Friday, March 23, 2007

What's On This Week

Just back from Spring Break, our class is researching PR case studies to determine the strategy used in handling different types of communication situations. Click on the student blog links to the right of this page to read their findings.

Up next? Trend spotting. Our class will examine trends — what they are and the promotional strategies for pushing them to trend status. We will be working with Look-Look, a trend tracking company that will guide our class in tracking specific trends and reporting the results.

Following are resources students will be browsing for background in assessing the current trend landscape:

http://look-look.com

http://www.springwise.com/ideas/

http://www.psfk.com/

http://www.slate.com/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/collective/

http://www.joshspear.com/

Stay tuned.

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Kudos for our SMU Student Blogs

One of our student blogs by Meredith Hultman caught the attention of Dave Cote of Agency Next, a professional Marketing and PR agency. He writes about our class blog efforts and predicts that our "forward-thinking skills" will be instrumental in creating "leaders of a new generation of communication strategists."

(Read his entire blog post: Here’s a scholar (and the future of marcom BTW)

We appreciate his vote of confidence. It seems clear that since the Internet is second nature to today's students, communication companies will count on this generation of college students to help companies navigate in the blogosphere. Cote insists, "Organizations with members who blog well and blog regularly will benefit from the invested effort. Striking a balance between getting your message across while serving the needs of your users and building community is critical. Nothing propels adoption faster than online communities. Nothing builds traction more cost effectively. And nothing is more elusive or temporal."

Amen. And although I'm aware that if you're reading this blog, I'm preaching to the choir, it does not change the overwhelming evidence that the blogs have caught on well beyond original expectation. As Cote says on Meredith's blog, "
PR professionals have caught the blog fever, and the only prescription is bloggers like you. As a matter of fact – give us a call when you graduate!"

Count on it.