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Negotiating multiple identities on the social web: Goffman, fragmentation and the multiverse

(This is a keynote presentation I delivered at this year's webCom Montréal)

Let me start off with a confession: I have multiple personas. No, not multiple personalities! I have multiple personas. And I’m pretty sure you do too! Erwin Goffman, the famous Canadian sociologist once observed that when we interact with others, we enter a stage and take on the role of an actor presenting a character to an audience. We start performing and in this performance, we present desired impressions of selves to others.

Goffman’s idea of social interaction as a performance of identity is not all that different from what happens when we join a social media platform and use it to connect with others. Except that things get a little more complicated when we enter the online world. In real life, the confines of physical space easily identify the situational context in which our performance is to take place. When I drive to campus in the morning, the buildings, the reserved faculty parking lot, even the physical layout of the classrooms (with the chairs facing towards me & the blackboard) all remind me that I am about to step into my role of professor and that that is the front I will be performing for the next hour or so. All these contextual clues make it easy to figure out what stage play I will be enacting, and identifying my audience takes all but a quick glimpse around the room.

Who are we performing for online?

Online though, things start to get messy. Stages merge and audiences become fluid. When I enter the Twittersphere, digital audiences aren’t as easy to define any longer. Yes, there’s my primary audience composed of the people who chose to follow me on Twitter. But to think that that’s my only audience might be a bit naïve. All it takes is one re-tweet for my message to leave the confines of my own Twitter network and to reach new audiences. Of course, my tweets also live on on my Twitter profile, which if set to public, means that my potential audience has just grown to pretty much anyone with an Internet connection. And let’s not to forget the Library of Congress, which in 2010 announced plans to acquire every publicly shared tweet since 2006. Let’s think about this! One day, years from now, my great-grandkids – an audience that doesn’t even exist yet - might be reading my tweets through the Library of Congress archive. With all these potential audiences, how are we supposed to know any longer who we will be performing for?

To make matters even more complicated, thanks to cyberspace, I can also be present in multiple places at once. In Goffman’s terms, I can now perform different plays to different audiences at the same time. Just think of a tweet: I can send it out via Twitter and simultaneously post it to Facebook and pull it into my blog, all of which have different audiences and serve different self presentational needs. That poses a problem though: Facebook Corinne and Twitter Corinne are not the same persona. And they’re also slightly different from Corinne, the blogger. I’m a lot pickier about who I let join my Facebook network and I rarely let mere acquaintances in. If you want to connect with me on Facebook, I have to know you fairly well. As a result, you’d probably get to see a much more unfiltered version of Corinne than you would on Twitter. Twitter Corinne is an engaged professor and researcher, tweets in a number of languages and aside from the occasional (but justified) rant about AT&T’s dismal phone service, tries to present a very professional image. But the point is this: although we may think of Facebook, blogs and Twitter as separate stages with different audiences each, sometimes the performance we stage for one audience gets viewed by an altogether different audience. Social media platforms have forced us to become actors on multiple stages with multiple sometimes overlapping audiences.

And that’s not even taking into account an altogether different audience. When Goffman published his now seminal book “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” back in 1959, he probably couldn’t have conceived of a digital world where actors might not just perform for human audiences but also for an audience of computers -- for search engines, or sophisticated algorithms. This additional audience goes back to a fundamental question about who these new social media platforms are really built for: “us,” the user, or “them,” the Internet giant, i.e. Google, Facebook, and company. When Google CEO Eric Schmidt argued that Google + was an identity service which depended on people to use their real names, he clearly answered that question. Google + wants you to use your real name, not because they want to protect you from putting creeps in your circles (although that would be nice), but because it helps them build better products. It helps them better target their ads and personalize your search results.

The fact that Zuckerberg and Schmidt didn’t just built their platforms for the common good without any ulterior motives may not come as a shocker, but the idea that we are no longer just performing for human audiences has important implications for online self-presentation and identity management. If our identities are socially constructed through our stage performances, it matters whether they are viewed through the lense of a human being or an algorithm. It matters because humans and search engines don’t see the same thing when they bump into you online.

My abandoned SL Avatar

Our online identities are fragmented. Partly because the web has become fragmented with walled communities popping up everywhere. As a social media professor, I feel pressured to keep up with these communities, so naturally I set up shop in them as soon as a new one arrives. In fact, I have created identities in so many of these services that I have no idea how many parts of me are floating around the Internet. I know there’s VirtualCori, my Second Life avatar from way back when Second Life was still considered cool. Last I checked, she was stuck on my university’s island chained to a wall in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (for those of you who are wondering: I had to leave her there at the end of class because I couldn’t figure out how to unshackle her)… And then there’s @corinnew, cweisgerber, and all the other ones whose avatars or screen names I don’t even remember! Google tells me there are 3,470 fragments of my identity strewn all over the Internet. I have a fairly unique name and there are only 3 other Corinne Weisgerber’s on the Internet that I am aware of: a 9 year younger version from my native Luxembourg, a slightly older version from next-door Belgium, and a Twitter spammer from San Antonio (I won't link to her - don't want to give her any Google juice) who tweets under my name and promotes winter jackets in sunny San Antonio… I can say with certitude that most of these 3,470 search results refer to me.

