Whitney Foard Small, Regional Director of Communications for Asia Pacific and Africa of Ford Motor Co., and Tatt Chen, Senior Vice President of Penn Schoen Berland, Asia, were special guest speakers in Professor Lee Miller's Data Mining class on April 9.
Small and Chen, whose firm does consulting work for Ford, talked about how they measure the impact of public relations campaigns and the attitudes of key groups of potential customers.
"Measuring PR can be done," Small said.
Zhang Hong, deputy editor-in-chief of the Economic Observer, told students in Advanced Business Writing how the weekly newspaper uses social media in news gathering and distribution. He visited Professor James Breiner's class on March 29.
The newspaper, with print distribution of about 100,000, gets about 10-15 percent of its web traffic from Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, Zhang said.
Lars Willnat, professor of journalism at Indiana University, brought 17 students to visit the campus and Professor Lee Miller's data mining class on March 12.
Miller started the session started with a presentation on some of the top restaurant chains operating in China. Students then did a a data-mining exercise in the form of speed dating, in which they each interviewed 10 of their peers from the other country about their food preferences and eating habits.
After two minutes, they moved to interview the next person.
What started out as an assignment in a feature writing course for the Global Business Journalism program at Tsinghua University evolved into a major feature on the website of Foreign Policy magazine.
Eric Fish, a second-year student in the master's program co-sponsored by ICFJ, became interested in the annual ritual of several weeks of military training that most university freshmen in China have to undergo. It involves marching, physical training and patriotic education.
