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| Issue No. 200407
| July 2004
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The PIOnet Newsletter is sponsored by Newswise and Dick Jones Communications
Feature Editor: Dick Jones Editor/Publisher: Roger Johnson
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PIOnet Newsletter is produced monthly to support media relations' vital role in integrated marketing for your institution. This role is not always adequately recognized, understood, or acknowledged. Our goal is to give you data, arguments, evidence, and ideas to enhance the understanding of and appreciation for media relations at your institution.
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View full list of jobs in higher education.
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Use Your Media Placements in Marketing
by Dick Jones
Dick Jones Communications
As Texas Christian University's higher education marketing guru Larry Lauer has pointed out, "Today we are experiencing the end of mass communication."
In 1970 the average TV viewer received seven channels. How many do you get now? Over a 30-year span, the big three TV networks saw their prime-time audience fall by 42 percent. There are more than twice as many radio stations in the US as there were in 1969. While the number of daily newspapers is down from 1,750 in 1970 to about 1,500 today, virtually all papers have created online editions, effectively adding to the number of information outlets.
This fragmentation means that even when you score a major media coup, such as an interview on "Good Morning America," most of your constituents will not see it live. Media relations naysayers cite this as a reason why media placements should not be considered important in marketing. The naysayers, however, could not be more wrong.
Again, Larry Lauer, whose real title is vice chancellor for marketing and communication, is on the money. His answer is to call your best media scores directly to the attention of the people who matter most to your college or university. When you show your constituents a positive story in USA Today or the transcript of a "Today Show" interview, they value it every bit as much as if they had seen it on the day of publication or broadcast. It becomes what all positive media placements become -- a third-party endorsement of your school's impact and quality.
A growing number of colleges now use their website to call attention to news placements. An "Old Siwash in the National News" web page can easily be updated for new placements. To get around the problem of links to pages that no longer exist, colleges summarize the information. Under copyright "fair use" you can excerpt a sentence or two, with attribution, of course. (If you would like to see an example, send me an e-mail.)
At least one top 50 national liberal arts college that I know of uses strong news placements as yield pieces in the admissions process. If there is a positive story on a biology professor, for example, the college might send a copy of that piece to prospects who have been accepted in biology or pre-med but who have not yet committed to enroll. Permission to use a reprint should be obtained from the paper or magazine first, of course, and I have seen few instances where it has been withheld.
A school's president or vice president for development should be sending favorable stories, with personal notes attached, to fund-raising prospects. The governmental relations office ought to send good stories to legislators and government executives.
One way to combine these activities is to prepare a "three-minute brochure" once a year to reach multiple constituents. Using only your best placements, or quotes taken from them, create a brochure that hits the highlights and concisely shows that your school is a "player" nationally.
The idea is not to produce a heavy "clips book" that demonstrates how much you did over the course of 12 months. It is to construct a document that someone will spend maybe three minutes with -- and come away with the impression that your institution is making waves on the national scene.
What innovative uses are you making of your media successes? Let us know.
We invite your discussion of this topic on PIOnet.
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Top Ten Ways to Create a Public Relations Nightmare
by Jeffrey Alford
University of Mississippi
10. Do not consult with anyone before making important decisions.
9. Once a decision is reached, do not test market it with any of your audiences before making a public announcement.
8. When making a change, be sure not to have a replacement for whatever symbol, product, or service you are taking away.
7. Timing and format for an important announcement are immaterial; no one cares.
6. Ignore any initial criticism or objection; it will blow over.
5. Pay no attention to the lessons learned from previous decisions. (Faulkner was right when he said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past.")
4. Words are unimportant. People will intuitively understand what you mean.
3. Demonstrate flexibility by frequently changing direction while searching for a solution.
2. Ignore the mass media. They are a nuisance at best.
1. As a communications professional, never become involved in the discussions, planning, or implementation of important decisions. Your only responsibility is to clean up the mess.
