PR Studies

It's never wasted (only connect)

It's so easy to have regrets, usually over the things we didn't do. But nor is there necessarily a right way, or a correct sequence, for gaining experience. Here are some of the jobs I've held before working in public relations that I still draw on today in my university teaching:

• Special needs carer. We're all different, we're all unique and there's something special in everyone. You just need time to find out what it is.
• History teacher. Experience of school teaching is valuable in the lecture theatre. I even called on a lesson learnt in a difficult client presentation. The new boss of my main client was talking audibly to a colleague as I presented. How to respond? I did what always works best to quell unwanted noise. I stopped talking and waited.
• Typesetter. Not quite hot metal, but the system pre-dated Apple, Microsoft Windows and visual displays. Learning a code language early on means that HTML has never seemed too scary. Acquiring the principles of typography and visual design was a valuable lesson.
• Researcher. It often seems that everything is just a Google or Wikipedia search away. Gathering accurate facts in the world before the web involved patience, persistence and perfectionism. I was surprisingly good at it.
• Editor. This is the most underrated and most valuable skill of all. How to spot dull copy? How to transform it into something readable? How to cut 1000 words down to 200 while keeping the meaning?

My review of my year

We encourage students to become 'reflective learners' - but in general undergraduates are poor at reflection. Some assume they're perfect and all assume that they're perfectible works-in-progress.

I know differently. I've never been perfect and with age my character flaws have grown ever more apparent. But my strengths are equally clear and as adults we become proficient at masking the one with the other.

So here's my reflection on my (academic) year, starting with what's gone well. For context, I returned to a full-time role in September after an inexplicable year of trying something different.

Positive

• My teaching hightlight was leading a large, lively and experimental postgraduate module (Public Relations and New Media). Not all welcomed the wilfully unstructured delivery - but it forced everyone to think and there was some very strong student work from a very diverse group.
• I have spent my adult life trying to turn a love of history into paid work in public relations. This year I turned a PR-for-PR project into a paper at a History of Public Relations conference.
• We're in a recession and graduates are sometimes derided for lacking workplace skills. Yet I'm still aware of more employers seeking good graduates than good graduates lacking suitable work. Nothing pleases me more than connecting the one with the other.
• My own research is limited (see below), but I'm delighted that a postgraduate who I supervised has had a paper accepted at the Euprera Congress 2011 (which we have both been involved in promoting).
• I've become something of a professional qualifications expert, and helped with delivery of the CIPR Diploma in another country (in addition to location-based and online delivery).
• I've edited online magazine Behind the Spin for over four years. We have a viable and valuable student magazine (with cash in the bank) - and I should now start looking to pass this on to a suitable home.
• I blog infrequently at PR Studies - yet it's still what I'm best known for. Perhaps this is a weakness (see below)?

Negative

• What have I written? I'm not a traditional academic focused on 'research outputs', but I should be capable of some original thought or interesting publication. So where is it? Are the blogs and tweets merely a displacement activity?
• I was fortunate to have gained a very good education in the humanities, during which quesions were always more interesting than answers. Yet I'm more often teaching people who expect a didactic and definitive approach to knowledge. (Knowing my weakness, I get an opportunity to work on it: I'm leading a new module for first year undergraduates - Principles of Public Relations, a chance to teach theory rather than practice.)
• I'm impatient with process and paperwork. I regret this where students are involved, but still feel there's a point to be made at an institutional level. I could be wrong...

Milestone reached

It's a minor and meaningless achievement, but one I'd been edging close to for some time. 

Despite only posting here weekly and spending more time on an online magazine, class blog and subject group  blog, my traffic to www.prstudies.com continues to rise (though only slowly).

I've just achieved average daily page views of 100 over the seven year life of this blog.

The absolute numbers are small - and unimportant to me - but the average is pleasing and the movement is still in the right direction.

There may be some lessons here for newcomers in building a presence despite infrequent posting, so here's my analysis:

• Much of my traffic comes from searches, so having an archive of searchable content helps.
• If I was keen to build traffic further, I would write more on popular search terms: 'meaning of PR', 'PR dissertation' etc.
• Being around for a long time (and from back when PR blogs were a rarity) means I'm well connected in terms of inbound links. My Google PageRank has been as high as 6, but is still a respectable 5.
• I'm spreading myself across a number of blogs, but have kept the content focused on this one. Though it's not a scholarly place, I do focus on the study of public relations, from an educator's and a student perspective.
• The first few weeks of a blog are easy and exciting, with visitor numbers doubling again and again. But it's hard to sustain the momentum so bloggers need to plan for the different phases they will go through.

My life in technology

On the eve of a milestone birthday, I've been looking back on the technologies that have inspired or influenced me.

1960s: The space race. I don't remember JFK's commitment at the start of the decade to put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth, though I've since read this speech. But I do remember the grainy black and white images of the space walk, and the famous fluffed line: 'one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind'.

Perhaps it wasn't such a giant leap, but it was a galvanising moment. Like all primary school children in the sixties, I thought life by the year 2000 was going to be a pill-popping space adventure. Wrong.

1970s: This was the hard one, as it was a decade of inflation and industrial decline. But my paragraphs above give some clues. For me, the seventies was about Concorde and colour television.