We know that most Internet users will never see all of that. Actually, the typical Internet user doesn’t look beyond the first three pages of search results. But what if an audience could see all 3,470 fragments and piece them back together? That’s exactly what data mining engines do. And that’s what sets them apart from human beings. While we see identity fragments, engines see identity aggregates. That’s not to say that humans can’t sift through all the available identity data, but merely that most of us don’t have the time or inclination to do so. Actually, leave it to the French to do that! In 2009, a French magazine called Le Tigre published an intimate portrait of a randomly chosen Internet user laced with private information garnered from social networking sites around the web. They called it the Google Portrait of Marc L. The idea was to pick a complete stranger and tell his life story based on the digital footprint that person either voluntarily or involuntarily left behind on the Internet.

Just like Marc L., we may feel comfortable sharing bits of private information online because we think that this one bit of information won’t jeopardize our privacy. We may even comfort ourselves thinking that when looked at in isolation and by its intended audience, it doesn’t reveal much. But what we tend to forget is that taken together, these pieces of information grow much more powerful. Once aggregated, they can draw a cohesive and troublingly intimate picture of our lives, or worse, they can completely misrepresent who we are. And that’s where another danger comes in. Computers can’t compete with human audiences when it comes to inferring meaning from pieces of data – at least not yet. They may not see the apparent irony of a pretend Twitter user from San Antonio, Texas who touts the virtues of fur jackets in the middle of one of the hottest summers in Texas history. Worse, the computer's inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name may lead to inaccurate online portraits, such as those produced as a form of critique by MIT’s Personas project, which scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person.

So if the people we perform for only see a fragmented identity, and computers can’t be trusted with making sense of these fragments, where does that leave strategic self-presentation? When we enter the realm of strategic performance of identity, the buzz-phrase that gets tossed around the most is that of personal branding. It’s interesting that the phrase personal branding (although coined over 10 years ago) was popularized only recently when social media started taking off. It's interesting because we just entered a new digital communication era, an era in which the traditional top-down communication model was flipped on its head and the laws of message control no longer apply. It’s what we teach in social media 101. It’s what a lot of businesses had to learn the hard way: they are no longer in control of their messages. Yet, despite all these dramatic changes, we chose to talk about online identity in terms of a branding metaphor. A metaphor that is built on outdated assumptions of message control.

Why would we tell businesses they no longer control their messages but then go on pretending that we control our own personal brand? Sure, it makes us feel better to think that we do. But do we really? Interpersonal communication research tells us that on social networking sites the people in our network actually co-construct our identities. For instance, we know that if your Facebook friends are physically attractive, others on Facebook will perceive you as more physically attractive. If your Facebook friends are unattractive, you in turn, will be perceived as less attractive! An MIT project, referred to as Project Gaydar, even suggests that your Facebook connections can give away your sexual orientation. You may chose not to state your sexual orientation on Facebook, but you can't prevent your friends from identifying theirs. And according to a team of MIT students, that’s enough information for an algorithm to predict whether or not you're straight or gay! The point is this: your online friends contribute to the construction of your identity the same way customer reviews on Yelp contribute to the construction of a brand’s identity.

So why treat our online persona as a brand? We’ve just seen that this marketing concept doesn’t work so well in a world where your friends can inadvertently leak your sexual orientation by identifying theirs. But even this branding metaphor is built on another metaphor: the word brand comes from “to burn” as in firebrand. Egyptians burned ownership onto cattle and slaves, which were seen as livestock and not people. This same practice was later continued in the U.S. In essence then, personal branding enslaves us as property of a strict image or set of ideas. A brand says we are this—not that. This idea is captured in popular personal branding advice such as “be clear about the image you intend to project. If you have more than one message you run the risk of confusing people about what you are all about.” Or “make certain your brand message is consistent across all platforms.”

I argue that being too concerned with branding restricts the self. Just take a look at U.S. leaders who conflate themselves to the ideology of the party even when it’s clear their own beliefs are far more diverse and subtle. This has lead us to distrust elected officials as we see them as merely parroting talking points. Now compare that to a person like Steve Jobs. Jobs refused to be branded. He was not Apple. He was not Next, or Pixar. He was a unique self, full of contradictions and that’s what humanized him. That’s why we saw the outpouring of support when news of his death spread across the Internet.

The branding metaphor may work for a business but it doesn't work so well for an individual. Issues of ownership, distinction, possession, and enslavement confuse the metaphor. The problem is that we think of a brand in the classical way of thinking of the cosmos: it’s either this or that. It can’t be both. It’s all about getting the positioning right. We used to think of a particle the same way: it is either here or there. It can’t be both places at once. It can only have one position. Or can it? Quantum mechanics suggests it can. According to the Heisenberg principle though, once we observe the particle and try to measure it, we disturb the way it behaves. This in turn changes what we see.

Maybe that’s the problem with online identity. If you look in one place you see one aspect of a person’s identity. If you look in another place you find another aspect. What you’re looking for, where you’re looking for it and the instruments you use to do so will determine what you see. Just like in quantum mechanics. Maybe that's why we need a new metaphor to talk about online identity. Maybe the idea of the multiverse with its multiplicity of possible universes could somehow inform our concept of identity.

When you think about it, the Internet literally chops our identities into packets and hurls us piecemeal around the globe. Our digital identities, reduced to subatomic particles or electrons, fly at near light speed through semiconductors, wires, and cables strung across the ocean floor. We mount to the air as waves from satellites, cell phone towers, and wi-fi hotspots. We shoot out as streams of photons from our screens, as waves of sound from our speakers, and glide across the surface of our tablets with the brush of a finger. 

