Coupons on your cell phone, paying for products with your cell phone, you can even take a picture of food with your phone and get an approximate calorie count.

Yes, this is really happening. The U.S.  is slower in the mobile race than Asia, but we’re trying to catch up.

Swift Mob: This is a free service that can take your company or personal Web site and make it available for mobile phones. It is free because they put a small ad on your site. The ability for people to reach your content on the go can be a powerful tool. There are also pay services in this department.

Educators representing various universities discussed the methods they use to educate students on blogging. It was a controversial subject because each educator had his or her own opinion about how to go about getting students to blog. Mihaela Vorvoreanu from Clemson University shared her method of teaching blogging. Some educators believe that they should make their students blog and other educators believe that it should be optional. They also shared that it is sometimes difficult to get students interested in blogging.

I think that a lot of students don’t “get into” blogging and social media because they don’t understand the point or relevance of it. We often ask “Are people really reading this?” and “Why would people care about what I blog about?”Educational programs such as the Edelman Social Bootcamp are important because they allow students to understand how and why social media is important and how it can applied.

Where all this started: Phil began with a brief history of PR in the blogosphere. As tech costs have gone down, there’s been an explosion of creativity, self-expression, and access in organizations.

Phil’s magnetic poetry: the usual suspects can’t handle a failure to communicate (in reference to PR people). He shows a clip from “Crazy People” in which Dudley Moore is an ad exec who tells the truth about products (”Buy Volvos. They’re Boxy but They’re Good.”) Makes the point that this is how people want to be dealt with online.

How do I get started? “Information wants to be free” — and a user-writeable Web is inherently profound. The ah-ha moment occurs when you click “submit” and realize you can publish anything to the Web.

Tendency to think of PR in silos — the media relations part, the digital part, etc. You can tell when the digital is part of the overall program or when it’s just bolted on. Digital smarts can’t be siloed anymore. In addition, digital media is no longer a “tech” thing. Now, you can set up a blog, syndicate it, and measure it to an incredible degree … for free.

Phil then discussed what Edelman’s doing to educate its staff, including a week-long immersion (graded) program and on-demand distance learning.

He also contrasted the assistant account exec job description for PR 1.0 (such as administration, coverage tracking, list-building, activity reporting, AP style) and PR 2.0 (administration, conversation tracking, community and member-list generation; team knowledge management, Web style).

“No plan leaves the company without a digital component.” Woe to he who attempts to do so!

Phil also discussed searching URLs in addition to names. For example, if someone says “This guy is a jerk,” with the link on “this guy” heading to Phil’s blog, it won’t show up in a name search, but it is part of the conversation that other people are reading.

What I look for in people who graduate from undergrad programs: Phil shows an “Ask a Ninja” video, then lists intellectual curiosity, up-managing skills, an examined, omnivorous media-consumption life, basic understanding of social media concepts and technology.

Phil’s dream courses include History of Online Communities, Writing 2.0, Online Law and Public Policy, Comminications Technology and Society, Critical Consumption, and Corporate Online Engagement.

Perceived challenges include: struggle to teach technology at the same time serving as an academic institution rather than a trade school; curricula is difficult to change; finding room.

Advice for someone getting into this: “Do things for the first time, all the time” - Don Nielson, Stanford Research Institute

It’s official.  EDB is full.  If you did not get signed up, you can follow us here for live-blogging from the conference tomorrow.

 There are still a few spots for educators, but not much time left.  Register now!

The educators that attend EDB will have a different agenda from the students.

There will be a small, interactive panel that will cover how to use specific tools and  make lesson plan/assignment recommendations for social media in your existing classes. Phil Gomes will spend the day with you giving out his wisdom and knowledge of social media. You will also get the chance to observe student groups brainstorming campaign ideas.

You’re registered and psyched to come to EDB, but you pull out your
bag and stop…
What should you bring?

Here are the EDB teams suggestions…

laptop
resume/ business cards
business casual clothes
a great attitude ready to learn about social media

If you haven’t, what are you waiting for? Space is limited, so register now!

For our out-of-towners: we blocked off hotel rooms at the Holiday Inn on Broad Street (the main street in downtown Athens). Rooms are set at $92/ night and have airport transportation for $40 each way. Want to cut costs? See who else from your university is going and maybe you can share a room.  (The Facebook group is a great way to network with others going to the event — connect with someone else looking for a roomie!)

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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:
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