Guest post by Professor Kirk Hazlett from Curry College.

I’ve been asked to put some thoughts together on what I see, as a former public relations professional now turned public relations professor, lurking around the corner for the public relations profession itself through the now-emerging “next generation” of practitioners.

I would love to say I know exactly what lies ahead. But I don’t…no one really knows. But I can make some reasonably educated predictions based on my experiences teaching undergraduate communication courses at Curry College as well as graduate communication courses at Regis College.

Probably nothing I am going to say is going to stop you in your tracks with a “Holy Cow, I didn’t know that!” reaction. But maybe I can confirm some of your own beliefs or validate some of your greatest fears.

On the one hand, I see a wonderfully creative, quick-thinking, fast-moving profession. One of my favorite personal sayings is, “They don’t think outside the box…They don’t even know there’s a box there!”

I find, in working with my more engaged students, that they are always thinking ahead trying to answer the unasked questions and find solutions to the unidentified problems. I love it when someone either comes bouncing into my office to test an idea on me or Facebooks me with a question about the project he or she is working on.

I usually wind up getting all excited myself and getting way too wrapped up in the challenge du jour. But it’s what keeps me on my toes, and it reassures me that there is, indeed, a future for public relations.

Another positive that I see is an inherent grasp of the many levels of social media as a communication tool…something those of us more “senior” practitioners are having to learn from the ground up.

Not only are these future communicators fluent in social media use; they instinctively know, having used it from Day 1, how to communicate with their peers…emerging target markets…in their language. (Note: This fluency leads in some cases to a problem discussed below.)

One problem I see lying ahead, though, is a long, slogging march as we try to instill in this up-and-coming generation the need for patience, attention to detail, and basic traditional communication skills.

I don’t put the entire blame on these folks, though…I put it squarely where it belongs…on the shoulders of the school systems that are putting quantity ahead of quality in education.

When I get students who have never learned how to format and write a simple business (or any kind of) letter, I have to ask myself, “How are these kids going to function as communicators in the real world?…Who dropped the ball?

All too often, I get class assignments that are very nearly unreadable. Correct grammar? Ain’t gonna happen. Punctuation? Whats that. Spelling? There never going to get their with they’re current knowledge.

In addition, they know how to say words, but they don’t know how to communicate…a result of the “new and improved” methods of communication that enable people to exchange messages, unfortunately, not in the “two-way symmetric” mode that I teach to my public relations students at Curry.

What I preach is the need to listen and to formulate messages based on visual and verbal responses from a target audience. In today’s smartphone world, this is rapidly becoming a lost art.

So what does this mean for those of us who will be training these young diamonds in the rough?

For starters, we’re going to have to tap into a previously unneeded reservoir of patience. We’re going to have to remember that communication for them has been about text-messaging, not cursive writing.

And we’re going to have to learn to reward the “baby steps” that our young charges will be taking as they slip tentatively into the “deep end” of the public relations pool. I was fortunate as I was starting out oh-so-many-years-ago to have had supervisors or mentors who took the time to show me the correct way to write, to formulate thoughts, to express myself both in writing and in the spoken word.

That part hasn’t changed and won’t change regardless of which generation we’re talking about. Things will never be the “way they were,” so let’s get used to it and move on.

As the Gryphon said in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “That’s the reason they’re called lessons…because they lessen from day to day.”

Kirk Hazlett, APR, Fellow PRSA, is a veteran public relations professional with more than 35 years’ federal government and nonprofit organization PR experience followed by nearly 10 years’ undergraduate- and graduate-level college teaching experience. His public relations experience includes healthcare and member services organizations ranging from Blood Bank of Hawaii to Medical Area Service Corporation to Boston Harborfest, and he has provided consulting services for both the Manila and the Singapore Red Cross. He currently is Associate Professor of Communication at Curry College where he oversees the Public Relations concentration and serves as Faculty Adviser for the Curry College Public Relations Student Association, and Lecturer in Communications at Regis College where he teaches graduate communication courses.

Could using a PDA be bad for your corporate health?

Über-intern Whitney checks in with a very smart analysis of how technology could impede the practice of corporate communications.  Take it away, Whitney…

Since the advent of smartphones people have had a new challenge placed in front of them.  It isn’t how often you can check in on Foursquare or how fast you can look up a fact to prove a point.  In fact, it’s a challenge of etiquette, of how we as a society are choosing to balance face-to-face interactions against online relationships.

Recently Gini Dietrich covered this on her blog, Spin Sucks. After reading her post we felt compelled to chime in as well.

If you look around a coffee shop, restaurant or on the train it’s safe to say you’ll see at least a dozen people with their phones out, waiting for them to light up with an alert that something is happening in their digital world.  When people are this focused on maintaining their networks online they are often neglecting the relationship and networking opportunities right next to them—in the “real world.”

In the not so distant past, it was viewed as rude to answer a phone call during a meeting; now, it’s practically expected.  It’s hard to make a blanket statement saying that everyone should ignore their phones while conducting business, at the workplace or when out with colleagues and friends.

Still, SMPR encourages clients to think about how one’s corporate reputation—not to mention one’s personal brand—can be hindered if your PDA runs your life and not the other way around.

Remember this—people with whom you network over the Web cannot see that you’re ignoring a client when Tweeting during a meeting, but that client sure can. What will they tweet, think or say about you after their face-to-face interaction with you where you were MIA?