Our very identities have become the indeterminate particles and waves of quantum theory. We do in essence exist in millions of places at once, being observed by a million others who interpret us in a myriad different ways. The Internet defies position, embraces fluidity, and fosters multiphrenia. Whether or not the concept of the multiverse stands the test of scientific rigor, I argue that it is an apt and useful metaphor to inform discussions of identity in our time. We can no longer speak definitively of position, of brand. Instead, we must speak of multiple voices and multiple interpretations, coexisting throughout our physical and digital world. We must embrace our multiple personas.

What the Bible can teach us about Personal Learning Networks: Spermalogos & Twitter birds

Yesterday, while reading Acts 17:18, I stumbled upon the rather intriguing term "spermalogos."If you're not up on your New Testament Bible stories, let me briefly set the scene for you. In this verse, the apostle Paul has just arrived in Athens and finds himself in the Greek agora preaching the gospel of Christ to a bunch of philosophers. The reaction from the philosophers? A baffled "What is this spermalogos trying to say?"

The NIV translation says they called him a "babbler" and explains that the term refers to a "bird picking up seeds here and there" and that it eventually "came to refer to the loafer in the marketplace who picked up whatever scraps of learning he could find." A bird picking up scraps of information from others? Maybe it's just me, and I'm ripe for another social media fast, but when I read this, I couldn't strike this picture from my mind of a little blue Twitter bird flying around the social web, occasionally picking up a seed of wisdom from its personal learning network (PLN). Kind of like this:

I love that metaphor! But there's more to it. The NIV study notes further clarify that a spermalogos picks up these scraps of learning and then parades them around without digesting them himself. What a great way to depict the limits of a personal learning network. There is no learning without digestion. Okay, strike that - that didn't sound so good. Let's try again: In order to learn from the seeds of wisdom provided by our PLN, we have to carefully examine them, question them, absorb them. We can't just skim over information in a superficial attempt to digest it.

Unfortunately, the fast paced nature of the social web might be priming us to do just that (see Nicolas Carr's book The Shallows for a very grim view on this issue). Even if you don't quite buy Carr's argument that we are losing our ability to read and think deeply, raise your hand if you have ever retweeted information from your PLN without having (fully) read the information contained in it! As much as I hate to admit it, I know I have. And I know it happens quite a bit - especially when you see a tweet retweeted in your timeline seconds after the original tweet went out. Parading scraps of information around without digesting them first? Sounds a lot like the practice of retweeting without first studying the information contained in a tweeted link, doesn't it?

It also reminds me of the practice of bundling tweets and repackaging them in newspaper style format through services such as Paper.li or Scoop.it. Although these sites refer to themselves as content curation services, I wonder if what they are being used for should really be called curation. Aggregation maybe, but curation? If all we do is bundle undigested pieces of wisdom together to share with others, have we really curated anything? A true curator adds a point of view and contextualizes the scraps of information s/he is culling together thereby framing the message. In order to curate then, we need to provide a frame to hold each precious little piece of wisdom, but in order to develop that frame, we first need to digest the information (for an excellent read on the topic of frames & curation, I suggest Maria Popova's piece on curation as a new kind of authorship). Aggregation may be possible without digestion, but curation sure isn't.

Back to Paul though. So these philosophers who according to Acts spent their time hanging out doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas, just called him a spermalogos (or in my version of the story, a blue Twitter bird). Although this may sound like an insult, some people have pointed out that that's not necessarily the case. These idea hungry philosophers saw him as someone who having picked up bits and pieces of wisdom here and there, could "make a significant contribution to their understanding."And there's a lesson in that as well. As we travel around the social web, we need to remember that we can gather scraps of wisdom from the people we encounter there. In a way we're all spermalogos traveling around the Internet. Or maybe we're Athenians picking up the bits and pieces of wisdom our PLN leaves behind everyday around the market place of ideas which is Twitter. For us to learn from these ideas though, let's not forget to take the time to truly absorb and digest them.

How the unrests in Egypt are highlighting key 21st century Internet issues

Given the historic unrests going on in Egypt right now, I decided to ditch the syllabus yesterday and discuss Egypt's role in highlighting 21st century Internet issues instead. I figured the Egyptian government's unprecedented decision to disconnect 80 million people from the Internet demanded a discussion of net neutrality and the Internet Kill switch as it raised an important question about whether or not Internet access should be considered a human right.

Here are the slides from yesterday's class:

View more presentations from Corinne Weisgerber.

Nov. 29th #SMCEDU Chat: Horizon Report Preview & How to Keep up With it All

Cross-posted to: http://smcedu.ning.com/profiles/blogs/nov-29th-smcedu-chat-horizon

Earlier this month the New Media Consortium posted a preview of the 2011 Horizon Report to its website (each year, the Horizon Report identifies a number of emerging technologies expected to change the way we learn and teach). As I skimmed through the 2011 Horizon Report Preview, I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that I don’t know enough about technologies such as Augmented Reality, Game-Based Learning, Gesture-Based Computing, and Learning Analytics. I kept thinking that while educators were busy discussing blogging, microblogging and social networking technologies, the tech industry had already moved on to new projects, leaving us academics scrambling to make sense of yet the latest round of developments. And I also felt pressure – pressure to catch up, learn more, and start experimenting with these new technologies.

Most of us know first hand that keeping up with the latest technologies can sometimes feel like a full time job in an on itself. As a social media professor and researcher, I am in a privileged position in that I get to roll that work into my normal work schedule. It is part of my job to stay abreast of these developments. Not every educator gets to do that though. If we are striving for true social media integration across the curriculum, we are asking educators from all kinds of disciplines to become immersed enough in these technologies to figure out their pedagogical uses. Is that a realistic expectation given their teaching, service and research workloads?

