Erika Penner, one of my PR Campaigns students, also happens to be an HR professional about mid-way through her MBA program at the University of Oregon. Lucky us!

She spent some time last week giving her best advice for resumes, portfolios and interviews and she is allowing me to share her PointPoint with you here.

Reading through my students’ posts this week, I noticed that several picked up the Chris Brown/Rihanna story that I included in last week’s linky love to write about.

This is an interesting topic with lots of angles – not the least of which is that it’s raising awareness about domestic violence among an audience that probably doesn’t think about it as often as they should.

Chris Brown: Quick Dance Moves, Slow Response Time from Maddy Hicks focuses on Brown’s lack of response for too many days following the allegations.

What’s Love Got to do With it?: Chris Brown and Rihanna Edition from Josh Damis focuses on the implications to each star’s career.

Rihanna: Navigating a Crisis from Ali Runyan talks about Rihanna’s response and likely effect on her career.

Dude, Where’s my PR? from Krista Berlincourt asks why the stars took so long to respond and offers some advice.

I’m sure they’d each love to hear what you think, too.

We talk about transparency a lot in social media (in public relations, too, for that matter). But what does that mean if you’re a blogger? And particulary, if you’re a new blogger.

According to Paul Gillin’s book The New Influencers, “transparency is about a lot more than just not lying. It’s about opening yourself up to inspection, analysis, judgement, praise and ridicule.”

Gulp.

That sounds a little frightening. But the blogging community has, over time, worked out some standards and guidelines that are not that difficult to follow and understand.

When you get down to the nuts and bolts, transparency in the blogosphere means adhering to these community standards. Some basic rules:

• Be familiar with the basics of copyright and fair use limitations. It’s important that you don’t plagiarize content (just link to the source!) or present others ideas as your own.

• Your posts should be well researched and complete, try to avoid sweeping generalizations and jumping to hasty conclusions. Honestly, this is the biggest mistake I see new bloggers, and students in general, make in their writing. You can have opinions, even strong ones (please do!), but make sure your opinions are well-founded and you build a foundation on which to stake your claims.
• Once you’ve pushed “publish,” don’t edit your post. If you need to make a change, do a strikethough the old information and insert the new. It is worth noting, however, that a strikethough doesn’t always mean that the author has made a change, sometimes it’s done humorously. (exception: you can correct typos if you need to, but don’t change anything that alters the post’s content)
• If you need to make major revisions to your original, leave a comment on your post as a way of public correction.
• Deleting a post is considered a major no-no. The only time this might be an option is if you think the post might result in harm to someone or could be seriously misleading.

Consider adopting a codes of ethics for your blog (either formally included on your site, or informally for you to know and abide by – I recommend the former). This example from Charlene Li has laid the groundwork for many ethics policies including the GM Fastlane blog.

• I will tell the truth.
• I will write deliberately and with accuracy.
• I will acknowledge and correct mistakes promptly.
• I will preserve the original post, using notations to show where I have made changes so as to maintain the integrity of my publishing.
• I will never delete a post.
• I will not delete comments unless they are spam or off-topic.
• I will reply to emails and comments when appropriate, and do so promptly.
• I will strive for high quality with every post – including basic spellchecking.
• I will stay on topic.
• I will disagree with other opinions respectfully.
• I will link to online references and original source materials directly.
• I will disclose conflicts of interest.
• I will keep private issues and topics private, since discussing private issues would jeopardize my personal and work relationships.

What guidelines or standards have you seen, or do you recommend for bloggers? I know I’ve missed some of the deeper/more nuanced aspects of transparency and ethics, but anything I’ve missed here on the basics?

This makes me smile. Look at all these people! I *think* this roughly goes in order that you add people to your list. Those on the top row, I’ve known now for 2+ years (some pre-Twitter). What a fun tool.
(Thanks Barbara Nixon for the link.)

Get your twitter mosaic here.

