On Monday, Karen Russell at Teaching PR posted the week’s best blogs. She included one from Tamar Weinberg, titled “Best Internet Marketing Blog Posts of 2007.” Let me tell you, Tamar’s blog is mindboggling. I mean, it literally blew me away.
Sprint, fly, surf to her site immediately for a complete education in social media. Caution, however, that you may never find your way out of the jungle of information Tamar provides.
Happy Monday! My co-author (USF Strategic Communication Management grad student Melanie Formentin) and I have an article coming out in a special issue “Public Relations and Sport” in Public Relations Review in June 2008.
Title: “Re-branding the NHL: building the league through the ‘My NHL’ integrated marketing campaign,” by Bob Batchelor and Melanie Formentin
Thoughts, comments, etc. greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Bob
Depending on one’s viewpoint, I am either in an enviable place or completely insane as a doctoral student in English Literature. The short version of a long story is that I have done everything backwards in my career, so entering the Ivory Tower, I had published books, teaching experience, etc., but no Ph.D. So, now after a career in communications, I find myself as a grad student once again. It is a necessary step to move from permanent Instructor to a tenure-track position.
On the plus side, there are interesting intersections between what I learn in English and the public relations classes I teach. Before I started taking classes, I would never have thought that English lit theory would add to my thinking about PR. Recently, however, we looked at a New York Times blog, “Will the Humanities Save Us” by Stanley Fish, a celebrated English professor and provocateur.
The essay linked to above is both oddly alluring, indirect, and ultimately frustrating. An example is one of Fish’s final paragraphs:
“Teachers of literature and philosophy are competent in a subject, not in a ministry. It is not the business of the humanities to save us, no more than it is their business to bring revenue to a state or a university. What then do they do? They don’t do anything, if by ‘do’ is meant bring about effects in the world. And if they don’t bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.”
I am intrigued by Fish’s willingness to admit that the humanities exist for their own good and the pleasure they give, although he is fully aware of the assault against the humanities by education bureaucrats and others who would do away with the liberal arts in general. I decided to look at another Fish article, from a collection English as a Discipline: Or, is there a Plot in this Play? edited by James C. Raymond.
In “Them We Burn: Violence and Conviction in the English Department,” Fish argues for English to reclaim its ownership “taking care of verbs and adjectives,” rather than engage in the multidisciplinary tasks (Fish cites “cultural studies” as one example) that critics rail against when examining what these departments bring to higher education (161).
Instead, Fish says, “It is a requirement, then, for the respectability of an enterprise that it be, or at least be able to present itself (which is even more important) as, distinctive” (162). The point, for English departments to find success — just as I would argue for public relations professionals to distinguish themselves from other would-be “communicators” across an organization — is to be distinct and champion that distinctness.
Fish exclaims, “A practice only acquires identity by not being other practices, by representing itself as not doing everything, but as doing one thing in such a way as to have a society habitually look to it for specific performance.” More importantly, for the argument in favor of public relations within the organization, “When the hard outlines of a practice are blurred by a map that brings into relief its affiliations, borrowings, lendings, and overlappings with other practices, those affiliations, rather than anything specific to the practice, are what become visible” [emphasis mine] (169).
From one perspective, this argument for public relations might seem odd coming from me, particularly if you read Bill Sledzik’s fine blog and my stab at a rebuttal. But, Fish’s idea about what space a discipline should claim provides great clarity.
My idealistic viewpoint is that integrated communications means each part of the marketing mix works together toward common organizational objectives. In the business world, this does not happen often enough because the respective directors of PR, Marketing, and Advertising/Creative pursue their own agendas without much, if any, interaction.
From Fish, I realize that PR professionals need to trumpet their distinctiveness and more actively carve out what it is that we do so exceedingly well, like broker relationships between organizations and the seemingly endless number of interested parties, or stakeholders, all around them.
