so this is mass communication?

Given that my research agenda has traditionally been online political communication, you can imagine my pleasure when I saw that PBS is teaming up with YouTube for a “video your vote” event. Yep, exactly what it sounds like. They want their army of citizen journalists to interview people, talk about the issues & (if possible) record voting irregularities during the election. A select group of videos will be featured on PBS‘ election coverage.

I already submitted my “early vote” video from a few weeks ago.

This event is not so surprising when you consider that consumer-generated content is KING this election cycle. We saw hints of it during the 2004 election, especially with the grassroots support of the Dean campaign. But that was nothing like we have now in 2008.

At the same time that we have more citizens picking up their flips or blogging from their blackberry, we have a a world where mainstream media is actually beginning to embrace social media. I wouldn’t say they get it as much as they humor us the audience with the novelty of Twitter integration on CNN and YouTube video calls — but it’s happening & that is a start.

So video your vote. If you do, post your link here too!

The first-ever live stream of a presentation at UGA Connect WORKED. Well, sort of.

I was thrilled that Karen Russell allowed me to take a chance & live stream my presentation on relationship and ethics at Connect. From my perspective, the presentation was just like any other one that I ever done … the only change was that I clicked a button before hand to start the stream then ignored the laptop the rest of the presentation.

It was my intention to record the presentation so I could also post that … but, it being my first ever live-stream on demand, I failed to remember to hit record the broadcast. Sigh.

On my end, the chat didn’t work. That probably would have confused me anyway. I hear there was a lot of talk about me being sponsored by Herbal Essence (perhaps because my hairs were so loud & proud?) & requests for me to put my new puppy on the live stream. Sorry guys, no sponsor & Ali is across the street napping right now. She can’t be bothered. Apparently there was also some discussion of my mixing the phrase “big honkin’” with quantitative statistics.

I understand that Auburn’s Robert French also put the live stream up on PR Open Mic, which makes me happier than you can ever imagine. This is what social media is all about. Sharing information, experiences & get togethers. I love it.

I’m told there were more than 10 remote viewers across the nation - mostly practitioners, viewing remotely. It doesn’t get any better than that.

I hope more people try to experiment with live streaming conferences …. just remember to hit the record button!

Note: Image from Kevin Dugan (@prblog) of his desktop while watching my live stream.

During my presentation at the UGA Connect conference in Athens, I plan to present a pilot test experiment I did looking at the impact of ethics on relationship. I plan to mention following:

• Tom Kelleher & Barbara Miller’s seminal paper on blogs as relationship tools
• Sweetser & Emily Metzgar blog experiment on the role of relationship during a crisis (pdf)
• BMW Rampenfest campaign explained
• BMW Rampenfest campaign coverage on CNN
• BMW YouTube videos (trailer, part 1, 2, 3, fake filmmaker’s channel)
• Word of Mouth Marketing Association ethics

If you are able to tune in, please join the live video stream & chat around (give or take) 11:15 a.m. EST Saturday, Sept. 20.

Earlier this summer I talked about how much I was looking forward to (seemingly-now annual) UGA Connect. Well guess what - it’s here!

This weekend (started earlier this afternoon, already) is Connect. The conference focuses on the use of social media in public relations & brings together academics, practitioners & students. But mostly practitioners.

You can follow the conference a number of ways … blog, twitter, twemes, flickr, you know the list.

I talked Karen Russell, my colleague & conference organizer, into letting me try something new this year too. I’m going to live stream my presentation on relationships. I will turn the stream on at when I go up (after Kami Huyse), probably around at 11:15 a.m. EST Saturday, Sept. 20.

Check us out, and, well - CONNECT!

For the past several years, I have experimented with having online office hours. I have a special AIM account that I put on the syllabus. I tell students that while I don’t schedule my time online, if they see me there then they know I’ve made myself available to them.

Today Dr. Alex Halavais (who seems to be providing all sorts of blog fodder for me lately) shared his version of online office hours. He’s live streaming video of himself, from home, via UStream. Office hours in UStream work like this:

• professor turns on vid cam (from home, office, sailboat)
• video and audio streams to anyone on the WWW who accesses the URL
• visitors to the stream can be anonymous & type in questions
• visitors could chose to log in using UStream or OpenID, if desired
• visitors type in an open streaming chat to communicate with professor & others on site

This is too cool for school.

