October 2013 – Andrew Careaga

For student recruitment, rankings still matter

Here’s some disturbing news for those of us who wish college rankings would just go away:

According to recently publicized results of a poll of prospective college students, the rankings of college and university programs by media outlets like U.S. News & World Report continue to have a significant impact on the college search process.

The consulting firm Art & Science Group, conducted an online survey with 846 college-bound high school seniors in November and December 2012. Here’s what they found:

Two-thirds of students surveyed indicated that they had taken college rankings into account in their college application decisions.
Students with the highest SAT scores (1300 or higher) were more likely to have considered the rankings in their application decisions than students with SAT scores of less than 1300.
Nearly two-thirds of students surveyed “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree” that the rankings are “very important in trying to sort out the differences between colleges.”
About two-thirds, respectively, somewhat or strongly disagreed that the rankings “don’t matter” and that they “don’t matter to me, but they matter to my parents.”

So, yes, the rankings remain relevant. And with the proliferation of new ranking organizations out there, and the White House’s push to have a grading system for higher education, these types of numbers games will continue in a variety of forms. Just in the past year, we’ve seen the rise of many “ROI” (return on investment) rankings, like this one. Look for this trend to continue. Since U.S. News owns the reputational ranking category, other groups, from publications like Forbes and Washington Monthly to salary-information services like PayScale, will focus on ranking schools by ROI or affordability.

Beyond the rankings

But the Art & Science Group folks suggest other factors may play an even greater role in students’ decisions on picking a college. Things like “substantive and atmospheric insights and information from the campus visit, interactions with parents, information on the web and in print materials, and more personal forms of contact with prospective students … can have a greater influence than rankings.”

Furthermore, “we would argue against spending too much institutional time, money, and energy on hand wringing over rank per se and on attempts to improve it. For most institutions, it would be far better to focus on planning strategy that strengthens an institution’s competitive position on a substantive basis: differentiation based on educational approach, student experience, innovative teaching, and the like.”

In other words, your time is better spent developing and refining your institution’s brand persona and messaging, and developing ways to deliver that messaging to your prospective students.

Media relations in a disintermediated world

As the lead of any news story should, the opening paragraph of The State of the News Media 2013, from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, encapsulates everything a skimmer of the news needs to know about the subject:

In 2012, a continued erosion of news reporting resources converged with growing opportunities for those in politics, government agencies, companies and others to take their messages directly to the public.

This is not exactly breaking news. The news media are in a tough spot and have been for years.

Their predicament also puts organizations that have relied on media coverage for much of their visibility — like colleges and universities — in a similar pickle.

Higher education has never been a big news topic. K-12 and higher education combined made up just 1.4 percent percent of national media coverage, according to a 2009 report, and I doubt things have improved much since.

Given such a low level of media coverage, it may become even more difficult to justify media relations activities in higher education. Yet it’s been my experience that the demand for media coverage of our higher ed institutions (from administrators, alumni, trustees, etc.) has not decreased, even though our efforts to tell our own stories directly to our audiences has increased.

So how should higher ed communicators adapt to this environment of fewer opportunities for media coverage coupled with no lower demand for such coverage from our audiences and those we report to?

If the news media’s ability to cover our organizations is on the wane, and the news hole for education is already incredibly small, then what level of resources should we devote to our media relations efforts?

The disintermediated world

I’ve written here before on the subject of disintermediation in the news business. “Disintermediation” is a big, awkward, ugly word that, in economic jargon, refers to the removal of intermediaries in the supply chain for delivering goods and services. To borrow language from the factory outlet store marketers, disintermediation means, “We eliminate the middleman.”

We’ve seen disintermediation disrupt entire industries, thanks to the Internet. (When is the last time you went to a travel agent to plan a trip? You can just log on to Travelocity or Priceline and find the best rates yourself.) The same sort of disruption is happening in the news business, and it heightens the need for college and university PR organizations to think differently about how we deliver the news.

We need to deliver their messages to their audiences through other avenues. It’s critical that higher ed PR, marketing and branding staff think like a media organization — a publisher of news content — to get their messages out. (We’re already doing this, to some extent. Visit most any higher ed website and you’ll find some news or feature story about some slice of campus life.)

