HYPERtext

Students & Social Media: The Future is Bright

I was recently invited by the communication department at Rochester Institute of Technology to give a brief lecture on the for-profit public relations milieu. It's been so long since I was back at college that the students made me feel a bit like an old man. Nevertheless, I persevered through my presentation on what agency PR is, what corporate PR is, and what Text 100 has to offer. In particular, I pointed out how Text 100's peer media practice and Second Life expertise is a big differentiator for us. You could feel the interest level in the room perk right up.

Text 100 isn't new to the peer media landscape, especially not as the first PR firm to have a presence in Second Life. But these students have been utilizing all kinds of peer media for years now. When I was in school, AOL Instant Messenger was all the rage. But now with the advent of YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook, Friendster and a cadre of other tools and applications, the students sitting before me in the auditorium were no newbies (read: "n00bs") to online social environments.

But the interest they showed in Second Life was really astounding. While only a dozen raised their hands as actually active in-world, I think many more were able to grasp the scale of the SL economy and the opportunity for building brand awareness through PR. After my presentation, Dr. Susan Barnes from RIT told me they were offering a class in conjunction with RIT's Lab for Social Computing for winter quarter focusing solely on Second Life.

In the end, it was great to see so many young students so excited about PR and the future opportunities for the field. Based on the acumen demonstrated in post-presentation questions many of them brought to me, I'd say the future is in good hands.

Kevin Ptak

Technorati Tags: Rochester Institute of Technology, Second Life, Text 100 

When Two Worlds Collide.

If you hadn't already heard: social networking is the future of public relations. (Let me know if that's not yet the case in your part of the world).

It's certainly becoming a prevalent form of professional communication in Silicon Valley as more and more web-savvy reporters invite pitches from PR folks on sites like Facebook. Not surprisingly then, PR folks are rushing onto Facebook and, well, so is everyone else. Everyone else, including your family, your old college friends, random people from your past...and there's nothing to keep them apart!

As a mildly skeptical early adopter, I was amused this week to see BusinessWeek's Jon Fine put into writing a question that had been troubling me:  Do I really want my personal life and my private life to collide on sites like MySpace and Facebook?

The issue is becoming more of a hot topic as users like me encounter, for example, others 'tagging' pictures of them on Facebook for all to see. I've had 45 pictures attributed to me (i.e. not taken or uploaded by me, but identified as me by others), none of them, as yet, feature me particularly compromised in any way, but it could happen I suppose, and I'm not entirely sure that'll be a good thing! So what can I (and you) do to prevent your boss discovering you used to dye your hair purple and adore the Sisters of Mercy?

Alan Lewis, eBay's Chief Evangelist came into the office today to show off some eBay Facebook widges and, not surprisingly, the question came up again: What if I don't want my boss to see that my old college friend has bitten me and now I'm a zombie?

The answer, it seems, lies in 'setting permissions'.  Alan pointed out that it's fairly easy to control the content that others see attached to your Facebook profile. On eBay's Marketplace, for example, you can choose to have people see what you're buying, but not what you're selling. The general principle applies to most applications, Alan says.

There you go...now you don't need to fear the future. Right, I'm off to delete some zombies.

David McCulloch

Technorati Tags: Text 100, Facebook, Public Relations,eBay