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© Newswise.
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| Issue No. 200512
| December 2005
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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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Corporate PR Culture vs. Higher Ed Culture
by Dick Jones
Dick Jones Communications
Trustees, who are often successful in business, frequently want to know how colleges and universities can be run more like businesses. The idea, of course, is that businesses are run "efficiently" while nonprofits are not.
It ain't necessarily so. I've got two names for you: Worldcom and Enron. I've worked in both the private and nonprofit sectors -- and found efficiencies and inefficiencies in both.
Nonetheless, in the college public relations (PR) field over the past decade or so, there has been a tendency for institutions to hire PR pros from the corporate sector, in part because these hires can, it is believed, bring the perspectives of the "real world" to the presumably out-of-touch academe. Many private-sector transplants handle the switch with ease. But not all. Those who do not fare well seem to flounder for a couple of reasons.
Some fail to appreciate the difference in governance. In the corporate world, the hierarchies typically are simpler. The PR director may take marching orders only from his boss (the vice president) and her boss (the president). And there may be only one message: that Company Name is the undisputed leader in (fill in applicable adjective) technology.
A college or university, however, is more like a feudal kingdom. The president is still the PR director's chief "client," but other, additional constituents have real, and sometimes conflicting, PR needs. Continuing Education's messages and needs differ from those of the College of Liberal Arts, for example. You no doubt can think of examples on your own campus.
Another pitfall can be a failure to grasp the nature of the product. I submit that the "product" of higher education is not graduates, as some believe, but rather knowledge. The business of higher education is the production and dissemination of knowledge.
In higher education public relations, we want our institution to get credit for the knowledge created and disseminated by its faculty. Thus we publicize faculty research. And we offer advice from our experts on all manner of subjects, from exercise to diet, to how to get your kid to do his homework, to what to watch out for in the tax laws. While all institutions have secrets to protect, our basic ethos in higher education is to share knowledge.
In the private sector, where company research is often proprietary, the sharing of information with the public is far more selective. Pulling up the castle drawbridge and not sharing information is a PR tactic more often employed successfully in the private sector than in higher education. Failure to appreciate that basic cultural difference has hurt the career of more than one professional in the move from the corporate PR world to the ivory tower.
We invite your discussion of this topic on PIOnet.
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Google Demonstrates That Old News Is Good News
by Bob Roseth
University of Washington
Google News (news.google.com) is a wonderful resource. It provides a quick, customizable page with links and headlines for major national and international stories, as well as those about your institution. You can also receive email updates several times a day as news breaks.
However, new technology also comes with unexpected consequences. A few weeks ago, I received an alert from Google that included a string of stories from the University of Washington. I thought we'd hit the big time. And we had, but not for the right reasons.
The news stories were old -- really old. Some went back to 1997.
I figured Google's "spider," the automated device that scans websites, had hiccupped and would soon right itself. But I hadn't anticipated how many people subscribe to the company's news service and how they use it.
We fielded a steady stream of calls from people who at first were concerned that they had not been invited to the event we had announced, and then were puzzled that "we" were publicizing an event that had occurred several years ago. One business owner thought we were deliberately dredging up old news in order to sabotage his small business. Similar calls came in all day, from people using Google News or from those receiving news from others who "updated" their information with news provided by Google.
I was relatively lucky in getting to the bottom of the problem. There is a general contact number listed on Google's website, but I was not able to navigate the phone tree well enough to reach a real, live person. I'm not sure the phone tree is actually intended for that purpose. I figured I'd consult the company's press center, which has news releases and contact information for Google's public relations (PR) staff. I left several messages, finally stating that unless I heard from a real person real soon, I would -- reluctantly -- have to issue a release to our local media describing the problems that Google News was causing us.
One of Google's PR people got back to me in about ten minutes, assuring me that their news team was working on the problem and that I wouldn't need to issue a release.
Sure enough, I heard from several Google people over the next few hours and ultimately received an email describing the origins of the problem and suggesting some solutions. So far, the suggested solutions have worked, although we've still been receiving calls -- a ripple effect of the initial problem.
Some of the lessons learned from this experience are obvious. First, take very seriously anything that is said on or via the Internet about your institution. Second, be persistent in getting any erroneous information corrected. Time is of the essence. Third, move quickly to squelch rumors. Because our news releases are stored in a database, it was easy to temporarily put a standard disclaimer at the top of each release, explaining what had happened.
Also, recognize that problems like this are likely to become more common as news aggregators use automated tools to scan your site.
Oh, and keep your sense of humor. One of the news releases to resurface was from 1998 and involved a request for human subjects for a research project. As a result of the re-release, several new volunteers came our way. We asked the researcher if she wanted to hold on to the names, and it turned out she was still recruiting subjects. So it went. Everything old became new again.
We invite your discussion of this topic on PIOnet.
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