The University of Mississippi PR nightmare began when it decided to yank its on-field mascot -- an oversized caricature of an old southern gentleman known as "Colonel Reb." Virtually everything that could go wrong did go wrong when we scrupulously followed the "Top Ten Ways to Create a Public Relations Nightmare." To read about the incident see http://espn.go.com/page2/s/caple/030916.html
A year later, although the dust has settled, there are still those who remain angry that the cartoon figure was snatched from them, and we are still without a replacement mascot. One lesson we learned is that self-inflicted wounds are the slowest to heal.
We invite your discussion of this topic on PIOnet.
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Do Hyperlinks Help or Hinder Our Communication?
by Zoltan Bedy, Ph.D
Oswego State University of New York
Putting stories on the web allows us, as public relations professionals, to give our readers far more information, variety, and sources than does putting stories in traditional print or electronic media. In print media, we can include -- if the importance of the story warrants -- another related story or two and/or a sidebar. For audio (radio) and video (TV) stories, we might include one or two related stories in a newscast. Putting stories on the web, however, enables us to post the story itself plus related stories, still photos and captions, audio and video sound bites, video (with or without natural sound, as appropriate), as well as direct, secondary, and tertiary links connected to the story, including links (if they exist) to other sites, discussions, blogs, etc. -- and the list goes on. As a result, we can, if we're not careful, bury our reader in information connected, however directly or tangentially, to our core story.
In 1996, the portion of the American population who had gone online for presidential campaign news was at five percent. By the 2000 campaign, 20 percent sought election news online, and during this year's campaign, that percentage is higher still. Those statistics were among the factors that led researchers Krisztina Marton, Mihye Seo, and William P. Eveland, Jr., to ask:
- Do individuals learn more from hyperlinked or non-hyperlinked online news sites?
- Do hyperlinked and non-hyperlinked online news sites lead to differences in information processing?
- Are there differences in the types of knowledge obtained from hyperlinked versus non-hyperlinked online news sites?
Their interest was primarily in the "content and structure of public affairs knowledge," but the results of their study, "Moving Beyond ÔJust the Facts'" (2004. Communication Research 31 (February):82-108), are also applicable to public relations practitioners' use of online media for information dissemination.
The researchers acknowledged the numerous similarities and differences between print and online newspapers, and focused their attention on the effects of hyperlinks offered in the online "papers," saying those links "may be stories from recent days that serve to provide the history of the current story, or they may be stories with elaborated information in news magazines. The links may also send readers to stories on similar topics that are not necessary for understanding the history of the current story but that instead would enlighten readers about the interconnected nature of many events at the local, national, or international level."
Participants in the study were mostly upper-division undergraduate students from a large Midwestern university, who were asked to read the same modified versions of online newspapers resembling The New York Times on the web, from which ads, links to classifieds, and sections irrelevant to the study had been removed. Some participants read "unlinked" versions, and thus were only able to access stories through the index on the newspapers' home page, with no other external or in-text links available. For those using the "linked" versions of the newspaper, not only were links on the home page available, but also in-text links (not generally included in The New York Times on the web), making them "easier to notice and therefore more likely to be processed at the point in the story during which they are relevant."
Eveland, Marton, and Seo tested several hypotheses, only three of which will be discussed here. The first was that cognitive elaboration -- "the making of mental connections among pieces of new information as well as between new and old information in memory" -- should be encouraged more, and thus will be greater in linked than in unlinked news sites. This hypothesis was not supported. The study results showed no significant difference in cognitive elaboration between those who read the linked versions and those who read the unlinked versions of the newspaper.
The second hypothesis was that there will be greater disorientation -- "a feeling of being lost in a Web site and unable to figure out how to find the information one is most interested in." The greater the number of navigation options, the more one would expect the reader to be disoriented. This hypothesis was also unsupported. There was no significant difference in the disorientation of the 'linked' versus the 'unlinked' readers.
