Tag Archives: University

US Education Issue is Cultural Not Fiscal

2554dc1 US Education Issue is Cultural Not Fiscal I am here in Berlin, in one of the top-5 nerdiest countries on the planet. Last week I got to spend some time with another global company, a consulting company. There, many nations were represented. Indians and Russians and Germans and Africans and Spanish and Italians. Education came up.

I had always believed that education and the prioritization thereof was cultural — memetic.

That only schools, cities, counties, states, and countries that think learning and academic achievement is cool will ever develop any sustained success in producing tomorrow’s doctors, lawyers, innovators, inventors, scientists, technologists, poets, writers, and business people.

I asked an Indian colleague, “all things considered equal, if you received a full scholarship to a top university and your twin won a spot on the national team or a pro team in cricket, which of you would honor the family more?

“Well, the academic scholarship, easily.”

The same thing can often be said of Germany and China, too, and South Korea — even in countries that perform well in the Olympics — that getting into the proper high school, then the right university and then the correct program — most prestigious, often (prestige is King) — is the coolest thing one can do, the best investment of one’s life, even if that results in a quirky post-doc life in a moldy academic program.

This prestige is a general coolness associated with being the best academically. Being at the top of your class. Where being in an astrophysics lab in Heidelberg carries more oomph than being taken into Goldman Sachs after graduation.

The United States biggest issue is that teachers, professors, and intellectualism are not cool. In order for there to be a renaissance in education there needs to be a revenge of the nerds.

This will be increasingly difficult as prices skyrocket and the risk of going into academia proper or into the sciences increases, propelling the desire to only steer one’s goals towards the JD, MBA or MD.

Even with the JD and MD, the enormous financial weight of the degree makes it tough to choose medical research or legal scholarship, to say nothing of rural medicine or legal aid.

So, I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t know. Maybe the TV shows “The Big Bang Theory” and “Glee” will start people on the path to the arts and the sciences.

Maybe in 10 years, these two super-popular shows will result in a renaissance in Broadway and the space program.

The power of shows such as these are as important as any education program or the budgeting associated. People have to both learn about the arts and sciences and then see and experience cool, interesting, and attractive role models they want to aspire to be like.

Though I didn’t pursue the sciences, per-se, Carl Sagan was essential to my development. In Cosmos, the PBS series, he explored the Universe and both introduced his world to me while also drawing me in and making me like him. Admire him. I didn’t think he was a nerd or a dork, I fancied him awesome.

To this day I do. And so do many scientists my age and a little older. I believe many of them were inspired by him.

Maybe now, Discovery and NatGeo and other shows are drawing people to the sciences, to nature, to being more openly curious and passionate about the world.

The only way this renaissance will occure in the United States of America is if we have a change of heart, of passion, towards optimism, finally concluding that being a nerd, being a geek is the most noble of aspirations in the world.

US Education Issue is Cultural Not Fiscal

The Tuning Fork Oracle

Sage Advice to a PR Professional of Tomorrow

Earlier this week, I guest lectured on digital PR at the American University and reported on the experience, Public Relations and Communications’ Future is Bright!. I said that I would not write anything nice unless someone sent me a thoughtful email from the class.

Well, I received two nice notes, one from Juliana Serafini (who promises to email me again next week) and one from Kari Elam, who had a lot of great question. I will not expose her questions, but the long story short is that Kari is writing for music, culture, arts, and society blogs and wonders if that it good enough as a way of writing herself into a smashing agency job in PR and I told her that while it couldn’t hurt, it is also essential for her to go a little further.

Well, here is the ‘sage’ advice I give to Kari: Kari, what you’re doing for your current blogs is more editorial writing. While editorial and column-writing might very well help you with a publishing career in the future — and doesn’t hurt your portfolio — I must underscore the fact that while blogging about music — being a blogger — is super-important when it comes to being a respected part of the community — the “who the hell are you?” factor, there is another more important blogging strategy to pursue if you want to end up in a top-ten national PR firm.

What you need to do, in addition to blogging is “meta blogging,” — blogging about social media, about digital PR, about public relations, about advertising, etc… It is really important to make sure you’re always taking a step back and think not only about the what of social media but also about the why and how.

