Katie's e-book challenge

First year BA Event Management student Katie Goyen has had her work published in an e-book by PR students. 

Katie picked up on the opportunity via a tweet by Jo Bates, one of her lecturers who, through her contacts with Southampton Solent University, was able to extend the challenge to UCB students. As the e-book was to be published on the same day, Katie only had three hours to complete the task. 

The project began at Southampton Solent in March where Stephen Waddington, President of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), joined PR students in a ground-breaking exercise – to compile the first ever e-book to be written and published in one day by PR students. All contributors would be listed as co-authors. 

The e-book, entitled “P2P PR: putting the public back into public relations”, involved cutting-edge use of social media to engage the stakeholders in Solent’s PR degrees. Students worked in teams across one of eight areas: networking, crowdsourcing, co-creation, gamification, curation, visual mash-up, face-to-face, and measurement. 

Katie’s contribution to the e-book was an article on the future of PR from her point of view. She considered the fluidity of PR and how it must be constantly adapting to its audience and the ways in which users access content. With the increase of digital PR, she then moved on to consider the lifespan of print media, and if it will still have its role in public relations in the future. 

Katie said: “The competition really made me think about the subject of PR and the way it’s changing to fit in with current society. It gave me a surge of confidence when I discovered that I had won and that my work was being published. I've really enjoyed this experience as a whole and will continue to blog in the future as I feel it’s really helped improve the way I write. I look forward to seeing other peoples’ great thoughts and ideas on the changing PR industry and what they think the future holds for it.” 

Stephen Waddington said: “The purpose of the project is to explore and report on new forms of public relations communication. The goal is for students to be confident about using a range of new media to connect and empower the dialogue between organisations and their stakeholders.”