Andrew Careaga, from Missouri University of Science and Technology, is doing a live chat with Seth Odell later on today on Higher Ed Live about the future of PR in Higher Education and has asked for any thoughts, so thought I’d give my two cents and pose some questions.
Andrew asks what sort of direction we see it heading in.
Questions
At a time when more (especially younger) academics are blogging, tweeting and establishing a digital presence themselves, should PR departments be concerned about this, or simply accept that this is a trend they can’t stop?
How do you achieve buy-in from senior management for resources in PR departments (ideally not as the result of a massive crisis)?
When does PR teams engaging with audiences (via digital media) etc, especially when those audiences are prospective students, become marketing? Should we begin to abandon the distinctions between PR/marketing and alumni relations/internal comms?
Are there any particular lessons the UK could learn from the US in this area (or vice versa)?
Join in – it’s at (if I’ve got my time zones right), 9pm UK time.
Many universities are now producing videos, whether in-house or via external agencies. We’re familiar with those aimed at recruiting students, particularly on the international stage. But if you’re producing videos from a PR perspective, I think it’s important to ask – what are they for?
The below is a video I put together last year to accompany research on how a compound found in coral protects it from getting sunburnt, and the potential for this to be the basis for new sunscreen protection in humans. Unfortunately I didn’t personally shoot the underwater footage from the Great Barrier Reef – I doubt there is a single PR budget for a university which would go quite that far – this was provided by the Australian Institute for Marine Science.
There are multiple reasons for putting together a video, such as the above, from a PR perspective:
Most importantly, it is simply impressive for the users who watch. Whether they are members of the public, alumni, others in HE or the media, it tells them about our work and establishes an association between an institution and a notable piece of news or research.
It’s also a real boost for internal audiences, especially students. When I’m looking for mentions of the university on Twitter, I love coming across links to our videos or stories from current students saying ‘wow I didn’t know we did this!’ Studying in one department means students aren’t always aware of the full scale of weird, wonderful and fascinating work which takes place at their institution. I remember not finding out until after I graduated that Sheffield has whole labs where you can grow plants in climate-controlled environments, all hidden under a car park. Again inadvertently – using videos/podcasts to tell strong research stories can make them aware of this.
In a group Q&A for the Meet Content blog back in October, @andrewcareaga - Director of Comms at Missouri University of Science and Technology, makes the point:
Traditionally, press releases are aimed at a single audience — journalists — and are designed to persuade them that our subjects, events or other “news” are worthy of coverage. But for years now, smaller news organizations have been using press releases as news verbatim. So we shouldn’t be writing solely for journalists anyway. We should write them for a more general audience.
If, however, our goal is to communicate with segmented audiences — prospective students, current students, alumni, parents and the like — then we should definitely reevaluate our content types and how we present the stories. Depending on the audience, a 90-second video may be more appropriate than a press release, or a lengthy article in the alumni magazine.
The one caveat I’d add to the above is that a video, especially when it’s promoting research, doesn’t have to be targeted at a particular segment of a HE audience, and doing so could narrow its broad appeal.
When we aim for media coverage it’s not to get it covered by a particular paper or outlet for the sake of it, but to reach the audiences they have access to. Shoot a video to promote research, an event or other news and providing it’s got something to say and is beyond a talking head, then maybe it can reach those same audiences too.
Worth a look: Chronicle of HigherEd article from July 2011 on Top 10 (US) videos posted by Colleges. Many commencement addresses in there but some research too.
(I’d urge you to read the full Meet the Content post ‘The Future of Public Relations in Higher Ed‘, and the comments for much more on press releases and social media in HE).
Writing in the NYT, Verne G. Kopytoff comments on the slipping away of control from corporate IT departments over their employees equipment and software (extraordinarily, I can’t find a link to his article – I read it in the NYT pullout from today’s Observer).
The corporate information technology department has long kept a firm hand on what equipment and software employees use in the workplace.
They are now in retreat. Employees are brining in the technology they use at home and demanding the I.T. department accommodate them, and many departments now do that.
It’s one of the more obvious manifestations of the blurring lines between personal and professional lines. Not only do your Twitter and LinkedIn profiles profess to be both on behalf of your organisation, but with the ‘all tweets my own’ caveat inevitably thrown in, but the tools we use to update such networks are now being used for both.
I was offered a Blackberry when I started my current role, but declined. Everything I need – email etc. – can all be viewed, updated and used perfectly from my Iphone, negating the need to carry round two devices. It’s versatile enough to be an assest to my job, even if the option of owning one is my own.
Obviously many people still prefer to keep the separation between work and personal life distinct, even down to the physical devices which are now so essential to managing each. It just seems more than a little inconvenient to me.
As Kopytoff mentions though, this isn’t an option open to those dealing with highly sensitive information due to security fears. I know friends in the civil service wouldn’t have this luxury.
