Working alone in a home office, the walls of your room can start to close in on you, so it’s nice to get out now and then to meet with other people locally. This afternoon I was invited to speak to a class of seniors in the PR program of one of the local colleges about social media. It’s a topic not well covered in their text book (do any cover it? I don’t know.) and while the instructor has been bringing in pieces of it all semester, she’d asked me to come in and do a deeper dive. Given my lengthy background in teaching/training – and my passion about social media – I was delighted to do so and provided an overview of what’s going on out there with regard to social media from a PR point-of-view. My audience was 25 or so students and one small dog. (The dog seemed to like it.) It was quite fun and I enjoyed hearing and answering their questions.
I set up the presentation as “So You Want to Get a Job in PR? In 2007?” and provided 14 suggestions for what they might do to learn about social media and potentially differentiate themselves from other candidates for jobs. In thinking about it, I should probably write that up as a blog entry here. (Note made to self…) The students were, of course, already into social media in the sense that they pretty much all already had either Facebook or MySpace pages, but outside of that many of them had limited experience, so it was fun.
They turned out to all be seniors, graduating in about 2 months and heading out into the big, wide-open whatever… they are entering PR at an interesting time…. so much is in chaos… and yet, the opportunities are out there in abundence for those that want to dive in. I wish them all well – there is so much ahead of them of which they have absolutely no idea… they’ll be in for a fun ride… 🙂
Dan,
Great post. I actually spoke to some students today. I love talking to students because you can really get a sense of what people of that age in that geographical area know. It’s a snapshot, but a valuable one. Same thing happened today, I mentioned Facebook and MySpace and a few of them even giggled and looked at their friends. I was thinking to myself “Well, now I wish I knew her name because I’d love to see what’s on her page that’s making her blush so much,” then point out to her that, as a job seeker, there’s a good chance a future employer will be looking at that.
Same here, other than those mainstream tools, they weren’t aware of much else. Interestingly, I heard on BuzzOutLoud last week that MySpace is starting a Digg-like service, which I thought was odd until I realized that people don’t know Digg. They know MySpace, but not Digg, so this could be huge. That was verified by the looks I got today when I mentioned blog/Digg monitoring and got the blank stares.
I liked your presentation topic, too, wished I could have seen the York show.