Salmon Khan photo by Robyn Twomey

Last night after watching the final Oprah show (at least until the end of her non-compete with her syndicator, which ends in 2012), I read a terrific profile in BusinessWeek about Salmon Khan, “Salman Khan: The Messiah of Math,” which seemed to me to be the perfect subject for Oprah. It is a great story about a revolution that is underway in how to teach in the 21st Century — and how to utilize some of the capabilities of technology in the classroom.

I won’t get into all the specifics — I encourage you to read the article — but basically Khan accidentally created a nonprofit that makes short 10-minute lessons available for free online. After a few years of working on it, there are 2,500 or so lessons that have been viewed a combined 52 million times. Some forward-thinking schools are now integrating the lessons into their classes and are seeing amazing results. One school told BusinessWeek that test scores increased an average of 70 percent.

But what I like the most was the description of one teacher who had “flipped the classroom.” Instead of sending the kids home to do the work and coming to school for the lecture, they are having the students consume the lecture at home and then come into class to do the work. What a concept! It gives the teacher the ability to participate and intervene as the students work on solutions. It is so much more aligned with how the world really works!

In the video below, Khan goes into more detail about flipping the classroom. I can’t stress enough how important it is to have the U.S. classroom better reflect how the work world and the world in general really operate. I am very concerned that our schools are not preparing students for the type of environment they will have to navigate when they graduate.

We don’t passively listen as someone commands. That is a 1950s mentality. We participate. We work in teams — usually dispersed geographically. We share and collaborate. The nature of the work is no longer hierarchical as it was less than a decade ago — ideas come from everywhere. Our schools must reflect these changes.

Established in 1964, the Accredited in Public Relations credential (APR) is awarded by the Universal Accreditation Board (disclosure: I earned my APR in 2000). It measures a public relations practitioner’s fundamental knowledge of communications theory and its application; establishes advanced capabilities in research, strategic planning, implementation and evaluation; and demonstrates a commitment to professional excellence and ethical conduct.

The APR credential has nothing to do with a person’s ability to govern effectively on the board of a national PR society. Zip. Zero. Nada.

Currently, PRSA requires that any prospective board member be accredited. When a ground-up rewrite of the PRSA bylaws was proposed last year, the organization’s General Assembly (the PRSA version of Congress) rejected the proposed language that would have stripped accreditation from board requirements. Despite voting a few years ago to drop the requirement that all Assembly Delegates be accredited, the Assembly balked at taking the next logical step.

The reason the PRSA general assembly voted to drop the requirement that Assembly Delegates be accredited (or “decouple” service from accreditation as we called it then) was that doing so eliminated so many highly qualified PRSA chapter leaders. How could a person serve as the president of a large chapter and not qualify to represent that chapter as a PRSA Assembly Delegate?

The rationale for keeping the accreditation requirement for Assembly Delegates then (as it is now for board service) is that it illustrates an organizational commitment to the credential. If PRSA’s leaders aren’t willing to pursue and achieve the credential, how can the organization suggest it has value for everyone else? What kind of PR practitioner would seek a leadership position but not consider it worthwhile to seek this profession’s credential?

That is a pretty good argument, but we aren’t in a world where everything makes sense. The fact is that only about 20 percent of PRSA members have achieved the APR credential. As a result, until the middle of the last decade, the organization basically had a class system of governance. Only 20 percent of the membership had the ability to serve on the PRSA General Assembly and/or Board of Directors. The other 80 percent, for which everything else was the same (including dues) could not participate in leadership.

Included in that 80 percent are highly capable PR practitioners, including accomplished leaders in corporate communications and agency management. Included in that 80 percent are people who have been leaders of the profession for 20 or more years and regularly shape thoughts about effective strategies, trends and ethics. And included in that 80 percent who, until the mid-00s, could not serve as an Assembly Delegate and STILL cannot serve as a PRSA Board Member are practitioners who have given countless hours of their time as leaders at the chapter and regional levels.

It didn’t make sense for the PRSA General Assembly and it does not make sense for the PRSA Board of Directors.

Last year when the general assembly passed an amendment to the proposed new bylaws that re-inserted the accreditation requirement for board service, I thought it was wrong. To make a point, I presented an amendment to re-insert the accreditation requirement for service as a General Assembly Delegate. I knew it would be defeated, but I wanted to make a point that their insistence on requiring an APR for board service made no sense given their vehement distaste for requiring APR for the assembly.

