Carroll honored, new media pioneer
Carroll honored as new media pioneer
Craig Carroll, an assistant professor at the school, has been honored as a pioneer in new media from a Palo Alto, Calif.-based think tank that focuses on emerging communications technology.
Carroll, who teaches public relations and specializes in corporate reputation and the media, received the 2007 Society for New Communications Research Award of Excellence in the education category at a Dec. 5 ceremony in Boston, Mass.
The award recognizes individuals and organizations that are pioneering the use of new technologies in media, marketing, public relations, advertising, entertainment, education, politics and social initiatives.
Carroll was recognized for exposing students to the latest digital media analysis tools and moving undergraduate work from the classroom to the field. His 90 students evaluated the online reputations of 18 national nonprofit organizations including Susan G. Komen For The Cure, the American Cancer Society and the Special Olympics.
“Professor Carroll’s work represents the strides the school has taken to make sure that all of our students have access to digital technology,” said Jean Folkerts, dean of the school. “Our goal is to use the technology to ensure that students understand underlying values and the importance of research in public relations.”
The project uses media measurement technology that research firms CustomScoop and KDPaine & Partners provided the school through a $500,000 gift to help students collect, analyze and report on press coverage. It is one of the first projects of its kind at the undergraduate level, and it also serves as a test for a new measure of message integrity, developed by Carroll, that examines whether organizations’ desired messages become garbled after editing.
Students analyzed the nonprofits’ online performance using the organizations’ own Web sites, online newspapers, TV and radio news archives, and a variety of social media. Students developed plans for setting and evaluating public relations goals and objectives, and benchmarked the media performance of the nonprofits against peers and competitors. The assessments included the organizations’ media visibility, tone and coverage on a range of topics coming from online news, blogs, newsgroups and wikis.
“Public relations is increasingly a research-based profession. Hopefully this will help demystify a lot of the research these students will see in their professional lives,” said Carroll. “By having this program in an introductory course, we are emphasizing that research is not a nice-to-have in public relations—it’s a must-have.”
“Seeing how these students have risen to the occasion has been beyond my wildest expectations,” said Katie Delahaye Paine, CEO of KDPaine & Partners. “They’ve been able to leverage their classroom knowledge, CustomScoop’s collection tools and our Dashboard technology to create world-class programs that are smart, targeted and efficient. With a little help from us, they’ve really been able to do it themselves.”
The students are working with KDPaine and CustomScoop to issue reports and recommendations directly to the nonprofits.