• Can we really expect educators who don’t study and teach technology as a content area to keep up with all this?
• If so, how would we do it?
• Is the amount of work involved in staying abreast of the latest developments in the social media world too much for educators who may be overextending themselves already?
• What are your strategies for balancing the workload and keeping up with all this without letting it take over your real life?

What do you think? Join the #smcedu chat this Monday, November 29th at 12:30 ET and share your views on this topic with the SMCEDU community!

Going beyond the static slide: Creating engaging animations in Apple Keynote

There's no question that slideshows have matured over the course of the past few years and that we are finally seeing a trend away from simple bullet point design. As I was looking over this collection of 28 creative PowerPoint and Keynote presentations, one thing stood out: most of them rely on static images and text. While I do believe that good layout and design principles can imbue a sense of dynamism to a slide, I don't think that most of us are taking full advantage of all the features slide design packages such as PowerPoint and Keynote offer.

To illustrate the extent to which a program such as Apple Keynote can be used as an animation tool, I have included a slide from my colleague and husband, Shannan Butler's, Interactive Media: Design and Production class. The slide introduces the history of the print media through the concept of a media time machine. The video below is a screen capture of two slides created entirely in Apple Keynote. The first slide contains 81 builds and the second one 64.

I think these two slides nicely illustrate what Keynote is capable of when used to its fullest potential. Here's a screenshot of the builds contained in the first slide:

click picture to enlarge

And here's what the second slide looks like:

So the entire content of the video you just watched is contained as builds in these two slides. In order to do this, you first need a frame -- in this case, the media time machine. That frame basically acts like a canvas and looks like this:

Notice all the red diamonds? Those are action builds. In this case, they make the needle on the clock and the years move forward, and they also spin the gears. These animations alone might fall flat without the addition of a few space-age gizmo sound effects. Although I don't usually endorse sound effects, I think that in this case, they work and might even be necessary in order to make the concept of the time machine more visceral.

So where does the actual slide content go? The content for each of the slides was joined together into a single horizontal strip and animated as an action move. As you can imagine, the workspace gets a bit cluttered after a while -- hence the need to split the content into two separate slides. You can see the line-up of the action moves below:

click picture to enlarge

Shannan's intent here was to make a potentially dull and dry topic come to life through the use of dynamic slides. Of course, this type of slideshow takes a lot more time and patience to design and construct than a simple static presentation. But isn't this more fun?

Incorporating Personal Learning Networks into Course Projects

Last semester I introduced a brand new project into my social media class which I've been meaning to report on for a while now. I decided to set 25% of the final grade aside for an assignment the students were allowed to design themselves (the project is described in detail here). The idea was to help students develop independent learning skills by teaching them how to use social media tools to create a personal learning network (PLN) capable of supporting their project goals. Students were able to tailor the assignment to their own learning needs by:

• identifying an area of social media or PR they wanted to learn more about
• outlining a plan of study, and 
• deciding on appropriate learning deliverables to demonstrate their mastery of the material.

The projects the students created ranged from doing PR work for real-world clients to designing their own digital portfolios and social media resumes. The nice thing about this assignment was that as an educator, I got to see and evaluate not only the final product, but also the process the students went through to produce these final products. Below is a Prezi one of my students created to introduce her PLN. I love this Prezi because one look at it told me that this student really 'got' the idea of a PLN -- she really was able to identify experts capable of informing her particular project needs.



To be fair, students' initial reaction to the project may not have been one of absolute enthusiasm... I think the idea of independent learning and PLNs may be so different from the standard academic fare, that it was met with a bit of resistance at first. When I asked my Twitter network to tell me what they got out of their PLN, one of my students responded:

Let's hope that this epiphany hit the student before filling out the end of semester evals :)

So, would I do this project again? You betcha! I'm absolutely convinced that one of the most important skills we can teach our students is to become independent learners. Social media technologies have given us the opportunity to connect to experts all over the world -- all we need to do now is show students how to put these technologies to use in their own learning. It's not just students though that stand to gain from this. PLNs also provide powerful professional development tools for academics. Below is a presentation my colleague and I gave last week to our faculty in order to encourage them to develop their own PLN.

SXSWi 2011 Panel on the Social Media Fast Project

Okay, a little bit of self-promotion here: The 2011 SXSW PanelPicker just went live and I would love it if you would vote for my panel. For more information on the nature of the panel, also check out the project blog I've created. Thanks for your support!

Looking for clients for my "PR for Nonprofits" class!

I'll be teaching "Public Relations for Nonprofit Organizations" this fall and am looking for two nonprofit organizations in the Austin area that would be interested in working with my students during the fall semester! This class is a service-learning course which allows students to gain valuable hands-on PR experience while simultaneously helping out a local nonprofit.

As part of the class, students will take on a local nonprofit as a client and provide PR counsel to that organization. Students will meet with representatives from the nonprofit to find out more about the organization and to identify a PR problem or opportunity (this could be any PR related issue such as increasing awareness among a particular public about what your organization does; attracting more volunteers, etc.). Based on their interactions with the client and on research conducted by the students, they then develop a comprehensive plan for a PR campaign which states their goals and objectives for the campaign, identifies key publics and messages, and describes the best strategies and tactics to reach their stated goal(s). At the end of the semester, students present their campaign proposal to the class and the client.

