. Phony quotes. The use of quotations can add so much credibility to a news release. Journalists are hungry to have them. We punt this opportunity by inserting quotes that simply aren’t natural. They read like laboriously crafted written statements (that’s because they actually are laboriously crafted written statements). To literally quote from a recent release:

“… we have provided in these documents for a solid long-term framework for the further benefit of consumers, in which we will control rate increases; maintain reliability; introduce competition in generation; require performance standards; strongly encourage renewables; ensure proper regulatory oversight; enhance environmental protection; and encourage efficiency.”

People don’t talk this way (at least, they shouldn’t). Can’t we cut the journalists some slack here and give them something they might be able to use in a story?

3. Unsubstantiated hype. Somehow, we think that if our release says the event was a success (or the new product is the best on the market, or the revised service represents a dramatic improvement), the public and the media will accept these generalizations without any evidence to support the claim. Give your readers some credit; tell them the what and why of your story and let them decide if it’s a success, the best, or dramatically improved. For every newspaper that runs your promotional hyperbole, there are inevitably several others who wonder why you think they’ll run your thinly disguised advertisement for free.

4. Preoccupation with announcements. So many releases kick off with the fact that an announcement is being made, instead of telling readers what was announced. “Convoluted International announced yesterday that it has acquired Baffling Canada.” Why, exactly, are words three through six in this sentence? I’d wager announced is the most common first verb found in news releases. I’d wager that in most of those releases, making an announcement is not the actual story.

5. Gobbledygook. Sure, every field of endeavour has its terminology and jargon. It’s a not-so-subtle demonstration of expertise. But do we really have to lace our releases with it? Can’t we just tell the reader what a renewable is? Can’t we find a nice English translation for “The company will fully commercialize the intrinsic value of its intellectual property.”?

This is starting to sound uncomfortably like a lecture. That wasn’t my intent. I’m simply looking for some examples of well written news releases. Can you steer me in the right direction?

Opened my blog today to find it had a new look. Can’t say I was particularly keen on it. Can’t say I know how it got there. Did I accidently hit a new theme button? Was I asleep at the Dashboard? Don’t know.

Restoring my year-old insipid lacy theme did remind me that it’s time for a different look. That will happen, but I’d like to be at the controls when it does.

edublogtheme.jpg

Temporary Class Act look: streetscape inspired by Mondrian?

UPDATE: Mar. 13 - I’m test driving a new visual theme for A Class Act, with an image of our campus courtyard at The Centre for Creative Communications. Ultimately, I agree with Judy Gombita’s comment below: these kinds of redesigns are often jarring at first, but before long we can’t really remember the old look.

Megan Ramsay, a Centennial postgrad PR student, asks the following question in a recent blog posting: Will being a waitress help my career in public relations? She goes on to demonstrate how many of the skills and demands in her job serving food at a Toronto East Side Mario’s have helped prepare her for the PR world.

Students in our Career Management class often want to know the value in shovelling unrelated experience onto their resumes. They’ve served food and beer, sold clothing, taught English as a second language or coached minor sports. Include it? Or leave it out?

Not surprisingly, the answer is decidedly mixed. Some communication managers tell them to skip it. Others indicate it demonstrates the ability to multi-task, or handle a client’s needs, or manage a team or … you get the idea.

Ultimately, the right decision probably comes down to running each unrelated job through a checklist that doesn’t focus on duties but on transferable skills and accomplishments. Communicators are in the business of measuring their results (at least, they should be), so finding ways to express transferable skills in these terms adds to the argument of including unrelated jobs with relevant outcomes. For example, to what degree did the student’s initiative on the sales floor have an impact on improved sales?

Personally, I think well expressed transferable skills would carry more weight on a resume than generic cliche-ridden objective statements or lists of attributes without supporting examples. But, as it turns out, I’m not hiring anyone at the moment.

So, what do you think? Include the unrelated jobs or leave them out? Megan makes a good case for inclusion. Waitressing probably is helping her PR career — but it also made her too tired to make my morning class today :-)