Media coverage matters

Yet for many of our audiences, getting the news about our institutions directly from the source doesn’t carry the same weight as seeing positive news coverage of our institutions in mainstream media outlets. Here are a couple of reasons why:

Third-party validation. It’s one thing to say, “Look what great things our organization is doing!” It’s quite another to have some established authority say, “Look what great things this organization is doing!” That’s what positive media coverage of our institutions helps with. So, yes, it’s important to deliver the news directly to our audiences. But it’s tough to beat a reputable third-party endorsement of what you’re saying. The idea goes back at least as far as the Old Testament Book of Proverbs : Let someone else praise you, and not your own mouth; an outsider, and not your own lips. – Proverbs 27:2. Even wise old Solomon knew the value of third-party validation.
Rankings. Yes, rankings. People love to compare their affiliated institutions with others. And media organizations know this. That’s why the higher ed rankings game has exploded in recent years. Everyone from the granddaddy of the ratings game (U.S. News & World Report) to President Obama has gotten in to the ranking game. They may or may not be helpful to prospective students looking for a good fit, and they may be nothing more than “pageantry” and nonsense to some observers. But many audiences take them seriously. It’s another form of third-party validation. For better or for worse, media relations efforts don’t have much direct influence with where an institution may fall in the rankings. But there is a theory that PR efforts, like sharing an institution’s media placements with leaders of other institutions in order to influence those leaders’ vote, can help an institution in the rating game.

Opportunity and the new media mix

So, where does this leave today’s higher ed PR/media relations professional? To go back to that report on The State of the News Media, it leaves us in the land of opportunity.

We have more opportunity to share our story than ever before. Here’s why:

Free your stories on the web. It’s trite to say that our websites are the front doors to our institutions. But there’s truth to that saying. By thinking like a media organization, we can publish our news before we share them with the news media (or at least at the same time). We can also do the once-unthinkable: Share stories created for other media (such as a story written for the alumni magazine) on our websites. Maybe not every story that goes into your alumni magazine is appropriate for sharing on your website. But I bet many are. So why not reuse and repurpose that content for other audiences? As Georgy Cohen put it in this nearly two-year-old (but still relevant) post, Reinventing News on Your University Website: “[W]e need to start finding ways to own our stories. We don’t need to rely on the media. They should be an amplifier, but not our main conduit for communications. “
Use social media to amplify your news. As Georgy said, the news media can be an amplifier. So can social media. Judiciously share your news via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or other social platforms so that your fans and followers can share with their networks. Quoting Georgy again (dang, that woman’s good!), “News content is our ambassador. A news story may not be our most visited page, but it may be our most well-traveled.” Just don’t be an automaton in your social media sharing. Don’t throw every news release out there in an RSS feed. Be human about it. Sharing stories via social media is especially important if you want to reach younger audiences. According to a 2012 study, one-third of people under 30 get their news from social networks.
Lose the “news” view. Sometimes we get too hung up on our traditional perspective of news. In the digital world, we can loosen up a bit. Get your students and alumni involved with your social media presence through contests (as we did over the summer with an Instagram contest in partnership with our campus bookstore) or through special hashtags for events like commencement or move-in weekend. Then collect and share that information in various ways (see item 7, below).
Share that third-party coverage. It’s OK to share the relevant positive media coverage your institution receives from mainstream media. In fact, that might be the best content to share with some audiences. Include in alumni newsletters, notes to trustees, on social media and anywhere else where you think it would matter. This includes those rankings (assuming you can say something good about your institution’s spot) or third-party stories about your institution’s position in the rankings. (A year ago, we got good play in social media and elsewhere by sharing an ABCNews story about 12 Colleges Whose Payoff In Pay Beats Harvard’s. But again, be judicious with your sharing. Don’t overdo it.
Share, share, share. I know I just advised you to not overshare information. But sometimes we’re guilty of the opposite sin: We undershare information, assuming people who should know about our news coverage actually do know. One audience that often gets overlooked is the internal audience of students, faculty, staff and administrators. They need to be in the know of all the great news coverage your efforts are yielding. They, too, can be great ambassadors of your stories. These individuals already have a strong connection, and they are able to reach audiences who might otherwise ignore your stories. So work a reporting mechanism into your media relations plan to ensure internal audiences know what’s being covered and what’s being discussed. This can work both formally (daily reports of news coverage) or informally (sending an email of thanks to a student or professor who worked with you on a press release that got great media coverage, and cc’ing upper-level administrators and that person’s boss).
Think differently about third-party validation. In the online world, your networks contain important influencers. Students, alumni, faculty, other campus staff, administrators — they all have networks that extend beyond your official online presence. Think of them as third-party validators of your news. Anytime they share your content, they are adding value to it within their social networks. They provide credibility that an institutional account might not bring. At Missouri S&T, we’re fortunate to have a chancellor who is very active on Twitter (@SandTChancellor) and a CIO who is active on Twitter (@ghsmith76) and also blogs about technology in higher education. Their networks add value and validation to your institution’s stories.
Gather and curate. Social media tools such as Storify make it easy to pull together all types of digital content. Use them to your advantage. Create an account (here’s ours) and use it as a digital depository. You can then share the information on your website, via social media or electronic newsletters, or elsewhere.