For universities, the issue is less employees than students. Ferdinand von Prondzynski, from Robert Gordon University, did a post on the potential decline of workstations at university libraries:
A few weeks ago I visited another university and was shown its library. It was also a very modern library, opened a year or two ago, and it also had a good deal of space set aside for computer workstations. But what struck me on this visit was that, despite the fact that it was close to exam time, the workstations were almost entirely unused. Other parts of the library were quite full, but here I noticed that many students were sitting at desks with their own laptops, netbooks or iPads. I asked one of the library staff, and she explained that over the past year or so they had experienced a dramatic decline in demand for the workstations. ‘If we were fitting out the building now’, she suggested, ‘we probably wouldn’t include many workstations, perhaps even none at all.’
As a veteran of working part-time in the university library – 3 years at Sheffield – I’m not surprised by this. Despite having the option of remote access to our file store when off campus, I gave up on it in favour of a pen drive after two years, and then converted entirely to Google Docs once I started my postgrad degree. I think it will take a while for universities – such large and diverse organisations as they are – to fully convert to the Cloud though.
I was at a debate last month organised by the Media Standards Trust on ‘Churnalism’ (there is a video from the BBC College of Journalism). It centered around the PR/journalism relationship and the proliferation of press releases. It was mentioned that 90% of press releases never got any coverage, which is extraordinary considering the industry around them.
Yet what’s also notable is that we continue to perceive press coverage as the primary desired outcome of a press release. From a post by Alistair Wheate, from Glide Technologies, entitled ‘Would anyone read your news if they weren’t paid to’?
Who is the target audience for your press releases? If the answer that comes to mind is ‘journalists’ then think again. Do journalists buy your products or services? They might do if you are a well-known consumer brand, but probably not. The real audience is likely to be a mix of your current or potential customers, investors (where applicable), current and future employees, partners and range of other important stakeholders.
Journalists are in most cases an intermediary audience. You communicate with them in the hope that they will say good things (or not say bad things) about your brand that in turn will influence opinion towards your brand amongst those who make an impact on your business.
At the moment, especially in PR which isn’t consumer focused, we are perhaps still too hooked on the idea that public relations is based on media coverage. But what’s the point in achieving those column inches or broadcast time? In order to reach those key audiences, to establish and improve their perception of us, to influence the wider public debate and decision makers. The media are a conduit for this.
But we compete within an environment where users can consume media across borders, time-zones, platforms and outlets, and where those of us in PR still battle with each other for precious space in traditional media. As it’s the area I’m in, I’d ask how can universities add at least another string to their bow when it comes to promoting their work?
Alistair recommends one solution:
Take a new approach to how the story is presented. You may be able to get away with presenting a boring wall-of-text press release if the only people you expect to read it are those who are actually paid to do so. This is particularly true for larger companies who can get away with very lazy presentation – journalists will write about you anyway just because you are such a big player. If you write with the notion in mind that you want a more general audience to choose to read your story over and above other stories on the web then presentation becomes much more important. It’s no longer a case of a journalist choosing to read your bland press release over and above someone else’s bland press release but a potential customer choosing to read your story versus an engaging well-written blog post or news story.
Universities have an opportunity to leapfrog the mainstream media and explain our research, teaching and wider contributions to society in forms beyond the text-based press release. Whether it’s video, audio, slideshows or hosting debates, events and using social media to engage with different stakeholders, it seems like an inevitable direction. We have websites, and access to the tools needed to reach the public.
Content is still king, but new ways of telling our stories are also essential.
(Fiona Fox of the SMC, who chaired the MST debate, posted on it)
Below is the presentation I gave today to the AHRC Aim High media conference, held at the University of Manchester.
Some useful articles and posts, relating to the subjects I covered in the presentation:
The press release from Imperial
Sheffield release on the video from near-space
Social Analytics for Russell Group unis - a statistical assessment of Russell Groups university Twitter feeds. I’m a bit sceptical about this sort of thing, but it’s worth a look
Time to close your digital department (Rob Brown)
Academics and Colleges split their personalities for social media
I really enjoyed the day, and thanks very much to Jake Gilmore for asking me to speak. Any feedback is welcome!
I went to the British Academy for the first time last Monday (13 June) for a talk on ‘Flexible learning: the future Higher Education?‘, which was also celebrating 40 years of the Open University.
The speakers were Professor Alan Tait, PVC (Pro Vice-Chancellor) at the Open University, Carl Lygo, Principal of BPP (@caryllygo)and Professor Vernon Bogdanor, from King’s College London. The whole thing was chaired by Sir Peter Scott, from the Institute of Education.
Peter Scott opened the talk by suggesting that universities have ‘suffered too much from the tyranny of the standard student’, and that flexible learning was likely to increase.
The discussion touched on a range of points, but there was actually limited time given to the Open University, though it included how the OU had changed the definition of a University, by breaking the link with ‘place’ and the negative reaction from the media and politicians the OU suffered at the time.
