Special UB column about PR 2.0: Interview with Dan Forbush, President, ProfNet – PR Newswire

1) You’ve recently launched a wiki to discuss the future of PR in higher ed featuring very interesting conversations around Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, RSS and podcasts. Why should these be part of the higher ed PR toolkit?

We used to talk about “targetting messages to audiences.” With the new tools, we increasingly must talk about “interacting with communities.” That’s because all of these new tools support online conversations. As Weber Shandwick’s Larry Weber has predicted, the PR pros of the future will be “constituency managers” who “identify, analyze, and interact with each of the micro-segments that relate to a client’s brand.” So imagine all of the “micro-segments” that relate to the brand of, say, a major university.

I think RSS will be far more important to academic PR practitioners than blogs per se. I say that because universities already produce a huge amount of non-blog content so the real challenge, it seems to me, is to harness it all and make it easily accessible online. The key term I think we all will have to get our heads around is “CGC”—“customer-generated content.”
How do we capture it and put it to work for us?

2) What kind of responses do you get from PR higher ed professionals when discussing these new technologies? Do they seem interested, puzzled, skeptic?

I have the sense that a lot of academic PR professionals would like to be doing more with the more tools but are having difficulty persuading their administrative colleagues that the new media have to be taken seriously, and that there’s much to be gained by getting ahead of the curve. More than 1300 PR professionals representing 200 colleges and universities participated in a recent CASE teleconference on the new media. That says to me there’s a whole lot of interest. I wonder, though, how far that discussion is going into the rest of the organization.
Are communications professionals sitting down with the colleagues in admissions, development, alumni relations and academic affairs and brainstorming whole new approaches using the new tools? At a few institutions, I sense that they are.

3) Can you give us a couple of concrete examples where these new technologies can really make a difference for higher ed PR?

Sure. Imagine the day—which I sense is only a couple of years off—when a few prestigious universities decide to begin offering courses via streaming video and video podcasting to national and international audiences. That’s the day when the new marketing challenge facing all colleges and universities suddenly becomes abundantly clear. Will these initial forays into creating international classrooms be chiefly academic in nature, or chiefly marketing in nature—that is, aimed at extending the brand? I think they’ll be both.

4) What do you tell PR professionals in higher ed to convince them they should take the time to learn more about these new tools?

They don’t need persuading. Anyone who’s paying attention to what’s happening to media realizes we must master these new tools or risk becoming professionally obsolete.