What this could look like is a blog about your studies of PR at AU and what you’re learning and how it contrasts with what you’re learning at your PR Internship. If you’re interested in music, society, the arts, and culture, explore it in the context of the Internet, of online branding, ads, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and even television and radio. How do you see what you’re learning about traditional PR dovetailing into social media marketing and digital PR? Can you see a continuum? Can you maybe help the fogies of traditional PR find their way to digital PR? If you can light the path and maybe even map the way, you’re golden. Move to NYC and start shopping for apartments, you’ll be on Madison Avenue in no time.

However, don’t forget the basics. As a PR consultant, you will be required to know how to not simply consume content (read blogs), not only produce content (blog), but analyze and understand how to conversation works, how best to leverage and participate in conversation, and also how best to manage conversation and manage reputation. Being a PR professional is about knowing how things work behind the curtain. And, since you are young and “cyber,” people assume that you have a valuable and important insight into the future.

PR firms are beginning to realize that “all kids get the Internet” may be true, but not in the way they thought — that “kids” get the Internet with only the level of sophistication that people from 35-50 get television — as a source of entertainment and information.

So, it is your job to publicly and prove, on a daily basis, on a blog, that you get what’s going on, that you’re current with the movers and shakers, that you have a passion for that space, and also that you will be able to prevent the future from blindsiding your PR VP and your client by keeping on top of technology, social media, new PR, and new and important channels through which you need to use to promote and protect your clients.

Your music blogging and your trend blogging and your other blogging means that you can now think like a blogger and that you’re accepted into the blogosphere — which is an important first step. The second step is proving you can strategically and even tactically make the Internet work for your clients and your agency.

Not to insult us marketing, advertising, and PR bloggers and blogs but there is a lot of room in the Power 150 for more voices, that’s for sure. If you start today, you may very well shoot up the list. A new voice is always welcome. Also, don’t be intimidated by what this sort of blogging means. You don’t have to act out of your focus. Take what you already love and then just spend some time getting meta on it — spend some time playing. Spend some time taking the articles you’re writing elsewhere and slice them and dice them a little academically. Do things like create your own case studies and give away the sort of campaigns you might recommend yourself. Feel free to critique or compliment campaigns and brands and firms and agencies — especially the ones you’d like to work with.

I swear to God, you can write yourself into this business. You can write yourself into a very fine career as a PR professional. You’re good as gold if you can prove that you’re both someone who has been trained in traditional PR and who gets digital PR; that you’re someone who gets both theoretical social media as well as practical social media.

And, good luck to you, Kari!

Via Chris Abraham

Advice to a PR Professional of Tomorrow

And, good luck to you, Kari!

Is email marketing still relevant in a 2.0 world?

When I realized that I could download the OPML file from the Power 150 site and then hack it around into a contact list of over 900 of the top advertising, marketing, PR, and SEO bloggers on the planet, I did so.

Ever since, I have been scheduling calls with all of the folks I have been admiring on a daily basis. Two days ago I spent an hour on the horn with Lee Hopkins, “one of Australia’s leading thinkers on communication strategy in an online environment,” who is, in fact, one of the World’s leading thinkers on communication strategy in an online environment. We had a great chat — and amazing talk!

At the end, Lee asked me if he could blog the conversation and I jumped at the opportunity and late last night Lee published Is email marketing still relevant in a 2.0 world? which is not only the most complete description of what we at Abraham Harrison LLC do on a daily basis but it is said in a better, more comprehensive, way than I could even conceive of doing myself. Here it is, in full. Be sure to visit (and subscribe to) Better Communication Results, Lee Hopkin’s blog.

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Lee Hopkins on Email Marketing in Digital PR

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Guest Lecturing on digital PR at American University

I just returned from guest lecturing for Chris Boesen at American University’s School of Communication’s Public Communication department. The class was full of seniors who aspire to join the PR workforce. I didn’t talk gloom or doom because I told them a secret. I told all of the fresh-faced smarties the secret that will make them competitive if they’re smart: become social media producers instead of being just social media consumers: start blogging yourself into Edelman, Ogilvy, Burson, Ketchum, Fleishman, and Qorvis.

