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posted by cmn32480 on Friday December 04 2015, @08:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the facebooking-for-hire dept.

Blurred boundaries between advertising and public relations professions due to new roles in social media raise the question of whether educators can adequately prepare their students for a career in those growing fields, according to a Baylor study.

"Educators need to address the deficiencies identified in this study and find ways to build these skills and competencies in their courses," said Marlene S. Neill, Ph.D., assistant professor of journalism, public relations and new media in Baylor's College of Arts & Sciences.

The study—"Gaps in Advertising and Public Relations Education: Perspectives of Agency Leaders "—is published in the Journal of Advertising Education.

"In the study, we have provided some specific and practical recommendations for advertising and public relations educators," Neill said.

Recommendations include:

        --Business literacy: Have advertising and public relations students read and analyze investment reports and financial statements, as well as take current events quizzes from business and trade publications.
        --Math: Require advertising and public relations students to take a statistics course.
        --Online community management: Have advertising and public relations students conduct social listening/social media audit and develop evaluation reports using social media analytics; advertising students should consider taking electives in public relations to learn about crisis and issues management.
        --Media planning/buying: PR students should consider taking advertising electives to learn about paid media strategies.

The reaction of people polled on this issue is this?


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  • (Score: 2) by LaminatorX on Friday December 04 2015, @02:19PM

    by LaminatorX (14) <laminatorxNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday December 04 2015, @02:19PM (#271788)

    Most of these professors got their advanced degrees in the late 80's and early 90's. Good luck finding enough of them that have a clue about social media to teach their students anything useful.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2015, @02:50PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2015, @02:50PM (#271799)

    Yeah those old fuckers they know nothing of new tech. We should just take them out back and put them out of our misery. Except for the ones that entertain us. Oh and the ones that are on 'our side'. /sarc

    Yes there are clueless people 'old' people out there. But there are just as many clueless young people. Take for example my niece. Nice typical bright young girl of 10 years. A 'digital native'. I let her play with my phone because she was bored. Within 5 mins she had at least 3 different 'free games' installed on my phone. Yes she AND her mother got an earful. But she had *no* idea of the implications of what those applications did. She did not understand that in business 'nothing is free'. There were strings attached to those applications. Such as being able to see the whole phone stack. Send messages, access all my pictures, etc. It was as close to root access as they could get. That is only because I didnt root my phone.

    Why tell you this? Neither her 30 year old mother or the 10 year old daughter had ANY idea what I was talking about. They are not atypical. I was able to look at their phones/ipads. Full of 'free' applications.

    I read a couple of days ago HOW they are using those numbers. For example they have access to your SMS messages. Not so they can send them. They want to know how many *you* send/recv (and many other metrics, phone calls, length, phone type, age, etc). Why? Because it has a non negative correlation to your credit rating. That can then be used to change the advertisements from say a low end car to a high end car. Because you more than likely have better credit. All in the blink of an eye.

    It only took this 'oldster' about 2 seconds to realize the scope of it. The free app uses DLC to scrape a few whales. But the real money/value is in the metrics. The apps are designed to 'make you want more' and use the app more. Then when that fades they put a service in the background to make sure it happens. Now take that across the entire smart phone population with the number of applications doing this.

    You may be thinking 'oh I will just use a flip phone'. Thats so cute. You think the phone companies and guys making the phones are not doing it too?

    I sometimes turn off adblocking. It is kinda of interesting how something I look on Amazon will suddenly show up on my phone in adverts... How did they do that hmmm? It means amazon is selling advertising to these markets and they have linked me together to my phone.

    I explained all of this recently to a 90 year old man. He got it right away. But his reaction was typical. "Why would they do such a thing? That is the most antifreedom thing I have heard in a long time" Its simple. Money.

    • (Score: 2) by LaminatorX on Friday December 04 2015, @03:18PM

      by LaminatorX (14) <laminatorxNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday December 04 2015, @03:18PM (#271810)

      The better professors are sufficiently on top of being part of a rapidly changing field to roll with the changes, but most of them are just average. Frankly, this stuff is developing so quickly that it taxes most academic institutional structures to be able to cope. By the time a curriculum committee has agreed on what the target should be for instruction in a cutting edge subject and put together a course structure, three years have gone by and the program is out of date before the first student who receives it has graduated. It reminds me of the programming classes my school had on offer in the early 90's - "Seriously, take all four ADA classes, the government is mandating it."