Meet Michel Haigh, new senior research fellow with the Page Center

Michel M. Haigh is a newly appointed senior research fellow at the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication. She is an associate professor of advertising/public relations in the College of Communications at Penn State University and brings to her career a mix of practical and teaching experience.

Among her work for the Page Center is a new, yet-to-be-published study examining the policies and procedures that public relations practitioners have in place for handling negative, user-generated social media content. She and Shelly Wigley of the University of Texas at Arlington surveyed more than 200 PR people in organizations to learn how they react to undesirable Facebook posts, damaging Tweets and negative YouTube videos.

This builds on earlier work by Haigh and Wigley, just published in February 2015 in Corporate Communications: An International Journal, showing that stakeholder’s perceptions of an organization declined after they viewed negative social media posts about the organization—even if they didn’t know anything about the people making the negative comments.

It’s the kind of scholarship at which the Page Center excels. The intersection between theory and practice is our home. The Page Center strives to create and disseminate knowledge about current and best practices in public communication.

It’s certainly knowledge that Dr. Haigh can use in the classroom where she teaches the public relations writing, campaign course, research methods and the freshmen seminar. Along with six years as a public relations writer and editor, she has authored more than 35 conference presentations, seven of which were recognized with a “top paper” award.

She has published more than 25 articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, and is a regular presenter at Penn State Cooperative Extension workshops. In 2008 she earned the College of Communications Dean’s Excellence Award in Research and the Dean’s Excellence Award for Service in 2010. Among other tributes, she has been invited to the Scripps-Howard Leadership Academy, was a 2012 Plank Fellow at the Plank center for Leadership in Public Relations at the University of Alabama and was named to NerdScholar’s “40 under 40” list of “professors who inspire.”