Including Social Media Skills on a Resume

Explaining a social media drought? Image by . SantiMB . via Flickr

— Kelli Matthews

[cross posted, in part, on PRos in Training]

The first term my students blogged, I was thrilled if they completed the assignment and seemed to enjoy it. A few did (my favorite was Stu Holdren’s blog, Stu’s Clues), but almost no one kept the blog up longer than the end of the quarter. That’s been the case most terms since then.

Of course there are a few (extremely notable) exceptions. Staci Stringer, Jessica Lomelin, Sarah Essary and Beth Evans all come to mind immediately.

But for the most part, the blogs are abandoned after the 7 weeks assignment.

Twitter seems to get a little bit more traction and become part of the students’ routines. But I would be lying if I said it was more than 25% of students that continue using twitter after it’s not required.

There are lots of reasons for letting your blog and twitter profile to go seed. Students (and young professionals) are busy people. But recently a student came to me to help edit her resume for an internship. She listed “social media” in her skills. In her case, she seems like she’s in it for the long haul, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is, it got me thinking about when you should list “social media” on your resume as a skill – especially as a student.

I asked my twitter friends and got a ton of response.

My point wasn’t wording, specifically, but whether someone can claim social media as a skill if they aren’t actively participating (with the assumption the individual would not explicitly reveal status of the specific tools in which s/he had participated). You can see twitter’s response here.

My reasons for having students participate in social media are three-fold: 1) to learn the medium, 2) to make connections through outreach and links/trackbacks and 3) to develop some pre-professional thought leadership (at least a leader among their peers). I know that these skills are important and that knowing how to blog, twitter and podcast will make them more marketable. However, in this market, I also know that they need to work consistently to keep their skills and knowledge fresh.

If I were an employer, and a potential intern or employee told me that they blog/twitter/podcast, I would immediately go in search of that content. If what I found was an abandoned blog and a dry twitter stream, I would question whether the student was passionate, curious and enthusiastic about the tools, or had just completed a class assignment and how that would translate to work for me and for my clients.

My advice for students would be to try to keep up their activities. Keep blogging. Keep participating in twitter. It’s a win-win. Ultimately, it’s important also to help them understand what overstating a skill looks like and how to be honest and transparent about their work.

I’d love to hear what you think and what advice you give students.

Learn by Doing

Research, as I tell my students at the University of Georgia, bookends every public relations campaigns. That is, every campaign begins and ends with research. Whether your acronym for a four-step campaign process is RPIE or ROPE, you very clear see formative and evaluative research surrounding the process to a successful campaign.

As such, we educators need to get it right when teaching research methods. We need to make sure that while the majority of our students will go straight into practice, not graduate school, that they each understand the importance of rigor in their approach. And maybe, if you’re lucky, along the way your infectious love for research might rub off on them.

My way approaching this in the undergraduate PR research method course at UGA has been to have students work in teams and conduct a real academic study over the course of the semester. The students come up with their own research topics, which often range from crisis to social media.

They find quality instruments, obtain IRB approval and in short conduct ethical, high quality research.

After teaching 3 semesters using this method, I am now proud to have racked up some impressive stats of my own:
• 2 student project papers presented at academic conferences (AEJMC & NCA)
• 2 student project papers published in Public Relations Review
• 4 undergrad PR student teams’ end-of-semester presentations received more than 1,140 views on YouTube (combined)
• 9 press releases from the college announcing the results of their studies

I held the students to a high academic standard, and the promise of presenting their research at a conference or later publishing it kept me focused on ensuring their projects were of the quality to reach that level.

The students’ research now has a greater audience than the 30 people registered in the class, as it lives on digitally and ascends to the next level of academic peer-review.

If you want to have the same results for your research methods students, consider my tips:
• express your expectations (conference-quality research) at the beginning of the semester
• be prepared to help the students along the process, letting them find their way but never allowing them to get lost
• have each student group separately over to your house one weeknight to run their SPSS results (pizza party!)
• video the student presentations then post on YouTube
• post pictures, audio and/or video of student presentations on your own Facebook page then tag each student – it will attract the interest of each student’s friends & let them see what the student has been up to all semester
• offer bonus points at the end of the semester for students to write a press release you can then edit & submit to your college’s PR person to distribute to media (or post on the college Web site)

Happy researching!

Dr. Kaye D. Sweetser, APR, is an assistant professor of public relations in the H.W. Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. She blogs at http://kayesweetser.com, and can be reached via e-mail at sweetser[AT]uga.edu. This items is cross-posted on her blog.