I didn’t cover this very well in the lecture but you add your featured image to a WordPress post using the Featured Image setting which is found at the bottom of the right hand column on the “Add New Post” or “Edit Post” screens.  You click on the “Set Featured Image” link, upload your image to the Media Library as usual and then select it from there.

You then have to hit the “Update” button if you’re in the “Edit Post” screen.

Remember that the size of your featured image should be 1024 x 484 pixels in the Hueman theme that we are using for the  PREPP63 blog.

Brussels Uncovered: a private briefing for Stirling students in a European Parliament committee room

Masters students from the Stirling Public Relations and Strategic Communications programmes participated in two bespoke fieldtrips in the Autumn semester 2015. The first leg involved a two-day fieldtrip in Brussels, meeting communications staff working within the institutions, and public affairs professionals trying to influence EU policy making. The group received expert briefings from European Commission and Parliamentary staff, and were also treated to a ‘Brussels Uncovered’ session where researchers and advisors working in the two major political groupings within the Parliament shared their insights on how the institutions really operate, good practice in public affairs campaigning and how to factor the particularities of European Parliamentary politics into communications strategy. Continue reading →

Students studying for the MSc Strategic Public Relations and Communication Management and the MSc in heritage and Conservation  at the University of Stirling had  a fieldtrip to St. Andrews on 10 April 2015 – a day at the Scottish seaside filled with glorious sunshine and some extraordinary learning experiences about the contemporary tourism sector.

Stirling students with Mike Woodcock outside R&A clubhouse, Old Course first tee and Open grandstand in the background

The day was organized around a series of expert interviews and site visits to a number of organizations involved with promoting golf tourism in Scotland. Students gained an insight into the role of the R&A, golf’s governing body, and the evolution of event-led tourism strategy in Scotland from Mike Woodcock, Media & Editorial manager at the R&A. Mike also spoke about the challenges of correcting misperceptions (around golf in general, and the specific role of the R&A in particular) and the enormity of the media relations operation associated with the hosting of the Open at St. Andrews this year.

Continue reading →

In the briefing notes for the blogging assignment I ask online students to keep a note of the permalink (permanent linkl) for any blog posts where they leave a comment.  So just what is a permanent link?  Well it’s a url that points to a specific web page rather than to a dynamic page.

For example the front page of this blog (url http://www.cmcstir.org/dh/)  looks like the picture below  as I write this post.

It will look different once I make this post.

Continue reading →

Public Relations Review has a lot of articles about digital media and public relations in print at the moment.  These articles have not yet been officially published but you can access  them through the library.

And a new term to me – DSM (digital, social and mobile) media.

• Avidar, R., Ariel, Y., Malka, V., & Levy, E. C.Smartphones, publics, and OPR: Do publics want to engage? Public Relations Review, (0) doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.stir.ac.uk/10.1016/j.pubrev.2014.11.019
• Brummette, J., & Fussell Sisco, H.Using twitter as a means of coping with emotions and uncontrollable crises. Public Relations Review, (0) doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.stir.ac.uk/10.1016/j.pubrev.2014.10.009
• Demirhan, K., & Çakır-Demirhan, D.Gender and politics: Patriarchal discourse on social media. Public Relations Review, (0) doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.stir.ac.uk/10.1016/j.pubrev.2014.11.010
• DiStaso, M. W., Vafeiadis, M., & Amaral, C.Managing a health crisis on facebook: How the response strategies of apology, sympathy, and information influence public relations. Public Relations Review, (0) doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.stir.ac.uk/10.1016/j.pubrev.2014.11.014

Continue reading →

lways WordPress will automatically shrink large images so that they will fit into the space available.  Unfortunately it’s not avery good at it.

Take this image from a PREPP63 blog post..

It’s a bit blurred isn’t it?  Well that’s what WordPress sometimes does if you let it do the work for you.  Continue reading →

Here’s some videos that students taking the PR and Digital Media module have created in previous years.

Continue reading →

Full time students taking the Digital PR module  are required to make a video for part of the blogging assignment and those of you taking the online version might like to do so.  Here are some resources you might find useful

Free Software

• Windows Live Movie Maker – if you have a PC this software is free and can be downloaded from the Windows Live website.  It is fairly easy to use and a series of video tutorials showing you how to use it can be found here on the Vimeo website.   This series of tutorials covers everything you need to know to make your own video ready to upload to YouTube or Vimeo .
• iMovie – Apple Macs come with the IMovie software installed and you’ll find everything you need to know about how to use it in this series of video tutorials, also from the Vimeo website.
• Jing – free software that allows you to “create images and videos of what you see on your computer screen and share them instantly.”  I used Jing’s bigger brother, Camtasia, to make this video which shows you how to embed a video in a WordPress blog post.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erHSlq1htrI

You might also want to take a look at the free trial software that’s available from a number of companies.  Adobe will give you a one month free trial of their Photoshop image editing and Premiere Pro video editing software for example and Camtasia is also available for a trial period.

Online Video Editing

There are a number of sites that allow you to edit a video online.  Here are three of them.  With these sites you don’t need to download software, you upload your videos, still pictures and music to the website and perform the editing online before downloading a completed video.

• Animoto
• Masher
• One True Media

Online Animations
Some  web sites, for example Go Animate and Moovly,   allow you to build animated cartoons online, you can see examples here.   There’s a Daily Mash article from 2010 that has information on some other sites where you can do this.