Robert French (not related) of Auburn University is on a quest to help PR students prepare for careers that will place them at the core of this debate - should PR students embrace and use blogs in their formative college years? In so doing, Robert created Marcom Blog - a collective of PR practitioners (and hangeron'ers like me) to provide insights to PR students. Questions that should be considered in this debate include (but are not limited to): Do you believe college PR students reading and blogging about PR practices is a viable and valuable endeavor? Certainly - blogs lead to greater understanding and tend to provide effective communication conduits. What are the key concepts/lessons that should be included in such an exercise? Of greatest importance is to make sure that PR students understand that the business requirements of blogging are far different from personal blogging. There's a clear distinction between people that blog and businesses that blog. Business people (for the most part) do not want to become "bloggers" - they want to communicate more effectively with customers, vendors, and resellers. As such, the blog functionality that businesses must have is different from what individuals will find useful. PR students must learn that there's no single definition of a blog. How might a future employer react to a student's PR blogging efforts? Both favorable and unfavorable. The reactions will be no different than the biases felt by the first computer science graduates that also built their own Heath-Kit computers. What tactics by the students will best exhibit PR knowledge through their blogging efforts? I'm not really qualified to answer this question, but I believe it would be a good tactic to demonstrate an understanding that business blogging is more about strategic communications and if done well, eliminates much of the tactical (and reactionary) maneuvering that blogs are typically used for. One reason blogs work so well in today's Internet is the influence they have on the long tail. Demonstrating a superior knowledge of the hidden side of the Internet and how people discover your message, is a key success factor (in my view). | 