It was and is a blatant contradiction. If you believe accreditation should be a requirement for PRSA leadership, I respect that. But I can’t understand how you can require accreditation for one set of leaders but drop the same requirement for the other set of leaders.

I don’t think anyone really got the point I was trying to make. Turns out PR people are a very literal group and don’t really get irony.

Fast forward to today with forum posts and e-mails flying with semi-respectful insults pitting the leaders of our profession against each other. Each side is entrenched with very little likelihood that many will be influenced by the back and forth argument. But here’s the bottom line:

• It makes no sense to require accreditation of the PRSA Board of Directors, especially since the PRSA General Assembly dropped the requirement for accreditation for itself and nearly all chapters have no APR requirements for leadership.
• Given the fact that a majority of the leaders of PRSA chapters, regions and the PRSA General Assembly are not accredited, it is impossible to argue that accreditation has any impact on the ability to govern. The organization is already largely governed by unaccredited PR practitioners.
• The inability of four out of five PRSA members to serve on the PRSA board regardless of their level of achievement, track record of service to the organization or interest in serving is patently unfair.
• If the real goal is to illustrate the organization’s commitment to the credential, there must be better ways to accomplish that goal than coupling accreditation and board service.

That last point is where a meaningful and productive conversation really should start, but unfortunately year after year the PRSA General Assembly gets a glossed over report on the status of the organization’s accreditation promotion efforts. Let’s hope this year it is different.

I grabbed my camera and asked Harte to walk through what she thinks are the most important points for PR professionals to consider in this rapidly changing environment.

At this point — about five years into the social media adoption cycle — I can’t help but feel that there aren’t too many more original thoughts on the subject. The PR pros who haven’t yet emersed themselves in social media have to be making a conscious effort NOT to do so. I mean, my 78 year old Mom is now on Twitter and plays card games with gamers around the world on Yahoo when she gets a break from caring for my 102 year old Grandma. If you are behind the adoption curve from my Mom you really must be trying to not advance in PR.

So my point is that everything I just heard Beth say is fine, but I worry that it’s not pushing us forward. And it’s not just Beth — it seems to be everyone who is out there speaking to PR groups about social media. I don’t hear anyone showing those of us who have a cursory level of involvement in the space anything particularly new. It isn’t new to suggest that we need to plan and have objectives and measure results on the back end. It isn’t new to suggest we need to know who we are engaging and be authentic. Anyone who has been involved in a grassroots effort knows the importance of connecting with influencers in a genuine way.

So it starts to dawn on me that this isn’t about the technology. It’s about PR fundamentals. But I am telling you: IT IS ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGY!

If the PR community intends to annex the social media space, we can’t just say that we are social media counselors and then suggest that all the rules we’ve always followed still apply going forward. They may not. Do we really need to spin our wheels examining the tone and frequency of every blog post that mentions us? To what end? I say go ahead and engage. Just like if you overheard a conversation about your company or product on a street corner. Listen and then offer your two cents. Connect! No need to over-think it!

Of course more information is always better than less, but the constant push by PR pros to slow down the process in the name of strategy inevitably diminishes the magic that comes with embracing spontaneity. You can be strategic and spontaneous. We do it all the time in issues management and crisis response. Just because you are making decisions on the fly doesn’t mean that they aren’t rooted in strategy.

Do I really need to assess if taking a camera along for a tour of a client’s facility and posting the videos on YouTube will deliver results? It doesn’t cost anything extra. And yet, how many PR folks have a video camera in their bag? How many have a basic understanding of video editing?

If you haven’t noticed, folks, the media is US. All of us. So if you want your stories told, go ahead and tell them.

We have to constantly push forward and examine how new technologies can be used. For instance, we need to understand the emerging world of cloud computing, which some suggest will radically change the way information is generated and shared in the coming decade (disclosure: I represent Mezeo Software, developer of the Mezeo Cloud Storage Platform). We need to better understand crowdsourcing and collective problem solving.

We spend so much time obsessing about Twitter that I am certain we are completely ignoring the NEXT Twitter. Whatever the next big thing will be is probably already in use. We’re oblivious because we’re all patting each other on the back for starting a Twitter account and updating our Facebook status.

EDIT: Beth Harte has posted a great response on her blog. Just to be clear, this wasn’t intended as a critique of Beth’s presentation. It is a reflection on the PR / social media relationship.

A big thanks to Brent Frei, co-founder and executive chairman of Smartsheet.com, for his illuminating piece, “Small BusinessesWill Inherit the Earth,” published online at Xconomy.

