Geoff Campbell Skills and Experience
I recently created a Prezi about my skills and experience related to higher education communication and public relations. Take a look here.
Seeking Work in Higher Ed
November 27, 2012 by
I’d like to announce a bit earlier than I need to that I’m looking for a full-time job starting Monday, June 3rd, 2013.
I could simply post my resume and explain why in 100 words or less why you, a manager in a higher education communication office, should hire me but I can do better.
Here’s a little Storify presentation about me and why I’d be a great web writer/public relations specialist at your college or university this summer.
I’m now a “Hootsuite Certified Professional”
November 10, 2012 by
After getting an offer for free “Hootsuite University” training via Klout Perks I spent a few hours going through the certification process to become a “Hootsuite Certified Professional“. Shortly thereafter I got an email from a potential Hootsuite University student asking if employers valued the certification. I don’t have any firsthand knowledge but my feeling is that it wouldn’t hurt and the extent to which it might be helpful is the extent to which you have demonstrated or can demonstrate your knowledge.
The certification itself demonstrates that you know how to use the software to engage on multiple social media platforms strategically but I think discussing how that would inform how you would manage social media for an organization would be more valuable during an interview.
I earned the certificate because it may have a positive impact on my prospects of getting hired for a social media-related position. There’s a lot of junk “certifications” out there but Hootsuite is an industry leader so at the very least it’s not a negative indicator.
What do all of you think of the certificate?
Starbucks VP Speech at Newhouse
November 10, 2012 by
On Friday, James Olson, Vice President, Global Public Relations for Starbucks Coffee Company, came to campus to present his talk, “Enlightened Leadership: How to Turn a Company into a Movement”.
It was a story about how the company, according to media reports, was in dire straits in October 2008. The stock was tumbling so Howard Schultz came back to take charge.
The company held a giant meeting of store managers in New Orleans to try to reboot Starbucks’ brand identity and increase employee morale.
He showed a video about the national training event that ended with the message “People started coming back to the stores and we showed up again.”
The company at the same time introduced a new mission statement: “To inspire and nurture the human spirit: one person, one cup, one neighborhood at a time.”
The company’s sales and stock price improved and crisis was averted.
Olson then discussed Howard Schultz’ campaign to pressure other corporate CEOs to not give contributions to political campaigns until Congress made progress in helping improve the economy. One hundred and forty CEOs signed on but it was largely a failed exercise. Schultz then wanted to help bring jobs back to the US and Starbucks started the Jobs for USA campaign to get people to donate to an organization that finances small businesses that couldn’t get loans from banks. It raised $50 million in donations and helped create thousands of jobs.
He then showed a video of American Mug & Stein which Create Jobs for USA helped to reinvigorate which led to many jobs being saved in the US.
He ended with a video about the company’s investment in a Leadership Lab to help make its front-line employees into brand evangelists.
Overall it was a pretty compelling talk. As a teenager I worked at the company for about nine months as a Barista at a very busy location (that’s the point, isn’t it?) so I knew about the company. His presentation was successful, by measure of crowd applause and reaction on Twitter in turning a roomful of people who may have just been dependent on coffee into people who were convinced in the worth of the company and some who said they wanted to work there because of his presentation.
Measuring opinion across media
October 5, 2012 by
A recent Pew Research Center study argued that social media and traditional press reacted to the Democratic and Republican conventions differently. However, the fine print showed that humans decided the tone of the traditional media stories while the Center relied on automated sentiment analysis which isn’t always right and in fact can be wrong most of the time.
However, the study touched on the notion that the type of posts and commentary are different on social media vs. traditional media. For instance, the Obama campaign insisted that he won because he lied while traditional news simply said that Romney won among undecided voters.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xZniwrAwZGY]On Twitter, with the help of live fact-checking by organizations like the NY Times, users were informed that a number of things Mitt Romney said were not true. Difference in sentiments about the candidates is absolutely affected by if those surveyed were given truthful information.
On the topic of the conventions, many were reacting positively to Bill Clinton’s speech on Twitter while some on Fox News were unsurprisingly critical of it
On the Republican side, many on Twitter enjoyed Paul Ryan’s speech, but after talk, many criticized Ryan or lying. Even regularly conservative mouthpiece Fox News (which another study found makes people less informed than those who watch no news) published an article saying
So, in the end the study shows not a whole not of anything definitive. People who get their news on Twitter can have opinions of candidates or conventions which aren’t based on fact just as easily as those who get it via more traditional means.
Richard Branson’s – Humanizing a Brand
September 28, 2012 by
PRL 614 Blog Review Assignment
Eccentric billionaire and Charman of Virgin Group Richard Branson authors a blog on the Virgin website where he writes on various topics from his time signing the Sex Pistols and the Golden Jubilee kerfuffle, the key to negotiating, to supporting drug legalization.
The posts in their totally not only provide a glimpse into the thinking of Branson but the kind of chairman he is the kind of companies he runs. By writing freely about what he thinks he gives the idea that the Virgin group of companies is a forward- and free-thinking group of companies.
It fits in with the other types of fresh communication from shooting an entire movie at 35,000 feet to promote Virgin Airlines to ‘fight the man’ type advertisements for its other brands (especially Virgin Music).
In general CEOs should be encouraged to write blogs to give a face to their companies. While there is the potential risk of having a less-than media-friendly executive hurting the brand image in various ways, for the most part CEO blogs have been positive insights into companies from the people who know them best.
YouTube and Online Censorship
September 21, 2012 by
YouTube and Censorship (PRL 614 Assignment Post)
Apart from the video, “Innocence of Muslims” which has sparked international outrage, the video giant YouTube has refused to remove other videos governments and individuals have requested to be taken down.
