Public Relations Matters

• From PR To Eternity: Matthew Watson’s Blog
  A listing of the world’s top PR blogs; definitely worth a look
  (tags: pr_blogs)
• TwitterCounter: How popular are you? (open beta)
  (tags: twitter)
• Savannah Movie Showtimes
  (tags: movies)
• Welcome – slydial
• Ask-Dr-Kirk: Did I Miss Anything?
  We’ve all had that question…A student is absent from class and comes up to you to ask, “Did I miss anything?” or “Did you do anything important in class today?” The following poem by Tom Wayman illustrates the various thoughts that have come to mind a
  (tags: absence humor students)

As an admitted “font junkie,” I find this video called “Font Conference“ pretty funny, even laughing out loud a few times. My favorite character in it is Wingdings. Which one is yours?

• The St Andrews Face Transformer
  The Face Transformer!
  Do a face experiment!
  (tags: humor fun design transformer generator face graphics)

• Drive Belonging and Engagement in the Classroom Using Facebook
  (tags: Facebook education Web2.0)
• Student noses buried in Facebooks.
  The place for socializing and goofing off. College students still can’t get enough of Facebook.
  According to Youth Trends’ February 2008 “Top Ten List Report,” Facebook was students’ favorite Web site for the seventh straight quarter.
  College
  (tags: Facebook)
• Making Connections
  From Facebook to text messages to blogs, we are an intimately connected society. In this highly interactive FYE course, you will create your own blog, contribute to a social network, learn how corporations are using the Internet to connect with consumers,
  (tags: FYE1220)

• McCain’s “Viagra” Moment
  The cat got his tongue, but not McCain’s hand. CNN’s Jeanne Moos on the awkward exchange turned anti-McCain ad.
  (tags: PublicSpeaking nonverbal)
• CNN.com - Podcasts
  (tags: iTunes journalism politics Podcast)
• Resume 2.0 « The Secret Diary of a Bonafide Marketing Genius
  As a Genius who endeavors to practice what she preaches, I decided to do a little experimenting with the idea of a social media resume myself.
  (tags: Resume jobsearch)

Need some feedback here . . . I was trying to explain to my public relations students how conversations on Twitter sometimes overlap, and sometimes they don’t. It seemed like a venn diagram might help. Is this an accurate portrayal of the overlap of people I follow, people who follow me and people you follow?

Your comments are much appreciated.

“Grammar Girl? She must be a superhero!” exclaimed my daughter Katey last week when she was peeking over my shoulder as I read some of my tweets.

After I finished laughing, I stopped to think about what Katey said. I guess Katey’s right: Grammar Girl is my superhero. Anyone who can take a subject that could be dry (at best) and turn it into an intriguing, humorous and award-winning podcast and then a book has done something amazing, something that most humans cannot do. That sounds like superhero work to me!

I’ve been a listener of Mignon Fogarty’s Grammar Girl podcast for about six months now. My favorite episode of Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips is the one on when to use lay and when to use lie. My tendency had been to substitute a word rather than figure out the rule. Now I think I may understand it! (The true test of this will occur when I explain to my public relations students when to use which word.)

Wednesday evening, Katey and I are making a girls-only road trip to the Atlanta area to meet Mignon in person and have our copy of Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing signed.

To subscribe to the Grammar Girl podcast, visit the Quick and Dirty Tips website. You’ll be glad you did.

Take the Grammar Girl Challenge; it’s on the right sidebar of Public Relations Matters. Let me know how you did!

And finally, if you know what the punctuation mark is right under the letter G in “girl” in Katey’s poster, drop me a comment here. Hint: Look close; it’s not a question mark.

• 50 Ways to use Social Media, listed by Objective
  Chris Brogan, who continues to dazzle us with his thoughtful and helpful social media blog posts (I recommend subscribing to him) lists out “50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing“. In twitter, Jon Burg suggests the lists c
  (tags: socialmedia web2.0 ChrisBrogan)

• From Blog to Research Article (and novels are good for you) | Off the Shelf
  “How can I use those in my papers? They’re not scholarly sources.” That’s a great question. Blog posts aren’t peer-reviewed journal articles. Many of them are hardly more than a paragraph or two. They aren’t going to be suitable for a pape
  (tags: research)
• Noodles Romanoff
  Noodles Romanoff that tastes like the old Betty Crocker® two-step preparation Noodles Romanoff in the box
  (tags: recipe nostalgia)
• culpwrit — guiding the career in public relations
  guiding the career in public relations
  (tags: blog career pr_blogs)

Have you tried Wordle yet? It’s fun, and it’s addictive. I took my resume and tweaked it slightly*, and then imported it into Wordle. Here you can see me, in about 99 words. Fun!

*To tweak my resume, this is what I did:

• for words that I wanted to have joined together (like “public relations”), replace the space between the words with a tilde (public~relations)
• took my name and copied/pasted it about 15 times, so that I was sure my name would be the largest word in the image
• replaced variations of a word (like communicates, communication, communicate) and standardized it to one word (communication)