So, hopefully they’ll write themselves right into an entry-level position in 9 months when they all graduate — if they’re smart (and they seemed like they were — a bunch of them already blogged and Twittered, some of them on their own and some of them because of a class — who cares how!). I also told them that I would be happy to help them in any way they can now and in the future — with one condition: they they send me the link to their blog. If they can provide me with a link to a blog that is about digital PR, new PR, PR, communications, marketing, or social media, I am at their service. Otherwise, fuck ‘em! (it’s for their own good).

So, if you want to learn more about my experience guest lecturing around Washington, check out Chelsea Reviews My Comm350 Guest Lecture. I will plan on blogging about my experience at American University again; however, I am going to first see if anyone there has has much chutzpah as the lovely Miss Chelsea Clark did over at UMD.

Is it sort of like a Schrödinger’s cat situation: if Chris Boesen’s students reach out to me via a blog post, a tweet, via email, or via phone, I will follow-up with a very positive and adoring post (a total of two for American) but if it ends up being a dud (sorry Chris), then I will have to be more lukewarm in my follow-up review.

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Public Relations and Communications’ Future is Bright!

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I think I committed suicide in Twinity

My CEO, Mark Harrison, downloaded and installed a new 3D virtual world called Twinity, based in Berlin, that will recreate the world’s coolest cities, starting with Berlin. Mark loves Berlin more than anything, so he tried exploring his #1 home from his #2 home, Mauritius, and here is his story, as reported in an email to his Berlin posse, I think I committed suicide in Twinity:

Mark Harrison – Mauritius – 22 February 2008, 14:05 — After over a week of trying – endless module and update loading, and countless crashes - I finally got logged into Twinity.com, a 3D virtual world, a la Second Life, but set in renderings of real cities. The first of these Twinity cities is Berlin, my favorite city in the world, and my summertime home (and apparently the best-mapped city in the world, as well as the home to Twinity’s headquarters).

I was incarnated as a completely physically average white guy in his late 30′s – quite accurate in many respects except for the color and quantity of hair, and the hue of my eyes. The statistically average white guy, even in Germany – counter to stereotypes – has brown hair and brown eyes. Average Guy Mark was dropped into existence at Hackischer Markt, which is a good place to come into the world, since it is essentially the center of the universe, if your universe consists of only Berlin, you are a wired hipster type, and you are a provincial just arrived in this big, big city and instantly lose your bearings if you can’t see the TV tower on Alexanderplatz.

I decided to walk home – to my apartment in Moabit – and take the path along the Spree river that I take on almost a daily basis in my real-life Berlin when I am there. I walked over to Monbijou park (eventually figuring out how to run by holding down the shift key, which reduced my impatience a bit), bouncing off a few trees, but successfully oozing straight through a pissoir. I walked over to the railing at the edge of the river, looked around, then took one more step. To my surprise, I found can walk through railings just as effectively as I can walk through pissoirs.

I fell a couple meters and found myself standing knee-deep in the Spree – not very realistic at that point in the Spree, considering that it’s a major shipping channel, but convenient for me as an avatar in the river. I could still walk.

I walked along the river a bit, thinking I could perhaps just walk all the way home in the river, maybe climbing up one of the stone staircases I knew should be coming up along the way, if Twinity’s mapping of Berlin is indeed that comprehensive. After a few steps I came to what I assume was the end of the universe… a wall of beige halfway through Monbijou Park, cutting across the river, and t-ing into the riverside wall of the Boda Museum. The end-of-the-universe wall was insurmountable, as was the vertical, stone wall bank of the river. I didn’t really want to spend the rest of my virtual life knee-deep in a fetid central European river, so I hit the “map” button, assuming that there could well be a way to fly, or teleport or something like in Second Life.

This hubris clearly angered the gods. I guess I should have accepted my humaness and walked back up the river looking for a ladder or something rather than thinking I might game the laws of the universe and escape the limitations of my corporal form. My world was wiped from existence with a cold Windows dialog box announcing that Twinity was no longer responding to anything I might ask it to do. Then Vista went looking for Answers as to the Reason for this caprice of the gods, and unfortunately came back, giving me only more questions. Quite realistic, that part of Twinity.

A restart of the program, and a surprisingly quick login process later (considering logging in took me a week of trying and failing, then a good 10 minutes when it finally worked today), I was again granted a view of my Twinity existence.

