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€
Charlie Melichar, VP of PR and communications at Colgate University and a blogger at Intermedia answered these questions last December.
1) I remember reading you monitor what bloggers write about your institution. Why and how do you do it?
Public relations is an input/output business—what we produce is only as good as our ability to gather information about our audiences. Blogs can provide some fantastic information on perceptions, what kinds of questions prospective students have and when they have them. The best part is that posts tend to be very straghtforward—folks peel back the veneer a bit when posting which leads to some really rich content. I tend to search on Technorati regularly to see what kind of chatter is out there.
2) 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?
Absolutely. We need to follow the path being beaten by our audiences—go where they already are. If they’re on iTunes, downloading podcasts—we need to be there. If they’re using a feed reader to collect news, we need to provide RSS feeds. Make it as easy as possible for folks to access the content that is meaningful to them.
We’re in a new era of transparency. The beauty of these new technologies is the same thing that scares a lot of folks—micromedia provides direct, cheap, easy access to your institution and the folks who are a part of it. This is the true “no spin zone.†You’d better be pretty sure that your marketing and messaging is on point. If it isn’t you lose all credibility in the minds of your audiences.
We’ve been running first-year student blogs for the past two years now. The idea is to provide a forum for these students—those who prospective students can relate to as they’ll be in their shoes in a few months—where they can talk about what it’s like to be in college. The students provide a great snapshot of what college life is like and they’ve heard from folks who read the blogs and find ways to connect with them, whether through a shared interest or some other affinity. The blogs make college real for prospective students.
3) If you do, how do you measure the efficiency of these new PR tools?
As with everything it’s a little bit of art and a little bit of science. As part of our overall scheme, we’re trying to make all of our communications experiential—provide our readers/visitors with a sense of what it is like to be a part of this community, and micromedia is key to that mix. So, to the extent that we hear that folks feel like they understand what the place is like, we’re succeeding. We do track stats, and they can be meaningful—at the very least, they tell you that someone is out there. The real power of the Internet isn’t mass communication, it is the dynamic, interactive experience that blogs, wikis, and other micromedia harness. So if our blogs are only reaching 200 people, but those 200 people are ideal fits for our institution, that’s a major win.
4) In your opinion, why should PR professionals in higher ed take the time to learn more about these new tools?
We need to be fluent in the technologies that are being used by those we want to reach. It’s not just so that we can know how to use them, it’s also about knowing when not to use them. A blog or a podcast isn’t always the best way to reach folks—print is just as important, some might argue more important, than ever. As PR pros, we need to master the mix and understand how to align our media so that we can deploy them with speed, efficiency and effectiveness.