Red River College students making snoo.ws

March 10 2010, 8:23am

NOTE: This article was written by guest blogger Melanie Lee Lockhart, a PR consultant and instructor at Red River College; she blogs about public relations at Lockstep on PR. This week, a long-standing tradition in the Red River College of Applied Arts, Science and Technology (”RRC”) Creative Communications program, the Independent Professional Project Presentations (”IPPP”), will offer a new twist: a Tweet Pit. At the annual IPPP event, graduating Creative Communications students present their work on a year-long independent project. The variety of projects is wide, the range of skills on display is impressive; but until this year, few outside the program knew much about it, because such publicity relied heavily on the cooperation of gatekeepers in the traditional media. Gatekeepers no more! Well, no. But this year’s IPPPs will reflect a major shift that’s taking place across the program: students are employing social media alongside traditional publicity and advertising techniques to get the word out.

 The Tweet Pit will host five first-year Creative Communications students, @jeffaward, @glendaollero, @aggiesemms, @jasmineamellie, and @jerwook, who will live-tweet the three-day event using the hashtag #ipp10. Curriculum changing with the times The Tweet Pit isn’t the only place social media shows up in the Creative Communications curriculum.  Every first-year student, every Advertising Major and every Public Relations Major is required to have a blog and update it at least weekly; check them out on the CreComm Blog Network. In class, the students learn how to appeal to and retain online audiences – combining an understanding of the tools and culture of social media with traditional audience targeting and principles of persuasion. In public relations and advertising, Creative Communications students learn

how different audiences use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, and a host of other new media platforms to share information with people who matter to them

how to analyze their audiences’ online preferences and behaviour to help target communication programs

how to employ social media to gain publicity, nurture customer relationships, and manage issues and crises online

about content moderation, and how it can be vital in helping maintain a healthy UGC community associated with a brand.

Journalism students, in addition to learning the importance of content moderation for journalistic websites, learn to leverage social media to find and develop sources, and to write for online media; they also live-stream an evening newscast to the web, and Media production students create podcasts along with traditional television and radio programming. Because the Creative Communications program is hands-on, students learn how to use social media effectively by integrating them into their own campaigns.  At this week’s IPPPs, we’ll see lots of evidence of that: publicity achieved through Facebook groups and fan pages, Twitter feeds (and strategic use of partners’ Twitter feeds), MySpace pages, YouTube videos and sites. There are even a couple of original books being marketed for the Kindle. The IPPPs will run from 9:00 to 4:30 this Wednesday and Thursday, and 9:00 to 12:30 this Friday, at the Park Theatre, 698 Osborne Street in Winnipeg. They’re open to the public, but if you can’t make it in person, follow the Tweet Pit at #ipp10.