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| Issue No. 200607
| July 2006
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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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No More Slow Summers in College PR
by Dick Jones
Dick Jones Communications
"Did you have a good summer?" the professor asked me.
"Yes, thank you," I replied.
"But it's nice to be back, isn't it?" he continued.
At that moment it occurred to me that he thought everyone left campus in the summer, just as he did. More than once have I uttered the staff-member's lament: "My kingdom for a nine-month contract."
Although we never had it as nice as the faculty, when I first got into this line of work, summers on campus were slower and more relaxed than they are today. Some of my colleagues at other schools even had "summer hours," usually meaning that the workday ended at 4 P.M. during those months. However, I worked for the legendary Art Ciervo at the time, and that meant the workday ended for us at 5:30 P.M. or later.
Still, summer was slower, a chance to cross a few of those B-list tasks off the to-do sheet.
It is a change that has come about gradually, the way the tides change at the beach. Without my realizing exactly when it happened, summer ceased being a slower time in the college public relations (PR) field. Now in the college PR shops that I visit, summer is mostly indistinguishable from winter in terms of workload. For publications and website professionals, summer is one of the busiest times of the year as they plan changes to their packages and schedule the coming year's output. The 24/7 news cycle has worked its changes on the world of media relations people as it has on everyone else connected to the news business.
This year, however, for just a brief moment, I got a whiff of the old summer. In mid-May, I hired a new staff member for our agency and asked him to introduce himself to the college PR directors he will be serving. He had trouble reaching several of them because they were out of the office.
When he reported this to me, I thought, "Of course. Commencement is over. They're taking a few well-earned deep breaths and days off before plunging ahead with the rest of the race."
So that is what summer is down to: a week, maybe two, in late May, after commencement is over but before summer term, alumni reunion weekend, the summer trustee meeting, and the department's strategic planning retreat get underway. Hope you had a chance to enjoy it, because for the rest of the year it's full-speed ahead.
We invite your discussion of this topic on PIOnet.
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Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
by Sally Widman
Director of College Communications & Web Information, Ursinus College
Blogs are "word of mouth on steroids," a form of communication so powerful that they can increase a corporation's brand strength and "Google juice" to levels no seven-figure marketing campaign could ever match. This is the essential message of Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, a book about why the people who run companies, and the people who work for them, should engage in natural, honest, two-way, passionate conversations with their customers. These conversations can be about the company's products, their thoughts, their corporate issues--anything and everything that truly interests them.
Scoble and Israel's message is supported by hundreds of examples of corporations that, through blogging, have experienced huge increases in sales and customer loyalty. The success stories range from that of Microsoft--where thousands of employees blog with no restrictions other than a simple caution to "blog smart"--to the account of a Savile Row tailor who increased his business three hundred percent in ten weeks by blogging earnestly about fine fabrics and stitching (http://www.englishcut.com).
The authors maintain that traditional, top-down, "command-and-control" marketing and public relations are rapidly fading in effectiveness in a world grown sick of slick marketing campaigns. Blogging is "two-way marketing," where the message goes directly to the audience without being filtered by the media, and where the audience can, and does, talk back. Once the company and the customer are engaged in a lively discourse, the media often follows with coverage pointing right back to the blog, again delivering the company's message in unabridged form. It's a win-win for bloggers and for their companies.
But can a blogging strategy work in the world of higher education? Scoble and Israel do not look at college blogs, but the answer, based on the blogs they do examine, would seem to be "it depends." It depends on the personality of the blogger (open, authentic, and enthusiastic vs. secretive, evasive, or dull). It depends especially on the culture of the institution. What is permitted? Do the trustees allow the president to speak freely about what's on her mind today, in public, or is she expected to choose her words carefully and avoid all controversy? And will the president allow unvarnished conversations about the institution and its issues among the people who work there, in front of the rest of the world? It takes a certain combination of personal qualities to make a blog work, so the answer will be different for each campus.
Still, a blog is an avenue worth considering and even taking, as more universities and colleges acquire websites with a built-in blogging feature. Scoble and Israel make a strong case for the value of just letting the conversation happen via this new channel, where more than 40 million blogs now flourish and a new blog is born every second. And the book is an interesting, excellent read, whether it converts you to blogging or not.
The authors caution against gimmickry and manipulation in blogs. An effective blog consists of natural, plain talk. Its honesty builds trust in the audience, and any attempt by a corporate blogger to twist or spin the facts will soon be smacked down as "lame" by the blogosphere's millions of readers. Scoble and Israel include examples of blogs gone bad, such as Mazda's attempt to rework a series of failed 30-second television ads into a blog allegedly written by a hip, young urban driver. The blog also flopped.
The authors' blog did not. They used their Naked Conversations blog to help them write Naked Conversations, and Israel is currently using it as he works on a sequel entitled Global Neighborhoods.
Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
By Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006
We invite your discussion of this topic on PIOnet.
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