By Lara Levin
Student Writer
Ask any public relations practitioner and he or she will tell you that a communicator is only as effective as his or her audience research.
As the media environment has exploded into new digital realms, the ability to build buzz has grown along with it. In a world where a public relations disaster is only an Internet meme away, how can the next generation of PR professionals keep track of their clients’ reputations?
These questions were the driving force behind a summer-long project undertaken by USC Annenberg’s PR faculty to integrate emerging digital media into undergraduate research methods course work. The updated research course curriculum aims to train students to paint a comprehensive picture using a vast range of data sources. (Changes in the undergraduate research course, the first of many social media-driven course revisions now in various stages of implementation, follow an already-completed update of the graduate PR curriculum, which resulted in a wholly new approach to be called “Digital, Social and Mass Media Strategies.”)
“It was a much-needed project, though daunting at first, as there are no real data available on how best to incorporate these new media platforms into the classroom,” said public relations professor Jennifer Floto (pictured), who took the lead in reorganizing the Research and Analysis course.
Examining the course syllabus line by line, Floto and her colleagues decided which research techniques were outdated and found spaces for the incorporation of new techniques and means of evaluation. Traditional media audits, for example, were determined to have become a thing of the past.
“While it will be important to show that an article appeared in the Los Angeles Times,” Floto explained, “clients will be asking our students — the practitioners of the future — to know how to do an audit of how their company is faring on Twitter.”
To develop the new curriculum, public relations professors came together for meetings and held conference calls throughout the summer. Adjunct professors Dimitri Czupylo and Sarah Huouh (a graduate of the Annenberg PR program who was named PR Week’s first college Student of the Year in 2000), offered personal insight based on their own experiences as current practitioners and past students.
“We’re not here to turn the students into pure researchers,” Czupylo said. “But if they don’t have this skill set, which now must include social media, they won’t have the respect of their research colleagues.”
Floto also incorporated what she learned in a teleseminar that focused on how to teach digital media and the ways in which research is evolving in the digital realm. As all the elements came together, the education plan began to evolve, keeping the same structure but with updated content that both professors and students anticipate will provide a valuable learning experience.
“I’m eager to see how the new curriculum will be incorporated into this class,” said Kirsten Erickson (B.A. Public Relations ’10). “While I’ve worked with social media in my internships, I feel that having a concrete set of research skills within the digital landscape will really set me apart from other candidates when I enter the professional world.”
To give her students an even deeper understanding of online communities, professor Melissa Robinson, senior vice president of digital communications at Weber Shandwick, plans to teach many elements of her course within a global context, providing her students with the skills to understand and communicate with international audiences.
Floto sees great promise in the new curriculum and is confident that Annenberg will continue to stay on the cutting-edge of the fast-changing communication environment.
“Other institutions are just dabbling with social media, but we’re making a big splash.”
More on undergraduate Public Relations
More on graduate-level Strategic Public Relations