I remember the sight of Concorde on its test flights above Bristol in about 1970 and can still recall the name of the test pilot - Brian Trubshaw.* We now know Concorde to have been an expensive failure, but it was a technical and aesthetic triumph and a sign of the international cooperation that continues with Airbus at the same Filton site today.

It's hard to imagine what colour televison meant, but for the only time in my life I was willing to watch golf because of the green, green grass. I could have looked out of the window, of course, but television held my attention.

1980s: Though computers were a rarity at the start of the decade and I had paid someone to type up my hand-written university dissertations, the technology of the eighties that most excited me was the personal computer.

Acorn or BBC Micro? Mac or IBM PC? PC or PS/2? These were compelling quesions and by the middle of the decade I was shuttling between magazine offices in London and New York reporting on business technology. By the end of the decade I was a public relations consultant with some of the best clients in the global technology industry.

1990s: Windows and the World Wide Web. Those early PCs were standalone, with monochrome screens, and running MS-DOS. Windows 3.0 was a revelation when launched in 1990. Thought the importance of the operating system is now diminished because of the World Wide Web, I will group them together in my review of the decade. I wasn't a web early adopter, but I created my first personal web page in 1995.

2000s: Smartphones and the social web. Tim Berners-Lee had the vision, but most of us did not have the technology or the bandwidth to realise the potential until this decade. I'd been talking about internet telephony and internet appliances in the 1990s and it had seemed fanciful. Now Skype is unremarkable and we're talking about the 'internet of things'. The social web is a reminder that technology is not the answer in itself; it's how people use technology that's exciting.

I'd been testing not-very mobile phones in the 1980s; owning smaller ones throughout the 1990s, but it's only in the last decade that the promise of the mobile internet has become a reality (remember WAP?). 

* I now remember much less, relying increasingly on Google to act as my memory bank. 'The cloud' deserves a mention in this review (that talk of PCs and operating systems is an irrelevance now.)

My social media guidelines

I'm not too fond of rules, so here are the guidelines that help me navigate my favourite social networks (with particular reference to contact with students):

• Facebook. It's great for entertainment and for friendships, but it's not my first choice network for business or education. I'll accept friends requests from students and others I know, but never ask students to 'friend' me for fear or blurring the boundaries between work and play.
• Twitter. Unlike with Facebook, the default setting is public. My public role is as the editor of a PR magazine (@behindthespin), and I'll follow people of interest in this sphere, and follow you back if you're a PR student, practitioner or academic. I do occasionally unfollow people, usually when the noise gets too loud. Like most on Twitter, I'm still surprisingly pleased by @ mentions, so this is a good way to gain my attention when time is short.
• LinkedIn. I follow people I know - and will write recommendations if I know you well enough and have something positive to say. I also join groups and display my blog posts and tweets on my LinkedIn profile - but I don't go looking for activity on this network and very rarely request connections.
• Blogs. I do still have a blogroll and sporadically try to maintain it, though I will probably note your blog posts through RSS or a link on Twitter rather than by old-fashioned surfing. My list of PR student blogs needs some tending as so many start and give up, and the better ones soon graduate and belong on another list. Please alert me to your PR blog and I'll subscribe first before adding you to my blogroll later at my discretion. My blog is personal and uncommercial and I won't respond to requests for reciprocal links or sponsorship deals.
• Behind the Spin: I'm pleased when people offer to write for the magazine, but it's best to check the About page for our forward features rather than ask me to spell it out in an email. I also value original content (please don't publish an article on your blog and then submit it to me as an afterthought). I welcome press releases (I enjoyed writing that) - and will sometimes use them on the news page.
• PROpenMic. I like this specialist network and will try to comment on student blog posts I find interesting. I will accept friend requests out of courtesy, though I've never found out what friendship implies or bestows on this Ning network.

New job, no news

'Never go back' has always been a useful motto - as well as a statement of the obvious given the inexorable passage of time.

So why am I disregarding it and returning to my old lecturing job at Leeds Met? Well, I do so a bit chastened, but with some relief. I also do so humbly, knowing there were some good candidates in the running.

I've had a mixed time since leaving full-time employment almost two years ago. 2009 was a difficult year that ended in disappointment (let's just say that the timing wasn't right for me at the University of Gloucestershire). 2010 has been busy and challenging (how many university lecturers work flat-out in August, including several weekends?), but the highlight was leading a summer course for high-achieving graduates studying with Johns Hopkins University.

The cash flow has been acceptable - but as a freelance you live with uncertainty and the constant threat of famine. I hope not to lose sight of my instinct to take on new challenges despite returning to the payroll.

'Not exactly a team player' was a damning but truthful comment made of me in a graduate interview I attended long ago. Despite this, I value loyalty. I've continued working for Leeds Met despite 'leaving' and I'm immeasurably grateful for their loyalty to me. I value the contact with students and graduates too (another two-way street as I often find myself writing references and giving advice).

Opposite of exotic

Before the resumption, I'm taking some days' leave (holiday would be a misleading term). One of the side-effects of being married to a travel writer is the decision over holidays: we often choose not to go far.

Next week, we'll be on a small island off the north west coast of Wales, living in a house without electricity, running water, internet or even a phone signal. There are no shops, few people, no roads. Nothing. Our holiday is about the absence of things. This may sound strange, but until recent decades most of humanity has lived like this. Many of us in western societies could benefit more from the absence of things than from yet more surplus.

Gail recommends it highly. Perhaps I'll find another reason to break my 'never go back' motto.