I asked Alex what he thought about the ethics of student privacy if one were to do this in her real campus office hours. He said he would post a sign & advise the student upon entry that this was streaming on the Internet. You can liken it to having the door open during office hours because people in the hall can overhear what is happening inside the office. If the student has something private to discuss (grade, personal issue, etc) then you can turn the camera off. Simple.

Benefits:

• professor doesn’t HAVE to be on campus for office hours
• students don’t have to physically make it to obscure campus location to talk to professor
• some students have the same questions so answering in an open forum helps all
• courses which are taught via the Internet (distance learning) enable more personal communication with professor
• no special account necessary to view stream or type text questions
• extends office hour audience to colleagues (almost all of Alex’s “visitors” were other professors)
• may increase student comfort with visiting office hours (anonymity, lack of geographic constraints or campus parking space!)

Drawbacks:

• possibly reduces the “drop by” of former students, with whom you often have great interactions
• reduces the personal attention paid to single student that occurs when student visits professor for one-on-one office visit
• back channel of text chat means there are two conversations occurring at once (video & text)
• retains the class power structure of professor talking AT student, not having a conversation WITH the student
• requires webcam tech & good Internet connection by professor
• may reduce student comfort with visiting office hours (unsure of tech, shy, etc)

Yes, benefits also show up as drawbacks!

What do you think about these online office hours? As a professor, would you do it? As a student, would you use it?

Everyone talks about how social media is changing everything. Media, professional networking, credibility - you name it. Sometimes education is thrown into the mix, but I’ll have to admit that even I never thought about this new classroom I’ll describe here.

Thanks to Dr. Alex Halavais who posted a link the link through Twitter (@halavais), I found this post on Media Shift about what NYU’s very respected journalism school was doing in their teaching of social media in the newsroom. The post was by NYU student Alana Taylor.

And man, it was not pretty for NYU.

This represents a new classroom, where once-private teacher evaluations & complaints are more than public … especially when they are endorsed as a “special report” on a very credible Web site.

(sidenote, wonder what Dr. Jay Rosen, who teaches at NYU & writes PressThink, has to say about this?)

In all these days of talking about consumer-generated content and the increased level of credibility for “someone like me” that you’ve never even met has in recommending or rejecting something (Yelp, Amazon reviews, etc.), it never occurred to me that students could or would use it as a place to so one-sidedly air their grievances publicly about a class or professor. Never.

Now, mind you, I knew that this happens in spaces like RateMyProfessor or similar sites & I was fine with that.

But something about Alana’s tirade against her professor, her classes & the NYU journalism program as a whole really struck a nerve with me. Not to mention that her blog post happens to be published on a well-read media blog, hosted on the PBS server. I’d say that takes RateMyProfessor to the next level, wouldn’t you?

Gotta say I even I didn’t see that one coming.

In the beginning of the semester, especially in a newly developed elective course, it can be challenging to communicate the course to students. Assignments or projects may seem to lack the level of guidance presented in other classes, the professor may seem disorganized - lots of things can happen. Sometimes the professor really is disorganized, and sometimes it just takes time for the students to “get it.”

Traditionally, student complaints begin with adult and professional one-on-one discussions with the professor in office hours. If the complaint is not resolved, it continues up the chain of academic command.

This Media Shift/Alana Taylor method, however, is worrisome for so many different reasons in my view. Maybe when I get tenure, I’ll go into them all.

So anyway. Read that post if you haven’t already. And don’t forget to look at the comments.

Keeping with my online political public relations program of research, this study (with my amazing colleague Dr. Ruthann Weaver Lariscy at UGA) looked at a social media tool new to the 2006 midterm elections.

Kaye D. Sweetser & Ruthann Weaver Lariscy. (2008). Candidates Make Good Friends: An Analysis of Candidates’ Uses of Facebook. International Journal of Strategic Communication, 2, 175-198.