I’ve been keen to hear Carl Lygo speak for a while, and he didn’t mince his words ‘Government is not the solution, it is the problem’. He identified three reasons that we are seeing a turning point in HE – all of which may well lead to more flexible learning. Government policy, the proliferation of digital technologies and employment patterns.
Much was made of the second point – that academics are currently ‘stockpiled’ at universities where only the students who can afford to go to that institution have access to them, whereas in the future, location won’t be an issue. Teaching and learning can be done online, in the same way that Carl Lygo crowdsourced ideas for the discussion on Twitter beforehand (which led one audience member to ask whether he actually needed to be at the discussion in person, given the ability to connect with people online).
Often when we think of university, the image we conjure is of the three/four year, full-time undergraduate degree begun straight after school. But if we are at a turning point, and flexible learning will increase, how are we going to convince the 17-18 year olds that this is what they want to do? I asked the panel this question at the end, and Alan Tait suggested that the learning experience of that age-range would be unlikely to change (apart from a rise in living at home) it’s the rest of the demographic groups for whom it would.
Most of us who went to university probably did that three year degree – I remember for so many of my age-group, it’s just ‘what you did’ after sixth form. But I’d suggest that very few would look back and say they’d have rather done a part-time and/or remotely taught degree. For better or worse, the university experience – or more accurately, the student experience – is now as much of the appeal as improved job prospects and learning for the sake of it. Subsequently, I can’t see many more 17-18 year olds opting for flexible learning, given the tantalising prospect of moving away from home and living the student life. Of course, the increased debt burden on students might change this – we simply don’t know yet.
Incidentally, recordings and slides used at the discussion are available at the link to the talk at the top of the post.
There is another talk, also at the British Academy, tomorrow on research independence and the Haldane principal, which I’ll be going to.
Very late, but I had an article published on the Guardian Higher Education Network a while back, talking about how social and digital media can be used to promote research. My concluding paragraph:
When I work on a story, I’d give anything for it go viral, but the best social media strategist on earth couldn’t force this. But our university, like most, has a presence on the right channels, giving us somewhere to initially promote the story. If the content is good enough, your users will do the rest, and you might find out some stories via them too. We can’t rightly see a story as unsuccessful if it generates a small amount of media coverage, but creates a storm of tweets and comments.
HigherEd Live have an article on ‘How to grab the attention of a Higher Ed Reporter‘, stemming from an interview with Josh Keller, of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Even in 2011, he highlights the importance of working relationships with journalists:
He stresses the importance of being strategic in developing good relationships with reporters and understanding what they are looking for in a story. Making the effort to share information relevant to a reporter that isn’t immediately self-promoting helps build a relationship of trust with that person. “Exchange of information between a journalist and a source of information is a two-way street,” Keller points out. It’s not easy, given the fact that reporters are very busy and rapid turnover is commonplace, he admits, but that relationship is well worth the effort—even for PR professionals in small schools, who might only have newsworthy stories once in a while.
One of the additional issues is that very few local papers, certainly in the UK, have dedicated ‘higher education’ reporters. They might have a journalist who writes about education, but their remit will also include primary/secondary schools, sixth forms and FE colleges. Part of this is due to the difficulties facing local media, with cutbacks meaning fewer specialist reporters. Therefore, PRs need to develop an awareness of what interests reporters in a whole rang of other sections of a publication – business, science, or health to name a few.
For university press offices this results in another important role, of explaining how Higher Education works and is changing to journalists, whether it be admissions processes or research collaborations.
He also mentions one of the importance of presenting material online:
Keller thinks that online newsrooms, a new development in higher education that we covered in a recent conversation with Georgy Cohen of Tufts University, are a necessary tool for any school that really wants its news publicized. Presenting such information as a directory of PR staff and experts in various fields, a feed of recent press releases and fact archives makes the journalist’s research task considerably easier. News organizations have also become more open to embedding multimedia features such as YouTube videos offered by a college or university into their own news coverage.
An academic ‘expert guide’ is a must for any University, although in my experience a lot of media will ring you up directly and ask if you have anyone on a certain topic, bypassing the online guide entirely. Having said that, it’s useful for the press office itself, as a directory of expertise when they get the inquiry.
As ever, the whole article, and video interview, is worth a look.
Hat tip must go to Jenny Rampling, via @GdnHigherEd, for the link to the article.
Been catching up on some of the recent QAA podcasts concerning social media, one with Professor Steven Schwartz, VC of Macquarie University, the other with Tracy Playle, from Pickle Jar Communications. Professor Schwartz is probably one of the best-known university leaders on Twitter. I saw Tracy do a presentation at my university last year in front of communications staff from Russell Group unis, and was suitable impressed, especially in how challenging she was to many assumptions regarding social media we had.
‘Social media…is really what should universities should be doing anyway’
Professor Schwart’z made a number of points:
Tracy Playle was asked about using it in teaching, but I’ll mention the other points:
The above are only summaries of the points I found most interesting. If you haven’t heard the interviews, with defelowen, they are worth a listen and aren’t too long.
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