Before we began planning the Edelman Digital Bootcamp in earnest, we began with questions. Lots of questions in fact: what should we discuss, how long should the event be, with which tools you were familiar.

The truth is we thought we had a lot of answers. We were completely ready to plan a two-day event but thankfully like good PR practitioners we conducted research instead of going with our gut.

And so we deployed our survey to more than 50 PR schools in the Southeast even though we thought we already knew what you would say. Boy, are we glad we asked!

When the responses came in, from nearly 170 students and 295 educators (a 29% response rate), we were truly surprised to find that nearly 85 percent of students wanted a one-day event! A fact we would have never guessed had we not conducted research.

That was just the beginning of the great things we learned:

Students:

• Most experienced in e-mail, social networks, text messaging and blogs
• Least experienced in Internet-hosted video games, Second Life or PDAs
• Wanted to learn most more about: video conferencing, podcasts and blogs

Educators:

• When teaching social media:
  • 80 percent discuss social media as a trend of media
  • 55 percent discuss the theoretical effects of social media
  • Less than 25 percent create implementation exercise and campaigns activities
• Most interested in learning about news aggregation tools and blogs
• Most used e-mail and social networking in their lesson plans

For the terribly curious, these tables demonstrate the use and interest of respondents for the tools in our survey. We hope that you enjoy it and that you enjoy an event truly based on your responses and needs.

Tags: edb, new media, pr students, public relations, research, social media, ugaedb08, web 2.0

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Edelman Digital Bootcamp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.