One of the areas of interest both in teaching and in research of course is crisis communications – whether it is looking at natural disasters or social media crises, or even those that are occurring in society. This is a case where it is not necessarily based on a life or death situation, but more of a crisis for a particular major.
I have to thank Heather Blanchard (@popgirl) for first sharing this link on Twitter. I was surprised to see the tweet update and I checked out the link she posted. This article was written by Amber Estes for the University of Georgia independent student newspaper RedandBlack.com. The title of the article was “How to find that perfect husband in college.”
The article title alone made me think – did we just transport back to the early 1900’s? I thought it was 2012 and all students – both male and female – were focused on educating themselves in establishing a presence in their career, start a lifelong practice of learning and exploring the world, and continuing to grow as individuals.
Now, last time I checked – I presumed the reason to go to college was to get an education to help you be independent and successful in a career, not to get a “MRS” degree as Ms. Estes is discussing in her article for RedandBlack.com. As I read her step-by-step directions in the article, I hope that it was a joke, but I think she is serious about these. Second, the thing that clearly popped up for me was that Ms. Estes was a sophomore majoring in public relations. Sigh – the PR profession just took a reputation hit here.
Public relations professionals have to constantly do battle in handling misperceptions of what we do in the field. Some people think we are all about event planning and being with celebrities. Others think all we do is deal with the press and be in media relations. However, there is MUCH more to PR than these areas – they are specializations within the field (entertainment PR, fashion PR, etc), but there are many opportunities here to think about.
I have several friends who have graduated or who are part of the UGA PR program – University of Georgia is one of the best programs in PR – so I was a bit surprised to see this and would be interested in hearing from others at UGA about their reaction to this particular post. In addition, the independent student newspaper is not necessarily handling the criticism from this article at all proactively.
First, the comments on the article page are disabled and on their Twitter account, and they addressed this by stating that the comments were getting “nasty and gratuitous and not right for proper discussion,” but this was the only response I saw on their feed related to this. I think there should have been a statement as well on the article page as well.
Second, Twitter is going wild with comments about this article ranging from people thinking it is a joke and actually funny, to being satire to even been labeled as “terrifying.”
The lesson learned from this case is simple – while some people may think this is “funny” – others may have a different reaction to it and this appears to be the case. Plus, this article is published and easily searchable for others (even potential employers) to look at for years to come. How would you address questions in a job interview about this particular post to a potential boss? These are just all things we, as public relations professionals and students, have to take into consideration when writing an article or post that will be viewed by others around the world to see.
Hope you all are having a great day.
Best Wishes,
Karen
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