On Wednesday, Christy Touhey, @NewhouseSU’s Web Content Manager was a guest lecture in our PRL 614: Advanced Public Relations Writing for Digital Platforms at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.
I thought her presentation overall was a great introduction to the professional use of social media. She covered reasons why companies use social media. While it’s very broad but covers most of the bases when it comes to public relations.
to widen your outreach
to let your audience know more about your organization
to found out more about your audience
to build relationships
to get your audience to share about you
to cut costs
to increase revenue or influence
I would agree with those points but I found some of the specific examples troublesome. When giving examples of ‘good’ tweets I found, and she half-admitted contained excessive hashtags that took away from the key message. I found the Follow Friday snippet to be overly broad. Her tweet included far too many handles and no reason WHY one should follow them.
Again, overall I think it was a good introduction for most but as I’ve worked as the ‘social media guy’ at both a university and student newspaper I personally did not hear anything I hadn’t learned before. However I think her talk was helpful and provided some specifics on the basics of using social media and a useful overview of why it’s important to the profession.
About Geoff Campbell
