Social media career insurance

Recently we posted on John Robinson, a US newspaper editor who filters out journalism students by whether they have a blog or not. It allows him to see their writing 'raw', and shows them how Web aware they are (in fact, he now looks beyond blogs to if they have a social media profile in general).

Amy Gahran from Poynter Online carries on this theme with some advice she gave journalism students at the University of Colorado.

Amy encourages her students to maintain blogs and other profiles so that search engines can pick up their work as easily as possible (it also guards against something like this and this).

Amy calls it 'media career insurance':

"Having your own blog is media career insurance. It will serve as your "home base" where you establish your personal reputation, track record, abilities, interests, and aspirations.

"It's a rewarding, useful, persistent way to be professionally and personally generous. It can attract help, insight, serendipity, and opportunity. And it lets you achieve all this consistently, despite inevitable changes in your job, bosses, beat, location, or goals."

Amy says that most of her students claim not to read blogs, when in fact they do - they just don't register that they are on one. That got me thinking. In the previous post, I said that if marketing agencies applied John Roberts 'no blog, no job' test we wouldn't have very many successful candidates.

Though the majority of people in the communications / marketing industry use Facebook et al for personal use, awareness of it seems to be almost incidental.

Case in point, I have one colleague here who swears blind not to be into all this social media, blogging or networking lark....yet at the same time he's set up and administers a Facebook group with 500+ members to do with his favourite football (soccer) club.

I tested this theory out on three people we have here who have been on the Bournemouth University PR degree, which involves spending the third year doing work experience at an agency. Two are currently spending their year out with us, and the third, Bridey, has come back after graduating in the summer.

Bridey told me that social media was covered off in the final (fourth) year of her course, but that by and large you were left to find stuff out for yourself. From talking to her, it also seems to be largely template stuff - checking out Edelman's blog and so on.

Jenni, one of our interns, said the following:

"I don’t think they teach us enough about it at the level we go to placement at. By the sounds of things that changes in final year, but surely that is a bit late if we were to be interviewed by someone." (for a job who places importance on social media skills)

"Before applying to Cow PR I was aware from looking at the website that you were very interested and active online. Despite choosing a research module looking into online PR I was still clueless to what ‘online PR’ was and started looking into it a bit further. Starting a blog is not something I would have ever even remotely considered.

"That said, I think it is a very valid point that people interested in media should be active online and if people on media specific courses aren’t being encouraged/inspired to do so, it is definitely a weakness in the course and therefore (to some degree) the graduates it produces."

As reported on reporter.net, one of the conclusions of the recent online news association conference held in Washington DC was the importance of graduates to be versed in what Robert Scoble called 'journalism plus' (so for us, it should be 'communication plus'):

"There was an recognition that key journalism values continue to be important, such as accuracy, curiosity and serving the public interest.

"But these were not enough in a digital world. Graduates also needed to understand how the media environment was changing and be flexible enough to adapt to this change.

"They needed to know about the collaboration, community and conversation taking place online."

Photo - "Jobs in town" by Arturo de Albornoz

Update (11 November) - An article from Jaffe Juice on the same theme: "Save your career / start a blog."