Frei notes that specialized sole proprietors, such as independent public relations counselors, are the big winners in the current economy, which is forcing all organizations to do more with less. He writes, “On one hand, they provide the “just in time” component services no longer staffed at the downsized firms, and on the other, they are adept at operating with lean resources and contracting for component services themselves.”

It just so happens that WSJ careers reporter Sarah Needleman also took on this subject in a segment on FOX this morning entitled, “How to Survive as a Freelancer.” Thanks Joe Cockrell (@joePRguy on Twitter) for giving me a heads up about the clip.

I do think that Needleman gets it wrong when she suggests that what is happening will be short lived. I believe that the splintering of work from larger integrated service providers to smaller, more efficient providers is permanent and is changing the way organizations that are in need of services behave. It wasn’t long ago that a large company would turn its nose up at the prospect of engaging a sole proprietor. But in this business climate, many are going forward with small providers because they (we) deliver extraordinary value.

Will these companies go back to the large integrated service providers when budget pressures ease — despite having positive experiences with their small but capable independent service providers? I do not believe they will. Here’s what Frei said:

“This atomization of business is…a function of the nature of work today, and of the growing availability of technologies that will soon transform this approach to business-as-usual.

“The ability to provide results electronically greatly benefits small businesses and individual contractors, as geographical location and infrastructure are no longer barriers. More and more opportunities will be available to productive workers to serve countless niches.

“The main barrier to this volume of atomization has traditionally been the “productivity tax” on the coordinator who manages all the players working outside the company. The information overload becomes intense with too many e-mails, spreadsheets, and overhead material with so many separate contributors. The logistics and technological challenges often outweighed the gains. But new online tools are changing all that.

“Collaborative work management tools will be tightly integrated with online work marketplaces (LivePerson, eLance, RentaCoder) as well as crowdsourcing technologies (Amazon Mechanical Turk, Smartsourcing). Think of these solutions as part of a global switchboard that connects real and virtual teams on an as-needed basis in order to accomplish specific work. They will be as universally accessible as Gmail, and available to all. And the important components—the tasks, milestones and deadlines, as well as the team members who own specific responsibilities—will always be clearly visible to whoever owns the end results.”

I not only believe in what Frei is saying, I have experienced it firsthand. I have successfully used Get A Freelancer to identify writers and designers for various projects. The writers I’ve worked with have done a great job and deliver their work at an extraordinary value. The service provides an e-Bay style rating system (a 10-star scale) that enables the customer to quickly see which service provider gets the most positive feedback from customers. People and firms from all over the world bid on projects. I had someone in the Phillipines create a logo for a client. I wouldn’t have been able to have a phone call with a local design firm for what it cost us. I use only U.S.-based writers, but they deliver similar value.

The bottom line in all this is that there is a global talent pool that is now just as easily accessible as the local talent pool. The fact that organizations are growing more comfortable with virtual relationships makes in unlikely that the Genie will ever go back in the bottle.

There were more than a few cringe-inducing moments in last night’s diatribe against public relations on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC. It is illustrative of the populist sentiments of the moment fueled by the tsunami of bad economic news and unfortunate business practices.

I hear and understand what Ms. Maddow and others who are raising their voices in criticism of investing in PR are saying. She is not alone by any stretch. Chicago Mayor Richard Daily thisweek took steps to cancel 11 PR contracts with the city. His administration had come under criticism for wasteful spending and PR was the poster child.

It is important that we as a profession listen to these scathing critiques. It is clear that there is a difference between what we believe we do and what the public believes we do. That is a fact.

So what did Rachel say? Take a look: 

“I…doubt very seriously that AIG is engaging public relations firms to soothe the taxpayers’ souls, or portray the company as just another innocent victim in the current economic meltdown. My guess, as it would be in any crisis, is that the reputable and highly qualified public relations firms working on AIG’s behalf are tasked with explaining what happened, what AIG is doing to fix it, why such steps will be effective, and why those steps will prevent future such occurrences. Only then can the process of rebuilding AIG shattered image begin.”

Even with the laundry list of “evil” that Maddow read, public relations can play an important role — not in seeking to manipulate or distract attention — but in helping an organization understand how it needs to change in order to rebuild trust. We help organizations align what they do with what they say they do. And we provide a clear understanding of what the public wants and needs from them so they can make the necessary adjustments in their attitudes and behaviors.

In times of trouble, organizations have a tendency to turn inward, which is almost never in the best interests of their communities. Public relations can be a catalyst for positive change and greater openness. How do we get that point across in an era of growing cynicism and distrust?