Through content analysis of Facebook wall comments in U.S. House and Senate races during the 2006 midterm election, this study describes young potential voters’ comments (quantity, valence, etc.) through the lens of the dialogic communication theory of public relations. Findings indicate that individuals who wrote on candidate walls perceive themselves on friendly terms with the candidates, overwhelmingly write messages that are shallow and supportive, and are positive in tone. Candidates rarely, if ever, respond to these messages; although the mere use of Facebook is a dialogic feature, researchers conclude campaigns are not using it for two-way symmetrical relationship building.

We have more work coming out from the huge multi-cell survey on the professional application of blogs in the journalism & PR fields. This study, just published in JMCQ, looks at the issue of credibility that professional journalists and public relations practitioners put on blogs, and relates it to use.

Kaye D. Sweetser, Lance V. Porter, Deborah Soun Chung, & Eunseong Kim (2008). Credibility and the use of blogs among professionals in the communication industry. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 85(1), 169-185.

This study examines use, credibility, and impact on the communication industry of blogs as seen by professional journalists and public relations practitioners. Informed by the uses and gratifications perspective and using an online survey, the study used factor analysis to reveal simplistic blog use categorizations as being either interactive or noninteractive. Results also indicate that those who are labeled “high users” in both factors assign more credibility to the medium. Differences between journalism and public relations professionals were examined.

Other studies from this line of research include:

• Uses and Perceptions of Blogs: A Report on Professional Journalists and Journalism Educators
• Blog power: Examining the effects of practitioner blog use on power in public relations

I was very pleased to present a paper, “On the Ballot & in the Loop: The Dialogic Capacity of Candidate Blogs in the 2008 Election,” on behalf of my team of co-authors at AEJMC last week in Chicago. The paper stemmed from a project in my undergraduate public relations research course at UGA.

In this paper, we compared 80 different blogs from gubernatorial, house, senate & presidential candidate blogs during the primary leading up to this November’s election. This paper focused on the female candidates and their use of blogs.

Thanks to Grady doctoral student Kristin English, we have video!

One of the first steps in a PR program’s entry in the world of social media is often monitoring. I found this to be true in much of my research, & well it just makes sense.

So we set up Google alerts, use blog search engines & keep a watchful eye on TweetScan.

Prof. Robert French from Auburn shared an invite with me so I could check out a new service called StartPR. The online service boasts the ability to easily compile all these searches into a single place to streamline social media monitoring. You guessed it - it’s a clip service for the social Web.

I tried it out using a few terms that were niche enough that wouldn’t provide an overload, but big enough to return some hits.

I was very impressed with:

• ease of setting up the search terms
• quickness of returning items
• ability to mark items as read or keep them as unread
• visual display of items — layout, easy to see the date an item was posted & blog source, listing of the search engine through which it was found
• ability to add others in your office to the account so you can all see what is happening (big picture & response)
• ability to assign others particular items for action (tasking)
• place to paste in comments internally (called “notes”)
• built-in response management program to track whether you/your PR folks replied/commented on the post

That last item is really the coolest part — but heck, you might already have a bigger internal system integrated with other media efforts set up for that.

What I didn’t like:

• most of the returns were items that had been caught via Google alerts
• heavy reliance on Google as a source (only other source in my searches was Technorati)
• had to scroll really far down (using Firefox on a Mac) when in the notes section & didn’t immediately see all the options
• ignored non-text social media: nothing from YouTube, Flickr, audio or video etc returned
• ignored social networks: nothing from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc returned

Areas for improvement (i.e., my “wouldn’t it be cool if” list):

• include number of comments (live feed) made on each item returned
• ability to sort items by date, blog, number of comments, those you’ve replied to, etc
• more personalized fields/options in the “notes” area
• integration of metrics (other than frequency of post per day report) into the system
• expand service to cover non-text multimedia (video, audio, images)

All in all, it looks like a neat little tool … but I wouldn’t pay for it (since good old fashion alerts & searches can get you the same information + more) unless they up’ed the ante to add more sophisticated monitoring features.

Note: I was given a free trial of this service from a friend. It was my idea to write the review (no one asked me to). Finally, I have 5 invites available for a free trial of this site up for grabs if you are interested. First come, first served & be sure to give me your e-mail address.