PR Students and Social Media Communications

Picture by LumaxartOver the last month I gave a series of guest lectures at the Erasmus Hogeschool to last year Public Relations students in Brussels.

The school integrated my old school where I used to study PR (a very, very long time ago) and I was really honored to be asked to teach there.

The students were great; an interactive, motivated bunch with pertinent questions and remarks about social media and PR.

In fact, I learned a lot of things about what I consider my profession thanks to their thoughts and reflections on the subject.

Here are some of the points that struck me:

• The sessions confirmed to me that it is not because most of them are active users of social media that they also "automatically" see the possible connection with business communications. 
• About 90% of the students didn't have a LinkedIn account although they are currently looking for an internship and will be looking for a job next year.
• Almost all of them were very much aware of their privacy on Facebook and didn't keep the default settings.
• None of them were looking to do an internship in agency. Some of them have tried but received no response or were still waiting for one after months...!

These sessions with the students and conversations with Liliane Priem, the teacher responsible for the curriculum made it clear that there is a need to integrate social media education in business communications studies and that we, experienced professionals have a role to play here.

This is a point I also made to my peers at the EACD and I do hope we'll be discussing this topic soon and find ways to help the next generation PR professionals in this area.

If you would know of schools or universities who have successfully integrated the broad topic of social media communications into their PR curriculum, please let me know. We can only learn from each other.

Thanks !

Looking forward to meet you at....

In the next coming months I will be speaking at several conferences and hope to meet some of you there.

Here's the list:

• October 29 - Brussels - Belgium: I'll be giving a full day Kluwer workshop in Dutch on "Web2.0 & External Communications. This is a training day focused on using social media for PR & Marketing efforts. You can find the details and registration form here.

• November 17 - Belgrado - Serbia: The regional EACD debate organiser for Serbia, Andrea Brbaklic,  invited me to speak at an event organised with the Serbian PR Society. I'll be talking about the impact of social media on the Public Relations profession. 

• November 24 - Antwerp - Belgium: I'll be speaking at a full day communications seminar for the communicators of the City of Antwerp on the use of social media for community relations. If you're from "'t Stad", do say hello.

• January 18/19 2010 - Amsterdam - The Netherlands: Marcus Evans is organising a conference of 2 days on PR & Media Relations Effectiveness. I'll be covering social media & media relations and am already looking forward to meet up again with Médard Schoenmaeckers from Syngenta.

Of course, I'll try to "liveblog" these conferences as much as possible and share my experiences there through Twitter updates or short videotweets.

PR Agencies in Belgium & their RSS feeds - edition 2009.

It is that time of the year again where I check about 29 Belgium based PR agencies - or rather their websites - on the use of RSS feeds.

Again, this is nothing scientific; I just go to the website in question, see if an RSS feed is clearly active, clearly visible and tick off a list.

(This is edition N°5 - I started keeping track in 2005.)

Why bother you might ask...

Well, I do think that if you're in the "content business", the "external communications business", the "conversation business" then you need to have an automated feed that syndicates your content - or the content of your clients - to the online world.

As Public Relations professional you need to understand the full potential of really simple syndication and apply it to your website.

This year I also listed if the agencies in question had a clearly linked blog of their own... In some cases I had to search a bit further than the home page but when this is the case it is also indicated in the list.

Now, here are the top level results:

• from the 29 Belgium based PR agencies listed only 8 had an active RSS feed on their website.
• from the same list, the same number of agencies - 8 - have a clearly linked blog.

Some remarkable agencies:

• Outsource, a former client, has completely switched from "classic website" to a full blogging platform.
• RCA Group has no RSS feed on their website but do have a blog with RSS.
• Porter Novelli, a former employer, has a new blog but it is not linked to their website.

Again this year, I am not impressed...

While some agencies really do their best to get with social media and apply it to their day to day work, most of them seem never to have heard of RSS or any other change in online communications recently.

Even when they use RSS, most agencies do not explain what it is or link their feed to an email newsletter.

In most cases you really have to look for a way to subscribe to their content... Which to me is a bit of a contradiction for a PR agency.

If you want to know how you could use RSS, feel free to search my blog for several articles or at least read this one.

You can download the full list here (opens a PDF) and if you're not on the list, or if I oversaw something, please let me know.

As I said, this is nothing scientific, not designed to be, but a simple check up once a year...