If you are interested in working with our class on this exciting project, or if you know of a nonprofit organization that could use our services, please contact me. I'm looking forward to hearing from you!

For further info on the class, I have attached the syllabus:

Going on a social media fast

(Post crostposted to: http://thesocialmediafast.com) A little bit of background on this project: I have always been intrigued by the Internet. I can still remember the exact day I first heard a friend utter the word email and explain what it meant. That was back in the summer of 1994. I got my first email account that same year and participated in a transatlantic text-based chat only a few months later. Needless to say, I was impressed. Until that moment, computers had seemed useless to me.

To my defense, my introduction to computers consisted of a class on Logo! To this day I can still see myself sitting in class, frustrated, punching in command after command in an effort to coax my Logo turtle into drawing that flower that would have guaranteed me an A in the class. My flower never took shape. Neither did the A. I later learned BASIC and PASCAL but never understood the point of either of those programming languages. All of that changed in an instant though when I discovered the beginnings of the Internet back in 94. I was mesmerized. So much so that I decided to pursue a Master's and later a Ph.D. in computer-mediated communication. But things didn't really get serious until 2005 - right around the time when I first heard people talk about "social media." At that time I wasn't real sure what they were referring to, but from the sheer volume of mentions I could tell it was something big.

As a communication professor, I quickly became convinced that we needed to incorporate the study of social media into our curriculum. So I proposed to design a class dedicated solely to social media. The class was scheduled to be taught for the first time in the fall of 2007, which meant I had a lot of social media catching up to do. I had to learn about RSS and feed readers, figure out wikis and social bookmarks, and start blogging and tweeting. All those things were new to me. And they were starting to eat up my time - a lot of my time. A couple of months into my first semester teaching the class, my husband jokingly declared himself a social media widower.

I assured him it was a temporary thing, that I needed to learn the ropes and that as soon as I had done so, my life would be back to normal. What I didn't realize then was the fact that social media doesn't work that way. Social media sites are more like a pack of ravenous wolves demanding to be fed constantly -- with new tweets, new status updates and new blog posts. And the rules of engagement dictate that a good social media user respond to other's comments. No rest for the weary here!

It's a catch 22 for social media professionals. Most of us realize that social media have taken over an excessively large part of our lives, but few perceive any viable alternatives. Sometimes I wonder if people (myself included) even want an escape route. I also worry about the long-term effects of excessive social media use. I'm not just talking about the relational effects here (a topic I addressed at this year's SXSWi conference). I'm also thinking about the effects on our behaviors and possibly our brains. As Nicholas Carr put it so elegantly:

"Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages."

Ever since reading Carr's article Is Google Making Us Stupid? a couple of years ago, I knew he was on to something. He described a phenomenon I had observed many times in my own behavior, something I had come to call hyperlinked thinking. Deep down I always suspected I knew the culprit... In this year's June edition of Wired Magazine, Carr provides further evidence of the Internet's ability to affect the way we think. He describes a study which found that a week of intensive Internet surfing is enough to rewire a novice's brain, changing the brain's activity to resemble that of veteran Internet surfers. Even if you don't believe social media usage can rewire your brain, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence of how it is changing our behaviors. This quote fromRoger Ebert's blog post on the topic is one I can relate to all too well:

For years I would read during breakfast, the coffee stirring my pleasure in the prose. You can't surf during breakfast. Well, maybe you can. Now I don't have coffee and I don't eat breakfast. I get up and check my e-mail, blog comments and Twitter.

Ebert's post made me curious. I already know that social media has had a tremendous effect on my life - from the way I teach, to the way I interact with friends and family, to smaller behavior changes that might pass below the radar unless we stop to think about them. And that's exactly what I am proposing to do: Taking a social media time-out and recording the effects. For one full week I will renounce all social media. I will challenge myself to stay off Facebook and Twitter, ignore my blogs and emails, and turn off the Internet altogether. In essence, I'm sending my computer on vacation! Instead of my laptop, I will carry a notebook (one made of paper) to record my thoughts on the experiment. After the end of the experiment, I will publish my findings on this blog. By removing social media from my life for a week, I'm hoping to learn how these new technologies are impacting my daily life.  After all, if a week of intense web training can alter a novice's brain, imagine what a week off the grid could do to an Internet addict!

Is hiring student interns for social media work really the right strategy?

Ever since I started teaching my social media for PR class, I've had all kinds of firms and nonprofit organizations contact me to ask specifically for interns who had taken my class. On the bright side, these inquiries seem to indicate that social media skills are in high demand and that the class is making students more marketable. That's the great news. The not so great news is that over the course of the past two semesters I have seen a dramatic increase in the number of employers seeking to hire student interns to put in charge of setting up their organization's social media presence on the web. I know this doesn't sound so bad on the surface either. After all it shows that companies are starting to take social media seriously and that they are willing to participate in the social media sphere. What I am questioning is their social media strategy (or lack thereof?).

Employers' assumptions about digital natives
At St. Edward's University, we require all of our communication students to complete an internship before graduation. Each semester, the communication faculty take turns in supervising these internship experiences. This past academic year, I had the opportunity to supervise both the fall and spring semester student internships which allowed me to learn a great deal about the types of jobs our students get hired to perform. Although I haven't collected any official numbers yet, I'd say that about 50-60 percent of our spring interns were recruited to set up some form of social media presence for their employers. Since we only offer one social media class (with a maximum enrollment of 20), the vast majority of these students had never taken a class on social media strategy. That didn't prevent their employers from putting them in charge of their social media effort though. The running assumption seems to be that students know about social media because they are, well, students. And they are young. And young people inherently know about social media...

