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When I received my acceptance letter from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, I was thoroughly surprised. It was not because I did not expect to get in, but because I was unaware that I had applied. I had applied to Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences as an intended English major, and had selected Newhouse as my second choice school if I did not get into the Arts and Sciences, completely unaware of the reputation Newhouse has. When I received my acceptance letter to be dually enrolled in both schools, it was the best mistake to ever happen to me.

It is key for organizations to make sure they are targeting their messages to their key publics. Every organization has different publics. Each public requires a different kind of messaging. Let’s take a look at how a major organization, The American Cancer Society, targets its messaging to its key publics:

This is the message that OkCupid users saw earlier this week when they tried to use the website on Firefox, Mozilla‘s web browser. This comes after news sources found that the newly hired CEO of Mozilla, Brendan Eich, had donated $1,000 to support Proposition 8, a California measure to ban same-sex marriage.

Malaysian Airlines has defended the decision in a statement that they wanted the families to be informed on the situation before it was broadcast to the rest of the world. While this is the right idea, from a PR standpoint, it was not the right method.

Since Malaysian Airlines flight MH 370 has gone missing, crowdsourcing has been a major effort put in place to try to find the plane. Approximately 3 million users have gone onto Tomnod, an internet crowdsourcing site that asks users to identify objects in satellite imagery. The missing Malaysian Airlines flight has spurred what might be the biggest crowdsourcing effort ever. But how helpful has this really been?

On March 1st and 2nd, an amazing speaker line-up filled the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications with some great tips for using social commerce and the future of public relations. I wanted to share the main points from the speakers that I saw during the conference with you.

Social Commerce Days kicked off bright and early Thursday morning with a social media breakfast at 7:30 a.m. Recent Newhouse grad Jared Kraham and W2O‘s social commerce director Michael Westgate talked about the importance of social media marketing in the business world.

The thing about PR that makes it so hard to define is it encompasses so many different aspects and responsibilities. One day you could be writing tweets, the next pitching a story to the media, and the next managing a full-blown crisis.

You’re a public relations professional. You’re organization has something that it wants covered by news outlets. Writing a press release and compiling what you need to pitch to the media is easy enough, right? But how can you be sure they will bite?

It has changed the way organizations reach their audiences, and perhaps changed the audiences themselves. Social media make it much easier – and cheaper – to reach people on the social networking sites that they use everyday. It allows organizations to not just push information out at people, but to receive and interact with their publics.

I love public relations for the infinite number of options it presents. With everything from entertainment and sports to financial and corporate to non-profit and government, there is bound to be something that catches everyone’s eye. My interests lie in the world of government and political public relations.

Corporate social responsibility is something that we hear a lot about these days. It’s a fairly new concept, at least in the way it is being practiced now. There are plenty of corporations that give out extreme amounts of money to good causes every year, and that’s not new, however, the reasoning behind doing so has been evolving over the past 30 years or so.

There is no argument that with today’s technology the world is getting increasingly smaller. With the internet and social media, tablets and cellphones galore, it is almost impossible not to stay connected with people no matter where they are in the world. But one thing that is newly trending, and growing fast, is this idea of Big Data and the analytics that go with it.

I grew up in a small town and was raised with small town values. Through everything I did as a child, I was taught the importance of family, generosity, honesty, integrity, and hard work. Playing sports all through my childhood and high school career showed me the value of teamwork and the skills...