The last hypothesis to be discussed here was that factual knowledge will be lower for those using the linked versions versus those using the unlinked versions of the newspaper. Unlike the first two hypotheses, this one was supported by the results of the research. Participants using the unlinked version of the newspaper scored significantly higher on a test of factual knowledge than did those who used the linked versions.
Thus, it seems that readers can make connections between and among various pieces of news from various links in an original story, and they are not particularly disoriented by navigating through numerous links to see new and related information. They are, however, less likely to remember the facts of what they've read after having visited several links. So, where does that leave public relations practitioners, whose job it is to manage relationships through communication, and public information officers, who are heavily involved in disseminating information to a range of publics through a variety of media?
Eveland, Marton, and Seo suggest that designers of online news sites -- and here I must add providers of online news and information content -- must decide on the ultimate goal of the site and story. "If the goal is to communicate basic factual information, clearly links should be avoided." The question to ask here is: Does using all this available technology really help the reader learn about and understand what we are putting out there? Or perhaps we should ask: Do we really need to use all available technological capability to help our readers learn about and understand what our organization is doing?
We invite your discussion of this topic on PIOnet.
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Book Review: Public Relations Kit for Dummies
by Andrew Careaga
University of Missouri-Rolla
Most of the experienced college and university public relations professionals I know wouldn't be too keen about reading a book with the phrase "for Dummies" in the title. You certainly wouldn't want it sitting on the same shelf as your institution's strategic plan, nor would you want your president to catch you flipping through it. But the books in Wiley's For Dummies series -- a series that spans all manner of activity, from using the Internet to cooking heart-healthy meals and learning about various religions -- aren't written for the pros. They are, as the For Dummies marketing materials proclaim, "for the rest of us" -- that is, the amateurs.
Eric Yaverbaum's reference guide, Public Relations Kit for Dummies (Wiley, 2000; Robert Bly, co-author), is no exception. This public relations (PR) primer focuses on the basics that should be second nature to any college or university staffer who writes a news release or edits a newsletter. But if you're a newcomer to the PR business, or you're starting your own company and need to understand the basics of getting media exposure, then Yaverbaum's book could be a handy guide. It also holds some valuable reminders for the rest of us.
Yaverbaum is president of Jericho Communications, a PR firm that counts Sony, IKEA, and Domino's Pizza among its clients. He writes in a breezy, familiar manner, mostly about the art of obtaining press coverage, and sprinkles his prose with personal anecdotes that underscore his main points. Yaverbaum's conversational style, combined with the book's format -- the use of subheads, bulleted lists, and cartoonish icons that are common to all For Dummies texts -- makes for easy, but sometimes tedious, reading. For instance, the bullet points under "Putting News in Your News Releases" (page 108) compose a handy checklist for PR 'newbies' while also being good reminders for seasoned veterans. But no-brainers such as "Never lie to the media, ever" (page 111) grow tiresome.
For PR neophytes, the book's best offering is Yaverbaum's solid advice on the rudiments of media relations. He extols the virtues of the standard press release, and he underscores the importance of keeping our relationships with the press on a professional level. (I can think of a few administrators and faculty members who could benefit from such advice -- but of course, none of them would be caught dead reading one of these manuals.)
Yaverbaum's insights on public relations come primarily from the corporate sector, and he's writing for the corporate PR world. His focus is on product placement, building company buzz, and influencing market share. While these are important facets of any PR program, those of us in higher education must deal with issues this book doesn't address, such as working with legislators, government regulators, alumni boards, open records and open meetings laws, and the like. Yaverbaum doesn't attempt to address any of the issues or circumstances peculiar to higher education.
And yet, Public Relations Kit for Dummies does offer a comprehensive look at media relations while addressing internal communications, the online world, and the importance of strategic planning and solid writing skills. The book also includes a CD-ROM with forms and programs to help the reader get started on a public relations program, as well as some entertaining features, such as Yaverbaum's "Ten Greatest PR Coups of All Time." And, even though I would never admit it to my staff, I did learn a thing or two about public relations from reading this book.
We invite your discussion of this topic on PIOnet.
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