3 questions to a higher ed blogger: Andrew Careaga, Director of Communications at the University of Missouri-Rolla, from “Higher Ed Marketing”

Director of Communications at the University of Missouri-Rolla, Andrew Careaga is the co-chair of the CASE Annual Conference for Senior Communications and Marketing Professionals where I’m going to speak about new media and crisis communication in a couple of weeks.
Andrew has also been blogging at Higher Ed Marketing since November 2005.

1) Why did you decide to blog about higher ed marketing in the first place? Can you tell us a bit more about your experience with blogging?

I started the Higher Ed Marketing blog last November for a couple of reasons. First, I discovered the PRblogs.org [Note from Karine: PRblogs was created by Robert French], and loved the concept of offering free blogspace to PR practitioners, educators and students, so I signed up as a show of support for this site. Second, I’d been thinking about creating a site to share my thoughts about higher ed marketing and PR, and to share related information with anyone else interested in the subject, and discovering PRblogs.org gave me the nudge to create the site.

My blogging began in March 2002 as an experiment in journaling. I’ve kept journals, off and on, since junior high, but I’ve never been a consistent “journal”-ist. I thought creating a blog that would be publicly visible and linked to other bloggers might make me more accountable (since I would have an audience) and in turn make me more consistent at journaling. But I soon discovered that blogging was not the same as journaling in the traditional sense – that many bloggers were interested in sharing news items and other bits of information snagged from the cybersphere, and commenting on it, and linking to each other. Blogging seems to be more of a community endeavor than the more private and introspective process of journaling. You have all of these info-hunters and –gatherers, sharing and interpreting information, communicating ideas. It didn’t take long for blogging to become a time-sucking obsession. But I’ve learned to deal with it.

2) You are also one of four bloggers on UMR’s research blog, Visions. Why did your institution decide to launch such a blog? What kind of results does it get?

A few years ago, our campus launched a quarterly online “magazine” of sorts to promote UMR’s research activities to various audiences, including people in federal research agencies, state and federal legislators and their staffs, and other influential folks. After a big marketing splash with the first edition, we sent out quarterly updates to those who hadn’t opted out. We received some nice email notes from readers every now and then, but after about a year of publishing a quarterly ezine, we wondered whether we were publishing frequently enough. We decided that moving to a blog format would give us the opportunity to get our message out more frequently to these audiences.

We went live with Visions as a blog in mid-January. After the initial flurry of activity during the first couple of weeks, visits tapered off to 200-400 sessions per day. From February through July 2006, the Visions blog has averaged 284 sessions per day and 682 pageviews per day. Approximately 50 percent of the visitors access the site via an RSS feed. About 28 percent come from a .com domain, 15 percent from a .edu domain, 11 percent from a .net domain. Only 0.25 percent come from a .gov domain, which has been disappointing. We tried to market this site to federal agencies, but apparently many of them opted out.

3) You have a “print” background, yet you have fully embraced the new media craze. In your opinion, why should higher ed marketing and communication professionals try to learn more about blogs, podcasts, social networking websites, etc.?

I think I come from a “writer” background more than a “print background. Print was just the most prominent medium around at the time. Had I been born in the Stone Age, maybe I would have come from a “cave wall” background. :) Anyway, I believe blogs and related online communications vehicles are terrific resources for anyone from a writing or journalistic background. I suspect Thomas Paine or any of the pamphleteers who cranked out leaflets during the colonial times prior to the Revolutionary War would marvel at this medium now at our disposal and its power to reach such broad audiences at such a low entry cost.

Like any communications revolution – the printing press, broadcast, and so on – the Internet revolution is disrupting conventional approaches to communication, and community. Consider how the printing press gave rise to books and pamphlets, which disrupted the oral tradition of passing along knowledge from generation to generation, and which gave rise to universities, which became a new form of community that disrupted traditional life in the village, and you get some idea of the power of media to alter communities. Imagine how empowering it must have been for the student to have a book full of ideas to read. Imagine how disruptive that must have been to European society. No wonder they called that era the Enlightenment. Now, think about how the advent of the Internet has also created a different kind of community – a virtual community that is unbound by time or geographic space – and opened up new and disruptive communications opportunities. I’m trying not to get too metaphysical here, but technological change has an enormous impact on communications. For people in the PR and marketing business, the social networking capabilities engendered by the Internet means users – that is, anyone online – can easily create, edit and disseminate information that can easily be found. This means that we’re no longer in control of the message. I’m not sure we ever were, but these days it’s easier than ever for a student, graduate, professor or staff member to spread a message about our campus via a blog, a video on YouTube, or a message on MySpace or Facebook.

We need to be aware that these new media tools – blogs, social networking sites, etc. – affect how people share information and ideas, form community, and express themselves.

Anyone in the business of marketing and communication should learn as much as possible about these tools. We’re communications professionals, right? Then we need to understand the media being used to share and spread information, and we need to learn how to use these tools to become part of the online discussion.

I often go back to something Dan Forbush (founder of ProfNet, now part of PR Newswire) told some of us at a conference back in the mid-90s, when the Internet was young. He said something along the lines of, “We’re in the middle of a revolution, and in a revolution, kings lose their heads. Therefore, think like a peasant.” Thinking like a peasant doesn’t always come naturally for those of us who have been trained in traditional methods of PR and marketing. But we need to learn some new communications skills.