If you’ve been wondering what’s been keeping me from updating the blog lately, there need no be any mystery: this is the home stretch of final projects for school. Not the least of which is my masters degree Capstone Thesis paper.
Any one of these projects could warrant a blog post of it’s own, and I will be glad to share more about them after each is completed. In a meantime, here’s a little insight into what a Graduate student in communications can accomplish.
Practicum: My team has been building a long-term strategic communications plan for Living Classrooms, a non-profit that serves communities in the DC-metro area with hands-on environmental education and workforce development; they call it “Learning By Doing”. This group does amazing work with young people who live in underprivileged areas, but one of the drawbacks of their success is having so many diverse programs it is difficult for newsmedia to make a clear focused story about what it is they do exactly.
One solution I have contributed, which fits the group’s communication strategy, is by making a Blog and Twitter for them to get the word out. I’ll cue you in on how we plan to help a non-profit grow as donors face a recession soon.
Management: We’ve been given a mock assignment in this class, responding to an RFP from the American Red Cross. Our group has been designing a complete response, including plans for a multi-city festival and a localization model for more than 700 chapters of the Red Cross. We’ll be competing with another group for the contract in an upcoming presentation, which I’ll try to share here.
Social Marketing: Diabetes is not “Your Grandparent’s disease” any longer; it increasingly impacts younger people. I’ve conducted an environmental scan of the issue, and conducted original primary research through in-depth interviews with students. From there we’ve designed a comprehensive social marketing campaign, that doesn’t just change attitudes but people’s behaviors as well. I’ve already built a mock-up of the online network presence, which is key to our strategy.
Seminar/Capstone: My thesis involves original research of a scholarly nature, but with real-world application to the problem of energy conservation. Although I am exploring an academic subject, exploring through case study and interviews how individuals are motivated to change their behaviors, I am writing it so that anyone can understand the issue. Hopefully my research will help me build the soapbox I need to come out of my degree with specialization in opinion leaders, agenda setting, and marketing as they apply to the salient public issues that brought me into PR.
I’ll be sure to tell you a little more about what I’ve learned… just as soon as I finish working through them of course. Stay tuned.
Here’s a few updates to previous posts, and some news on my professional life:
The Twitter Internship is soon to become simply An Internship. Last week I was happy to join New Media Strategies as their intern, starting in May 2009. I’m looking forward to learning more about how they use new media tools, including Twitter where I got their attention to begin with, to participate in online communities where they promote and protect brands for their clients. I think we’ll be a good fit together since we share the same inclination to try new online tools for ourselves so that we can understand any opportunities they offer for those we represent.
I have signed up for summer semester at American University. The two last classes of my Graduate degree in Public Communication will be Crisis and Political Communications. And since they take place in the evening, it shouldn’t be any trouble for my internship.
Rock the Vote, which I had previously applied for an internship, has begun to offer a fellowship program for young students like myself. This largely self-defined fellowship encourages individual innovation using social media to reach young people and engage them in civics. Although I probably will not be able to become part of their program because of my internship responsibilities, I hope to join their team and help out via Telecommuting over the course of their campaign. Ask me or tweet Chris Kennedy for an invitation if you’re interested in joining the program.
To date I was able to raise $195 from 7 donors for People to People on Facebook. Although this did not reach my goal, it surpassed my expectations, and has raised the bar for non-profits like PTP online. I am proud of what I could contribute using these social media tools as an individual, and look forward to helping them in the future.
While some of these updates might warrant a post of their own, thanks for letting me be a little self-indulgent. If you’re dying to keep up on the latest as it happens, why not join me on Twitter already? After all, it did help me get this internship, etc…
Everyone already knows that putting a video on YouTube might be a good way to get the word out about your campaign. Of course it’s not very easy for yours to stand out, so it’s important to explore the new venues where your message could be seen and heard.
To be sure YouTube is still where it’s at: for most internet users it is the default site to visit when you’re looking for a video, making it the second most popular search engine behind their parent Google. But although YouTube is supported with the largest collection of video in the world, it is not well designed to support productions of high-quality content from the Entertainment industry; their video ubiquity does not equal market dominance in video forever.
Even as YouTube prepares to launch a new video platform for premium content (ie broadcasters and advertising), HULU has begun to establishing itself as a successful haven for broadcast programming and advertising on the internet. In a little over a year HULU has become the #2 video site (behind YouTube of course) with 34 million viewers in February, and is expected to earn at least $120 million in ad revenue for their operating partners – NBC and FOX. And while many platforms for online video have launched in the past few years, HULU is backed with a marketing budget of $50 million from their partners. Continue reading New Media, New Video→
“Are Media Making Us Dumber?” The question may sound like an oxymoron in an age where information is instantly accessible, but ubiquity of human knowledge does not always equal individual understanding. So how are media changing the way we learn and communicate important ideas?
I went to an American Forum last night to hear different perspectives on the issue and try to get a few answers. Although consensus was difficult to reach in this panel discussion between academics and communications professionals, I think everyone agreed that people read a website differently than a book or newspaper article. Continue reading American Forum→
Content Marketing, Communications, and Social Media Strategy
If you’ve been wondering what’s been keeping me from updating the blog lately, there need no be any mystery: this is the home stretch of final projects for school. Not the least of which is my masters degree Capstone Thesis paper.