The problem is that knowing how to set up a Twitter account or Facebook page does not equal social media savviness. Unfortunately, my conversations with student interns and their internship supervisors have convinced me that most people think they're interchangeable. Smaller firms and nonprofits especially, tend to recruit students to handle their organization's move to a web 2.0 world - mostly because they can't (or don't want to) afford a full-time staff member to do the job. To me, their desire to participate in the social web seems fueled by a short-term approach devoid of any strategic thinking. Case in point: my students reported having set up blogs, Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts, and YouTube channels for their employers but couldn't tell me who would keep updating these pages once they left. And that's where I see the major problem. It's cheap for a company to hire an intern to run its social media accounts (and sometimes even free), but having temporary staff members blog, tweet and post status updates simply isn't sustainable, nor is is a good idea.

Are social media internships reversing the traditional employer-intern mentorship role?
First off, I am concerned about students not getting much out of such internships. In the past, internships were modeled on the idea of a mentorship (I know mine were). Students would be introduced to the ins and outs of a particular job by one or more professionals committed to teaching them the ropes. What I see happening more and more though, is students being brought in as the alleged social media expert supposed to teach the employer. In essence, the mentorship roles have been reversed. While I have had some very bright students who no doubt would make great tech teachers, the power relationship between an intern and his or her supervisor is such that an undergraduate intern will most likely not question his or her employer's social media strategy decisions.

For instance, I doubt most interns would object to an employer's direct request to seed an online community with fake accounts. From a social media perspective it is about us unauthentic a strategy as it gets, but for organizations wanting to jump on the social media bandwagon it may seem the right thing to do at the time. Interns may not know any better (because they may not yet have received any social media training themselves), or may feel pressured to comply with their employer's request. Either way, if the students haven't received any prior training, there's no one there to guide them and no one to help employers determine the right social media strategy.

The problem with the short-term social media approach
Another, and potentially much bigger problem I see, is the issue of sustainability. Most of my interns' employers seemed more focused on the idea of setting up shop on the social web than on the question of how to sustain the various presences once they had been created. As any of my social media students will tell you, engaging online audiences is tedious, time consuming work. If done correctly, it's a full time job. I can't help but wonder what will happen to all the blogs, fan pages and Twitter accounts once the interns leave. Yes, these employers could simply hire another intern to keep the cycle going, but how can we expect a complete outsider (who will spend roughly 15 weeks on the job) to learn enough about the organization to represent it accurately to the public? By the time the intern would be familiar enough with the organization to engage in a genuine conversation about its mission or operations, it would be time to bring the next intern on board. Not to mention the problem of constantly changing voices which may cause another authenticity issue.

The default approach to social media: the marketing/broadcasting model
Having listened to plenty of student presentations on their internship work, I couldn't help but notice one big commonality in their own and their employer's approach to social media: the tendency to view social media as broadcasting tool. I remember one of my students complaining during his presentation that he had been unsuccessful in establishing a Twitter following for his employer. His slide included a screenshot of the Twitter account he had set up for the organization. Not a single tweet included an @reply directed at a particular Twitter user. Instead, every tweet consisted of a marketing message broadcast via the Twitter platform. His example was by no means the exception to the rule. I'm not entirely sure whether this tendency to default to the broadcasting model stems from the students' greater familiarity with that model, or whether it was mandated by their employers. At any rate, the failure to view social media as a conversation platform, to me, only exacerbates the problems I have outlined in this post.

Airline use of social media during the Icelandic volcano eruption

It seems like every time I'm scheduled to discuss the role of social media in crisis communication some major crisis comes along -- usually just in time for class. This semester was no exception. The global disruption in air travel caused by the eruption of a volcano in Iceland created an interesting case for us to examine in class today. What I like about this case study is that it deals with a different type of crisis than the ones we normally look at in our PR classes: a crisis that wasn't directly or indirectly caused by an organization. The fact that it affected not just one airline but an entire industry also allowed for an interesting comparative analysis of the various airlines' crisis responses.

I split my class into teams and had each team examine a different airline's social media use. We then compared notes and gave each airline a grade on its crisis response. In case you're curious, the highest grades went to KLM and Lufthansa (both received As for their use of social media during this crisis). KLM is even rebooking passengers through Twitter!

Here are the notes from today's class:

View more presentations from Corinne Weisgerber.

Update: Also check out this excellent post by Thorsten Ulmer comparing several German airlines and their use of Twitter during this crisis (in German).

Timeline of the Greenpeace anti-KitKat social media campaign

In class on Monday we discussed web video and how organizations use it to disseminate their messages. One of the examples we looked at was Greenpeace's new video aimed at pressuring Nestlé into dropping its use of palm oil in the production of KitKat bars.



Nestlé immediately demanded that the video be removed from YouTube citing copyright infringement. YouTube agreed and removed the video -- thereby creating a stir that eventually got traditional media outlets interested in the story. Nestlé made matters worse with a number of angry comments it posted to its Facebook fan site. As a result, Nestlé is getting hammered with negative comments on its Facebook site. I'm not even sure you can still call it a fan site at this point... What's most amazing to me is that Nestlé has apparently abandoned its Facebook page. The company hasn't reacted to the onslaught of criticism since last Friday's comments.






