Friday Five, post-Thanksgiving edition, a day late: reading for tech-savvy PR and a request for input

The Thanksgiving holiday and an over-indulgence of turkey, football and college basketball has thrown off my circadian rhythms. So I’m a day late with this week’s Friday Five. Technically, I should’ve taken the week off, but this particular topic is timely, as it relates to the Advanced PR Institute I’ll be helping out with on Dec. 3-4. (“Developing a Technology-Savvy Communications Approach” is the theme for this institute, and if you would like to attend, there’s still time to register if you hurry.) Anyway, my co-faculty and I discussed some pre-reading for the conference participants to help bring them up to speed on the impact of new technology on PR, and we came up with this list of materials:

1. Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word of Mouth Marketing, by Lois Kelly. (Executive summary available online. So is my review of the book.)

2. The Cluetrain Manifesto, by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls and David Weinberger. The whole book is now available online.

3. Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. (I also reviewed this book.)

4. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott. The introduction and chapter 1 are available online (PDF).

5. Now it’s your turn. What other book about technology, social networking, the web 2.0 world, etc., would be on your list of recommended reading for higher ed PR folks? Leave your recommendations in the comments below and I’ll be sure to share these recommendations with the folks in Austin on Dec. 3-4.

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Now playing: The National – Apartment Story
via FoxyTunes

Parody: the sincerest form of flattery?

You may have read on this blog about our university‘s campaign to introduce our new name — Missouri University of Science and Technology — to various audiences. We call it the hello campaign, and it features brief video clips introducing students, alumni, faculty and staff.

The campaign is now the subject of a parody by a group of enterprising students. (Enterprising in the truest sense, as they’ve created a t-shirt business poking fun at the university.) Here’s the video they’ve posted in response to the campaign.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/REccpS1cScY" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

If I were wearing my official university spokesperson hat, I wouldn’t be sharing this. But this is a personal blog, so what the heck. I love parody in all its forms, so I tip my hat to these guys.

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Now playing: The Clash – Clampdown
via FoxyTunes