What may not be widely known is that the United States leads the world in Google content removal (censorship) requests. The company received requests for the removal of 3,8511 items. In second place was Germany with 1,304.
Google complied with 63% of U.S. government requests for removal pf content from January 2011 to June 2011. When they refused to remove videos of police brutality, they refused.
In another case, Google refused to rebuffed a request from the Canada’s Passport Office to take down a video of a Canadian citizen urinated on his passport and flushing it down the toilet.
The company also refused to remove six videos mocking Pakistan’s army and senior politicians.
However, Google did block more than 100 videos in Thailand allegedly insulting the Turkish monarchy, which is a crime in the country.
About the government requests, Google noted,
In regards to Google’s obligations to balance free speech and restricting the spread of inflammatory content, Google has none. It is a private company which makes decisions based on its community guidelines and only has the obligation to remove illegal material, not what some may find in poor taste.
Moving Quickly at the Newhouse School
September 17, 2012 by
Me, aged 17, doing the RCMP PARE http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/recruiting-recrutement/htm-form/pare-tape-requirement-exigences-eng.htm
During the first week of class of the fall semester, (of the M.S. in Public Relations here at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications) I was concerned that classwork alone would not secure me a job starting in June 2013, when I’ll be done classes at Newhouse and have to find a full-time job, or, failing that, a full-time eight-week internship.
So, I looked for something that I wasn’t learning in my required classes and found ICC 625: New Media Business, jumped through all the hoops to audit it, and have been actively engaged in discussions every Wednesday morning.
The New Media Business professor, Vin Crosbie, is a managing partner of Digital Deliverance and is the senior consultant on Social and New Media and Curricula at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.
I’m very much looking forward to the next lecture, “Creative Destruction and How Supply & Demand Affects Media Economics, Business Models, Consumption, Law, and Content Itself”. You can follow me @GeoffBCampbell on Wednesday mornings from 9:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m for highlights of the discussion.
I also have been wanting to know more about how university faculties decide on tenure so I nominated myself to be one of seven graduate students on the Newhouse Student Representative Committee. I was elected (albeit from 6 named candidates and a write-in option) and from there I ran (opposed) and was elected by a majority of graduate representatives to be the graduate student representative on the Newhouse Tenure Committee.
I cannot discuss the private discussions but when the committee needs student input I’ll be sure to include notifications here. I’m very much looking forward to being a part of this very important committee and upholding the strong reputation of the faculty here at Newhouse.
Lastly, I applied for and was hired to be Professor Seth Gitner‘s graduate research assistant. I’m doing varied research on multimedia storytelling that I will write more about in the future.
All of that work is on top of my full-time classes: COM 698: Media Law, PRL 605: Public Relations Theory, PRL 611: Public Relations Research, and PRL 614: Advanced Public Relations Writing for Digital Platforms which, all-together, I’ve found to be nothing to scoff at.
Today, I’ll be discussing Controlling Expression in Media Law, doing an in-class assignment in writing, doing multimedia storytelling research, reading dense academic text for Theory, and doing preliminary research for my case study in PR Theory. As a general rule I won’t be posting a lot (apart from the required posts for PRL 614) due to the workload but if anything major comes up I’ll be sure to share it here. For now I’ll wish you a positive productive Monday and leave you with a song. I hope your Monday goes better than this:
#NBCFail: A Post-mortem
September 14, 2012 by
During the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games, viewers in the United States quickly became frustrated with the company given exclusive U.S. broadcasting rights to the games and used the hashtag #NBCFail to express their frustration on Twitter. They were frustrated with their “shoddy streaming experiences, editorial mistakes and — most of all — NBC’s preference for obfuscating footage of major Olympic events until airing tape-delayed primetime broadcasts stateside.”
There were tape delays of sometimes up to twelve hours and people were so frustrated with NBC offering poor-quality live-streaming of the events only to those who pay for cable TV service that they used anti-internet censorship technology in order to connect with non-U.S. streams.
As Heidi Moore of the Guardian reports,
“Prominent, media-savvy journalists, academics and viewers have spread the word to each other to use VPN technology and proxy services like TunnelBear and StreamVia to scramble our computer’s addresses into ones that can access the BBC iPlayer, where 24 soothing streams of well-organized, brightly narrated, clever Olympics coverage await us.”
However, it wasn’t just about the tape delay, but “the determined refusal of NBC to acknowledge that some viewers might want live coverage“, poor narration of some events, and even insulting viewer intelligence.
Other failures by the company include cutting out a memorial to the victims of terrorism from the live broadcast, a spoiler of Missy Franklin’s gold medal win, and getting Twitter to suspend the Twitter account of a journalist critical of the coverage, and delaying broadcast of Usain Bolt’s gold medal win until four hours after it happens in the name of protecting their financial investment.
Jim Bell, who produced NBC’s coverage of the Olympics, defended his decision:
In the end I’d have to agree with the critics and say that NBC failed to live up to its viewers expectations. However, this time NBC seemed to be more focused on the bottom-line and didn’t care that people were upset at being forced to watch delayed broadcasts on TV because they served their advertisers by playing the most popular events in primetime. However, the media world is changing so quickly that by the next Olympics people may have lost their patience and technology will easily allow them to boycott NBC coverage in favor of foreign broadcasts to get their Olympics coverage. NBC isn’t alone in having to change their business model to face these changes. Many companies are having trouble monetizing online content enough to defray production costs. Let’s all hope someone finds a solution because to see coverage of these events, somebody has to pay.
Social Media + PR Guest Lecture
September 7, 2012 by
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.
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