For a timeline of the events that lead to this PR crisis, check out this great slideshow:

NESTLE KERFUFFLE on Prezi

For a an excellent analysis of Nestle's crisis response (or lack thereof), check Jeremiah Owyang's post & also this SocialMediaToday report.

Also check out the Brand Builder's 2 part series on How to make sure your Facebook page doesn't become a Trojan horse (part1, part2).

Spring 2010 Student Podcasts

Every semester, the students in this class produce a podcast on a particular topic. Since our university is celebrating its 125th anniversary this year, I asked the students to produce a 5-10 minute podcast about the university’s anniversary celebrations. Each team had the option of using open-source software (Audacity) or Garageband to produce the podcasts. Here are the results - enjoy!

• Interview with Michelle Diaz, Director of Communication, and Marcie Lasseigne, Public Relations Associate at St. Edward's University - Sarah , Courtney , Ally 
• Interview with Arnold Hernandez , a former St. Edward’s student who works in the admission office now - Kiara, Haza , Andrew 
• Interview with Michelle Diaz, Director of Communication, and Marcie Lasseigne, Public Relations Associate at St. Edward's University - Ellie , Nathalie , Annie
• Interview with Pete Erickson, Assistant Director of Student Life about the service challenge- Meghan , Erin 
• Interview with Professor Mike Sullivan , a key figure to the success of the St. Edward’s Theatre Arts Program - Mikkayla , Roy , James 
• Panel discussion about the anniversary - Christiana , Julie , Mischelle 

Sneak peek of SXSWi panel: Is Technology Weakening Interpersonal Relationships?

It's spring break and in Austin, that can only mean one thing: time for South by Southwest! Tomorrow I will be participating in a panel on the effects of technology on interpersonal relationships along with Ashley Brown (a former comm. student and advisee), Jenn Deering Davis, and Matt Weber. The plan is to discuss how our wired lives and our need for constant connection are affecting our offline relationships.

To me, there's no denying that technology is changing how we relate to other people - the question is whether it's a change for the better or worse. I'm mostly interested in the question of whether our technology use is taking a toll on our real life relationships. I think a lot of people are starting to feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of technologies (& the relationships attached to those technologies) they need to keep up with. I know I am!

For those of you who can't make it to our panel, here's a little sneak peek:

View more presentations from Corinne Weisgerber.

Crowdsourcing my Social Media for PR Syllabus: Need your Input!

The end of the fall semester is right around the corner and that means it's time to start thinking about spring classes. When I started teaching my Social Media for PR class in Fall 07, the field was so new I had little to go on to help me put together a syllabus. In the end, I developed my syllabus by compiling a number of social media and PR topics I felt my students needed to know. I have been tweaking the class ever since -- adding topics, changing readings, experimenting with assignments, etc.

This semester, I'm ready for a major overhaul and I'm asking for your input! I'd love to create a state of the art Social Media for PR syllabus crowdsourced by experts in the field. And I'd love to hear from you! Actually, make that I need to hear from you!

What do you think PR majors should know about social media -- specifically:

• What topics should a Social Media for PR class cover?
• What readings are absolute musts?
• How can students demonstrate their mastery of course content? What should the student projects/assignments consist of?

I have started the brainstorming process in this wiki and I would like to invite anyone with an interest in social media and PR to contribute to it. The wiki is open to anyone (you will need to create a free Pb Wiki login if you don't already have one). Please feel free to suggest additional topics, projects, readings, etc. I've also posted my old syllabi on the wiki for reference purposes.

Can't wait to hear from you/see your suggestions!

You don't need to tweet to get value out of Twitter

Yes, you heard me right: You don't necessarily need to tweet in order to get value from Twitter! Let me explain why I say this. For the last few semesters I have been encouraging my PR students to get on Twitter. I've explained the necessity to be Twitter literate (twitterate?) and discussed examples of corporate, non-profit, and personal uses of Twitter. I've even thrown in a lecture on how to use Twitter as a job search and personal branding tool. The response though has been mixed. While some students get really excited, others react much less enthusiastically.

Let me make a confession here before moving on: I probably fell into that second category myself when I first learned about Twitter back in 2007. I saw its potential as a PR tool, but as an academic, I didn't see the need to tweet myself. I set up an account mainly because people were talking about it and I felt it was something I should discuss in my social media class. I basically registered my account so I could learn about Twitter.

So now you know - I never planned on tweeting myself! Having said that, I think I can understand my students' initial hesitation about joining the twitterverse. I've been there. So here's my advice for them (and anyone else sharing their feelings): Just set up an account, develop a network and listen in - no need to jump in with your own tweets right away! Staying away from tweeting for a while might even open your eyes to Twitter's potential as a powerful social search engine.

So how do you develop a good network?

