Month: June 2008

Contextless links: June 30, 2008

It’s a Monday, the last day of the month, and the end of a fiscal year. What better day than today to wrap tie up some loose ends? Here are some links I’ve been keeping in the newsreader and del.icio.us account just for this occasion.

Brand tags: a collective experiment in brand perception.” And a great way to waste time.

The website is down. Another great time-waster. Share with your IT folks. They’ll love it. Or hate you. Um, maybe you’d better watch first.

Great college TV ads from Wilkes University, as presented by College Web Guy.

A question for college website creators, posed by Mark Greenfield.

The employable web designer.

Media analysis, Google Maps-style. This is a brilliant mashup. PR folks, take heed. Via @bobledrew tweet.

8 disruptive technology changes.

Webcentricity and the future of print designers.

Anthropology Professor, Now a YouTube Star, Says Web Video Can Help People Craft Their Identities

Jeff Jarvis on the crowdsourced life.

Down with Helvetica: design your own font, a New York Times piece about Fontstruct, via @ADenson‘s recent tweet.

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Now playing: Various Artists – eMusic – Lights & Music – Cut Copy
via FoxyTunes

Friday Five: what we blog about when we blog about blogs

Today’s Friday Five indulges in a bit of navel-gazing, tossing out five links about blogs and bloggers, by bloggers, on their blogs.

  1. Data-mine your blogs for reusable content. A recent post by Kyle James (aka dot-edu guru) of Wofford College (which has a slew of blogs) suggests that colleges and universities dig into their institutional blogs to find content that could be used elsewhere on the institution’s website. Good idea, Kyle. Maybe we should call it content mining.
  2. Why no Apple blog? Unlike Dell, Google or Microsoft, Apple has never felt the need to have a corporate blog. I’ve always thought this weird. So does Business Blogwire‘s Easton Ellsworth, who speculates that an official Apple blog might make the company more accessible to “the masses who find Apple snobby and elitist.”
  3. Speaking of official corporate blogs … The best of them — like Google’s — offer valuable services and tips, and in so doing they add value and build their reputations. Case in point: Google’s announcement on Thursday of an upcoming free cross-product webinar for webmasters.

    Three of our most useful products for website owners are Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Google Website Optimizer. On July 8, we’re joining forces to bring you a free webinar about all of them so you can learn more about how they can boost your website when used together.

    Nice touch, Google. Nothing snobby or elitist there.

  4. An admissions dean who gets it. A few weeks ago, I found out about “Dean J,” an admissions administrator who blogs, by reading this article about her (article via Academic Impressions’ e-newsletter). Dean J is the nom de blog of Jeannine Lalonde, the assistant dean of admissions at the University of Virginia. As the C-Ville article points out, Dean J has an “easygoing Web personality.” It’s refreshing to find such a voice in a world of recruitment spin. No wonder readers of her blog “quickly latched on to a source of much-needed information about the admissions process at UVA.” Nice going, Dean J.
  5. The most powerful persuasive element of blogging. It doesn’t take a psych degree to figure it our, according to Copyblogger. Blogging allows people to like you, and people like to do business with people they like.

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Now playing: Regina Spektor – Edit
via FoxyTunes

Slideshow: New Media Promotion

Below are the slides from the presentation Dan Forbush and I gave at last week’s conference on obtaining regional and national publicity. I’m not sure the slides make much sense out of context, but here they are.

Also, Dan has created a Facebook group for discussing these sorts of things, so for those of you who don’t have enough social networks in your lives, here’s one focused on college and university approaches to social media: The College Social Media Study.

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Now playing: Liz Phair – Help Me Mary
via FoxyTunes

Twitterpitching?

pitch.jpgWhile we’re on the subject of pitching to bloggers and traditional media, thought I’d pass along this article from Ragan that landed in my inbox today:

Is Twitter the newest and coolest way to pitch the media?

Slowly but surely, mainstream journalists (not just the tech media) are turning up on Twitter and often sharing thoughts on stories they’re covering. …

Of course, the day may soon come when “TwitReleases” are commonplace. In his PR Squared blog, Todd Defren, principal at SHIFT Communications in Boston, recently pondered the impact of a press release from Softbank that was just one sentence: “SOFTBANK MOBILE Corp. today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple to bring the iPhone to Japan later this year.”

Said Defren on his blog, “[I] realized that this Softbank/iPhone deal could have been announced via Twitter, with 17 character spaces to spare!”

What’s the takeaway for PR professionals? Start practicing the craft of writing 15-word pitches.

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Now playing: Belle and Sebastian – Funny Little Frog
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Why don’t higher ed PR folks pitch to bloggers?

One thing to come out of last week’s conference on how colleges can obtain publicity is that very few college and university PR people are pitching bloggers. We’re still trying to get our stories into a shrinking news hole in print, TV or radio. Meanwhile, more and more traditional journalists are also writing for their organizations’ websites. (Case in point: Newsweek science writer Sharon Begley, who was the subject of last week’s Friday Five. She’s posting a few times a week on her blog, in addition to writing for the offline version of the magazine.)

During one of the roundtable sessions at the conference, I asked how many at the table (a dozen or so PR pros) were pitching their stories to bloggers. Nobody was.

Why aren’t we pitching to bloggers? At the conference, I heard two primary reasons:

  1. It just hadn’t occurred to us. We don’t think of bloggers as sources for our news.
  2. Bloggers lack the credibility of traditional news outlets. We don’t think our supervisors, alumni, etc., will be that impressed by a blogger picking up our story.

At least colleges and universities haven’t gone to the extreme of some PR agencies that have been called out and publicly humiliated for routinely spamming bloggers. Still, there are plenty of legitimate blogs that would make tremendous outlets for our stories. They are influential in certain circles, and they can also become a vehicle to more mainstream media coverage.

Why not give it a try? But first, make sure you don’t send out something that could end up here. Know your audience. Be smart about your online PR approach, just as you are with your offline pitching.

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Now playing: Ben Kweller – Nothing Happening
via FoxyTunes