I am beside myself. I’m so excited about my spring term Strategic Social Media class that I think I am starting to annoy people. My reasons for this enthusiasm are threefold:

1. I get to design my own class about a topic that I love.

   I love social media. I am not so good at the technical stuff, that’s not what I mean. I love the idea of social media. The visionary philosophies and the challenging discussions that go on every day about the whys and the whens. I love the potential of social media and I am fascinated by the drawbacks.

2. The level of discussion is not about how-tos and technical aspects with a dash of strategy, it’s a whole new level. That means that we’re ready for a whole new level.

   The first time we talked about blogs in my principles of PR class, I invited a guest speaker. I had the sense blogging was important, but didn’t know much about it (this was 3 years ago). The next term, I tried the lecture on my own. The looks were glazed over and the response was tepid. I often get a similar response on day one in Advanced PR Writing, but by the end of the term I have a roomful of evangelists. That’s exciting to me. It’s these evangelists that are ready to take the next step with a class like this one.

3. I get to challenge myself with new ideas and new conversation with a roomful of students who are interested and excited about this topic. People who register are doing so on purpose. I expect great dialogue and look forward to new connections.

If you’re interested in the course, or just following along, you can check out the blog (in progress!). If you’re a UofO student, the class details are in the schedule. It’s a J4/512 class on Mondays and Wednesdays at noon. I hope to see some of you there.

My advanced PR writing students have been blogging now for a couple of weeks, so it’s time to share their links and help them get connected to the wide, wide world.

Please take a look at their blogs, add them as friends on Twitter and encourage their plunge into social media.

In no particular order:

Maddy Hicks: blog, twitter
Daria Latysheva: blog, (update) twitter
Krista Berlincourt: blog, twitter
Amanda Ip: blog, twitter
Kristen Victory: blog, twitter
Melissa Erb: blog, twitter
Marissa Phillips: blog, twitter
Babe Hoffarber: blog, twitter
Laura Hedges: blog, twitter
Ali Runyan: blog, twitter
Marla Federman: blog, twitter
Gretchen Brandtjen: blog, twitter
Dara Jester: blog, twitter
Josh Damis: blog, twitter
Chris Miller: blog, (update) twitter
Ruth Hickock: blog, twitter

Twittersheep “herds your flock” and pulls the keywords from your twitter followers’ bios to come up with a cloud that looks a little something like this. I love that these terms are so varied! Everything from “PR” (duh) to “mom” and “guy” (regular folks) to “love” (passionate people in my herd, my friend) and “Oregon.” I’m not sure where “Junkie” comes from. I can’t take responsibility for that. See all my results here and try out your own!

With this week’s linky love, I bring you a pretty wide variety of posts that I found interesting this week. Thanks to everyone here for providing such great content to share!

Learn Everything You Can, Then Ask Great Questions (Leo Bottary’s CSI)
Chances are you’re going to work with clients in PR, whether internal or external. Take a look at Leo’s post about that first meeting.

Creating Social Media Rituals (Social Media Explorer)
David Finch shares four ways to develop social media rituals that will help you build a solid foundation for participation in this arena. I suppose ultimately it will save you time, but even more important, these rituals allow you to focus on the fundamentals.

It’s a New Me (As Seen on Google) (WSJ.com)
Julia Angwin shares her story of building the search engine results she wanted. Great tips for thinking about your digital footprint.

Details, Details… Why You as a Young PRo Need to be Nit-Picky NOW (Megan Soto)
Many account support positions, like entry level gigs at agencies require a high degree of detail oriented-ness. Hmmm… that might not be a word. Megan has some great tips for young PRos (and she’s a duck, so we like her even more).

The Power of the Crowd (KD Paine)
Did you see the GoDaddy SuperBowl ads? Apparently a lot of folks are fed up with them and were chatting about it on Twitter… and the competition was listening.

How MC Hammer went from Caricature to Human Being – the Social Media Story (Ignite Social Media)
If social media can help the Hammer, what can it do for you?

Student Highlight
A Restaurant’s Guide to Social Media from Gretchen Brandtjen