Given the PR profession’s manic inferiority complex, constantly bickering over definitions of what PR is and is not, and whether or not executive’s value it, I am not sure how one would go about making its distinctiveness known. Maybe such an attempt means blowing up everything about the profession and starting from scratch. Perhaps, as Fish also suggests about English, it necessitates PR’s demise, hoping that an eventual rebirth will occur (if a world without PR serves as a catalyst for recognizing its value).
What do you think?
Monday starts a new semester, which along with the new year, provides a kind of rebirth for academics. There is power in this opportunity to start fresh, both meeting and teaching new students, at the same time refining and expanding on how we go about teaching them.
Living in 15-week spurts has disadvantages as well. Time goes entirely too fast. January bleeds into May, the short summer break comes, and then by the fall semester start in August, the year is basically over. The constant controlled and uncontrolled chaos of teaching pushes along at warp speed. The train is constantly moving and the destination seems a bit fuzzy. It is easy to develop a love/hate relationship with the semester clock.
Last week we lost electricity for a couple hours, just before darkness fell on our little piece of Florida. With a beautiful two-year-old daughter running around, the first instinct is to make sure she understands what is happening and, basically, does not freak out. To her, total darkness can be terrifying, so we made it a game with “magical” candles and fun sitting outside watching the stars. A few hours later, the lights came back on, and we packed up the Scion and went driving around to look at holiday lights around the neighborhood. We turned it into a great family evening.
The idea of the power outage stayed with me. My wife and I discussed how refreshing it felt without distractions, whether telephone calls or the constant blare of the TV (damn, it was nice to get a break from watching Caillou’s Xmas movie for the 1,000th time). For the first time in as long as I can remember, I actually felt decompressed. We pledged to turn everything off more often in the future in an attempt to recreate that unplugged feeling.
I realized that this conflicted feeling is similar to the way I feel about technology and teaching it to my students. On one hand, I love technology, not only working for years as a tech communicator and journalist, but exploring its power with my students, as well as the influence it will have on their careers. I think intellectual curiosity is the lynchpin of a career in communications and the constant technology evolution forces professionals to continue evolving, growing, and learning.
On the flipside, though, I hate my own addiction to technology…the gnawing feeling I get when I am not checking e-mail a million times a day; reading countless electronic newsletters, articles, journals, and essays; and trying to stay ahead of the curve on everything technology-related. When I give myself time to think about it, I know for a fact that I am spreading myself too thin, which is perpetuated by the way technology brings me closer to whatever pops into my head.
My lone attempt at fighting my own addiction is by completely repelling all technology based on cell phones. I realize that their are implications and that I am falling behind somewhat by not engaging in that arena, but there must be a stopping point.
Honestly, though, I can’t say that I use my time more wisely because I am not plugged in by cell, but I do devote some of it to the act of thinking. What I have noticed is that quiet time is virtually nonexistent in today’s society. We are so plugged in that reflection comes infrequently, if ever. Most college students cannot even walk across campus, whether a 7 a.m. or 7 p.m. without chatting away on the ubiquitous cell phone. For those of us over the age of 35, it is still unsettling to see people from a distant whose lips are moving or in the next lane over on the highway though all alone. I cannot be the only Gen Xer who gets a weird feeling in that fleeting moment before realizing that the person is on a cell phone.
Obviously, a blog is an odd place for such a technophile/technophobe confessional, but perhaps those who would read this are the most in need of thinking about the topic. These kinds of examinations are never simple and much larger than thinking about corporate America’s fascination with “work/life balance,” since technology is at the heart of the profession and unavoidable in the workplace.
More importantly, I do not think these issues should be pushed under the rug. Turnover (i.e. burnout) is a critical challenge in communications and tech-based chaos is a factor. My primary criticism is that technology should have made people more productive, thus enabling workers to work less, not more.
In fact, what happened is that technology gives management the opportunity to heap more on workers’ plates. I do not know a single communications professional who isn’t working the job of a person and a half or more. Fewer people on the payroll increases margins and profitability. Thus, the smartest, most efficient employees are given even more work, not a break from the onslaught. But, now I’m venturing onto another topic…
Getting back to the point. Technology enables us for better and worse.
I’ll admit: I am a technophile and technophobe. Are you?
