Last December, I conducted several email interviews to prepare my column about the new world of Public Relations in higher education for the April 2006 issue of University Business: “The Brand (Brave?) New World Of Online Public Relations.â€
David Jarmul, Associate Vice President, News and Communications at Duke University answered these questions last December (several months before the scandal surrounding the rape allegations against three Duke Lacrosse team members).
1) Do you monitor what bloggers write about your institution? If you do, why and how?
Like most universities, Duke monitors how it’s being covered in the conventional media. Every day, we gather a sample of “clips,†which we distribute via email and post online. As I’m writing this, I’m looking at our “Duke in the News†feed from a couple of days ago, which includes a professor appearing on “Hardball,†a Charlie Rose interview with our president and prominent Duke mentions in Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, the CBS Evening News and elsewhere. Over the past year, we’ve added blogs to our coverage, mainly by having a student search on Technorati several times a week. I keep an eye on Technorati personally via an RSS feed that appears on my desktop whenever a blog publishes something about Duke. As blogs continue to gain popularity, we want to know what they’re saying about us.
2) Do you pitch bloggers? Do you respond to/comment on their blog posts? Any interesting examples?
As with our system for monitoring “clips,†we’ve added blogs to our distribution lists for promoting online stories or sites. By reaching out in this way, we’ve encouraged bloggers to write about subjects ranging from Duke students flying in NASA’s “Vomit Comet†to research on how babies explore objects.
3) Do you think blogs/RSS/wikis/podcasts should be part of the higher ed PR toolkit? Can you give me one or two examples at your institution where these tools have yielded interesting results?
We’re watching these technologies carefully and think they have considerable potential to transform how Duke and other universities reach out to their audiences. This past September, Duke hosted a two-day symposium on podcasting that brought together experts from diverse disciplines; the symposium website includes an archive with lots of good material. Wikis are still used mainly within our technical community, but there’s growing interest among communications people and others. Blogs are also gaining more users. RSS has been the technology of greatest interest to us. We’re now using it to syndicate news in more than 20 categories. We’re also getting ready to roll out a “Duke Today†site that will use RSS extensively to provide everything from computer security updates to dining menus.
4) In your opinion, why should PR professionals in higher ed take the time to learn more about these new tools?
Anyone on a college campus who doubts the importance of these technologies need only go to the nearest dining hall and count how many students are reading newspapers … and then count how many are listening to iPods or text-messaging their friends on cell phones. This is where the future lies and, particularly at institutions whose “customers†are embracing these new approaches, communications people need to keep pace.