1. Start by identifying a few people in your field whose work you admire. Then look them up to see if they tweet. You may use Twitter's built-in search engine to locate people on Twitter (click on the 'Find People' link on the top right hand side of the page), or you can check their blog or other social networking site to look for their Twitter handle.
2. Now you can piggy-back off their following/follower list! Go through both lists to see whether there are any people who share your interests or who tend to pass along valuable information. A quick look at their latest tweets usually is enough to make that call.
3. When someone in your network sends out an RT (retweet), look up the person who sent the original tweet. Again, check their latest tweets to see if you could benefit from the type of info they tweet.
4. Check out the #followfriday suggestions from the people in your network. Every Friday thousands of Twitter users all over the world participate in this event by suggesting people who are worth following.
5. You can also check Twitter for suggested users although those suggestions won't be tailored to your specific needs. Twitter uses the analogy of your local book store's staff picks to explain its suggested users list.
6. If you want to receive suggestions on who to follow based on your current network, give Mr. Tweet a try. Mr. Tweet looks through your relationships and tweets to identify the influencers and followers you should follow.
7. An even easier way to discover new and interesting Twitter users is to consult a Twitter list. Twitter is in the process of rolling out its own list feature to the public, so you may want to check your favorite tweeter's lists once the feature goes live for everyone.
8. In the meanwhile, check out the lists published on TweepML, another service that allows you "to manage and share groups of Twitter users." Use its "find a list" search tool to locate lists of Twitter users in your field (for instance, check out this list of educators on Twitter, or this list of PR pros).

If you implement all of the steps outlined above, you should end up with a pretty good-sized group of people to follow. Now all we need to do is a bit of network tweaking:

1. Start by filtering your incoming tweets. That's the only way to keep on top of Twitter when you are following a large group of people. Get a Twitter desktop client such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic and divide the people you follow into groups. For instance, I have a group for PR educators, one for PR professionals, another one for non-English tweets, etc. By organizing them into categories, the tweets will be neatly displayed in columns which will make it much easier to scan your tweets for relevant information.
2. "Test drive" your Twitter subscriptions for a month or two. Then re-evaluate. Are there accounts you are subscribing to that aren't providing much value to you? If so, hit the "unfollow" button! Think of your subscriptions as coming with a money back guarantee. If you don't like what you see, simply cancel at no cost to you.
3. Don't forget to repeat steps 1-8 every now and then to add new voices to your Twitterstream.

Do this for a while and I'll almost guarantee you'll see the value of Twitter and will want to get involved yourself. You'll learn so much from the people you follow and come across so much great information you'll want to reciprocate by sharing your insights.

How to optimize a news release (brief tutorial)

Now that you've learned how to write a traditional news release, it's time to discuss how to bring this old PR tool into the 21st century! After all, the media landscape has changed tremendously since Ivy Lee issued the first news release a little more than 100 years ago. It only makes sense that we adapt this old tool to today's media reality. And that reality is complex: publics don't just receive their news from traditional media outlets anylonger and they don't just passively consume news either. They receive news from their social networks and likewise share news with those networks. As a result, we need to change the way we think about news distribution. I have embedded the class notes on how to optimize a news release below. You won't see any of the animations since I had to convert the slides to a PDF file, but the content is essentially the same:

View more documents from Corinne Weisgerber.

List of sites mentioned in class:

• Twitter search
• Facebook Lexicon
• Google Insights
• Microsoft AdCenter Labs (Keyword Research)
• Muckrack (for examples of Twitter pitches)
• Twitter Pitch design example
  

New Assignment: Optimizing a News Release for Search Engines

I'm teaching our PR survey class this semester and instead of reusing the traditional news release assignment for the writing part of the course, I thought I'd try something a little different this year: I'm having students optimize their news release for search engines. Students will still write a traditional news release, but once that has been graded, they will then take their release, make the necessary corrections and optimize it. The assignment is described below. It's very much inspired by a position paper on search engine visibility published by Steve Rubel on behalf of Edelman. I'd love to hear from anyone who's done this in their class already - anything I'm missing?

The Assignment: Optimized News Release

As we have seen, news releases and the messages they contain increasingly end up on the Internet where they get indexed by search engines. Since these messages have become searchable, it is important to include words and phrases Internet users would use intuitively when searching for content related to that message. Having read Edelman’s position paper on the issue and having discussed search engine and message optimization in class, it is now your turn to take your SEU news release and optimize it. For this assignment, you will need to identify a set of keywords/keyword phrases for use in your optimized news release. Use free tools such as Wordtracker, Google Insights, Google Adwords, or Microsoft’s AdCenter Labs to do so. You may also want to check Twitter Search or Facebook Lexicon to get a sense for the natural words and phrases people use to talk about your type of topic.

1. Accurately reflect how people talk & search (natural language)
2. Face little competition from other keywords

Once you’ve decided on your keywords, strategically incorporate them into your news release (see the Edelman position paper for tips on how to do so).

Deliverables:

1. Your revised & optimized news release with the keywords highlighted in bold print
2. A short paper listing the keywords/keyword phrases you decided on and explaining why you chose them and how they fit the 2 keyword requirements outlined above. Include screenshots of the visuals generated by tools such as Google Insights to back up your argument.
3. A Twitter pitch for your news release of no more than 140 characters. Use a separate page for this pitch. Your pitch should incorporate at least one of your keywords. Since this is not an official SEU news release, do not send it out over Twitter. For tips on writing effective Twitter copy, check out this example.

Grading Criteria:

Your optimized news release will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

1. Quality of the writing (10 pts.)
2. Properly optimized
1. Keywords incorporated into headline (10 pts.)
2. Keywords incorporated into body (10 pts.)
3. Keywords bolded (only bolded words will be considered) (10 pts.)
3. Quality of the paper
1. Lists keywords (10 pts.)
2. Provides rationale for choice of keywords (10 pts.)
3. Explains how keywords fit reqs (natural language & competition) (10 pts.)
4. Provides screenshots to back up rationale (10 pts.)
4. Twitter pitch
1. Within the 140 character limit (10 pts.)
2. Incorporates keyword(s) (10 pts.)