I think I am dead.

I have only a setting sun in a golden sky, adorned with a few evening clouds and the pregnant belly of a pale, twilight three-quarter moon. I have a 360 degree view of my heavens, and when I spin on my axis – my only remaining mobility in my gentle, but solitary, god-forsaken purgatory – the clouds tremble as if in silent horror at the eternity of loneliness I have been damned to by my unforgivable, cardinal sin of suicide (is self-murder through clumsiness officially suicide? Anyone know a theologian?) in the murky virtual waters of my beloved Berlin.

Life is so short. So meaningless. So incomprehensible.

Mark Harrison
Born: February 22nd, 2009 18:52 Berlin, Germany
Died: February 22nd, 2009 19:04 Berlin, Germany
“Well, there’s always LinkedIn.”

Guest Lecturing on Blogger PR to Communications Undergrads at UMD

I spoke to two classes of communications majors today about digital PR and social media marketing. It was a wonderful experience. The University of Maryland undergraduate course was called Comm350: Public Relations Theory and their communications professor, Sahar Mohamed Khamis, was amazing generous and welcoming, basically handing me the reins to her class, sight unseen.

The class is described as:

The historical development and contemporary status of public relations in business, government, associations and other organizations. Application of communication theory and social science methods to the research, planning, communication and evaluation aspects of the public relations process.

Everybody was super bright and super nice to me. One thing I was concerned about is that in both classes I taught today, both Comm350, only a couple people had Twitter accounts and I think there were just a couple folks who have a blog or who had every blogged. And these are our future PR professionals. Of course, when I asked, 100% of the students in both classes were on Facebook. Natch.

Well, I presented my A Guide to Blogger Relations slide show and then took questions. I told them that blogging, Twittering, and participating in the wider conversation would almost guarantee them a good job at a local or national agency after college. I told them that they should all, separately or in concert, start writing a blog about their take on communication, on advertising, on popular culture, on television, on PR, on social media — that the thing they learn in class every day would be interesting to the blogosphere, seen through their young eyes. That there is no doubt in my mind that you can really and truly write yourself into the job of your dreams and if they didn’t blog, all of them, they were darned fools (well, maybe I didn’t say it — it was implied).

I receive quite a thank you note from one of student from the first class, Miss Chelsea Clark, who not only asked a question but also said the following nice things — a mixture of review, testimonial, and, I dare say, her first blog post once removed:

I walked into my Comm350 class on Tuesday expecting to sit there taking notes for an hour and a half like usual. Instead, our professor announced we were having a guest speaker. I was thinking to myself that this could go one of two ways: really interesting and way better than cramping my hand taking notes, or really boring and put me to sleep.
Our guest speaker took the floor and introduced himself and described what his company does. I’ve learned about blogs in PR before, but I was never really able to link the two together. Yeah, so blogs are a new media outlet, but how does that help clients? How do businesses personally benefit from random people around the country writing about their hobbies and interests? I never really understood the connection until Chris’ presentation.
He described how he would have his team search for blogs that were written about topics that relate to his clients and then send out mass emails to the bloggers to ask them to write about his clients. He was worried that we would think he was a spammer, but, having made many annoying calls and emails to reporters myself, I knew how he felt. He then showed us results of actual bloggers that wrote about his clients. He got so excited! We all recognized this feeling, for being PR people ourselves, we know how satisfying it is to have free publicity.
I thought that Chris did a really good job with his presentation. I followed what he was saying the whole time and enjoyed some of his nerdy antics. I think some of the people in the class were less interested or maybe didn’t follow what Chris’ company is responsible for, either because they were pretending to take notes while really checking their facebooks or because they are still a bit unfamiliar with PR and got a little bit confused.
For me, the presentation was enlightening, exciting, and interesting and showed me new ways of getting publicity without necessarily resorting to TV and newspapers. I would definitely recommend him to other PR college classes that are looking for guest speakers!

That, Chelsea, really made my month. I appreciate the kind words and thank you, again, to professor Sahar Khamis

who will soon be coming out with a really compelling new book you should all pre-order on Amazon, Islam Dot Com: Contemporary Islamic Discourses in Cyberspace. I look forward to it.

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