News and Tips for Higher Ed Pros

If you’ve read this blog, you know that I posted earlier this week my first rant (hey, 1 out of 260 posts, that’s not too bad) titled “Why PR people don’t follow up on media requests?”

This was a real question that I ask myself and this blog’s readers after the PR contacts of 3 institutions (out of 5 contacted) didn’t follow up on my queries even though they had agreed to answer my questions.

Since I don’t think a lot of readers check the comments on a post after a few days (except maybe if they commented themselves, which, I’m happy to report, is happening more and more), I thought I would share some of the answers of a few readers.

For “type de technologie”, the pseudo of a regular reader, my misadventure could be explained by some kind of culture clash:

“I’m at an NJ university (not in PR) and find that the people there to be the most UN-Web 2.0 people on campus. They are stuck in a paper world that has turned yellow with age, but they continue to write “press releases” & contact The Star-Ledger newspaper and ignore any attempts to try new outlets for news and new ways to get to old outlets.”

Although my request was made for a print publication, I did point to its online version in my email inquiry. As a result, I might have been identified as just another online freelance columnist.

“PR offices are often filled with older employees who run “news services.” Many of these folks are new to higher ed, unaware of industry pubs like UB, and completely unaware of Web 2.0.,” confirmed Rob Westervelt before adding other reasons.

Robert French who teaches PR at Auburn University went further by writing “unfamiliarity with the topic is a likely reason. Seriously, their answer to “media relations and how the Web can help” may be - “I don’t know.” Most are likely ignorant of the platforms, tactics and strategies. We need to remember that all of this is really new for most people. I still get a deer-in-headlights look from some of them when mentioning RSS, blogs and social media releases, for example.”

After a quick analysis of different possible reasons (also shared in his blog post about the question), Andrew Careaga suggested this showed the necessity to change perspective and get more training for higher ed PR and marketing teams:

“This means we need to learn new skills. It’s not enough to be able to craft the perfect lead (or lede, as the old-schoolers put it) for our news release or media advisories. It’s critical that we learn customer relations skills, that we understand the key messages (dare I say “unique selling proposition”?) of our institutions and our strategic plans and connect our work to those, and that we learn how to engage people in the new media. That includes reporters who use the new media as part of their daily routines (like you) as well as “citizen journalists,” our students posting on YouTube and Facebook, etc.”

Barbara, who chose not to disclose the name of her employer to this blog’s readers, thinks that the solution lies in more training too. Not for PR professionals, but for yours truly.

After offering sensible suggestions on how I should do my job (which is fair game, as I’ve been complaining on how others do theirs), she wrote:

“Every reporter knows they need to develop their beat and build relationships with their sources. I have a hunch that you moved into a new beat area [media relations professionals] and jumped right in without taking time to cultivate the people you hoped would be sources for you.”

For the record, I did select the institutions, because they had very interesting media relations websites.

However, that’s true that I didn’t know I needed to take time to cultivate the people who are actually supposed to deal with media queries… for a living (and again we’re just talking about 3 simple questions to include a few quotes).

In a previous life, as a full-time journalist, I took the time to cultivate my sources (policemen, experts, politicians, activists, union leaders, etc.) and was always nice to PR folks because they usually acted as efficient middlemen/women. In graduate (PR) school, I was told that it was always a good idea to help any journalist when s/he needs you, because you never know if the resulting story won’t be read by another reporter working for a bigger/”better” outlet or if this journalist won’t work one day at one of the biggest news outlet in the country.

Anyway, Barbara also suggested something even more interesting:
“A query from a perhaps unknown blogger for their own views on a topic or little or no interest to them could easily have gone into trash.”

As I mentioned in my previous post, 2 out of 3 did respond to my first query and agreed to answer my questions, but then they just went blank. They didn’t delete my email.

So, could it be some kind of discremination against bloggers as Barbara’s comment hinted? Even though the article is going to be published in a print publication, I did use my collegewebeditor email account.

Michael Patrick Rutter from Harvard offered another very interesting and more hopeful explanation:

“(I)ncreasingly, many of us focus so much on creating our own internal content (i.e. our own websites, blogs, stories, etc.) that jumping at the “media” isn’t as critical as it used to be.
(…)
You can often generate more PR via a web story that you produced, unmediated, than you can by trying to place it in a major publication (the success rate is quite low).”

Good point which shows how new media is really changing everything.
As regular readers know, I can definitely live with that…

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