Media-morphosis

What’s the takeaway from all of this?

It’s that media relations has morphed. PR professionals at colleges and universities are no longer just pitchmen and pitchwomen to the press (if they ever were). Nowadays, we need to cover our institutions as a reporter might — seeing them as communities where interesting stuff is happening all the time — and then creating and telling those stories about our institutions to our various audiences. Those audiences include the traditional media outlets we’ve always served as well as newer audiences, those that are inside or closely connected to our institutions, and those social-media influentials who can share the stories even farther than they would otherwise go.

At the same time, media relations pros need to be social media-savvy, able and willing to monitor social media for mentions of their institutions. We need to be ready to share those mentions that could cast their college or university in a positive light. We also need to take on the role of curator, to collect and share stories — those we create and those covered by third parties — with our audiences.

What did I miss?

P.S. – If you enjoyed this post, I suggest you also check out a virtual roundtable discussion titled The Future of Public Relations in Higher Ed, moderated and curated by (who else?) Georgy Cohen and featuring me and three very savvy PR/digital pros: @tracymueller, @loripa and @bonnerj. Even though that post is two years old, much of what we discussed then is still relevant today.

Photo: Newspaper sunny yellow by Jon S/NS Newsflash via Flickr.

Friday Five: The week’s must reads

Five posts for your weekend reading consideration:

The best of #heweb13. Judging from all the Twitter talk earlier this week, the #heweb13 conference in Buffalo was a great success. (Kudos to Mark Greenfield and company for putting together such a stellar event.) For those of us who weren’t able to be there, we had the benefit of excellent coverage by the devoted crew of bloggers at LINK. Now another devoted blogger, Karine Joly, shares her 13 top LINK blog posts from the conference. (And she even gave up the chance to eat maple bacon ice cream to sift through all the LINK posts. Talk about dedication.)
The Show Me State (of the art). I must admit, as a Missourian, I was hooked by Seth Godin’s headline. But the text below the headline should give all marketers pause. We spend so much time showing, revealing, offering samples, giving stuff away, just to draw in customers. Maybe in doing so, we’re hurting our causes. Maybe we should show a little less.
5 successful rebranding efforts. Every brand needs a little freshening up now and then. What do you think of these five efforts? Were they as successful as the author suggests?
Here’s what the marketing organization of the future should look like. In this post, Forbes’ Jennifer Rooney reports on what a panel of top chief marketing officers (collectively called the Marketing2020 project) think their organizations should look like in 2020. The structures are more hub-and-spoke models of collaboration rather than hierarchical, and the “non-negotiable characteristics of the 2020 marketing organization” will include “a goal of business growth; a clear purpose; complete internal alignment of functional areas; clearly defined roles and responsibilities of each individual; research centers and data-informed efforts; an amalgam of agency partners as well as an in-house agency-like team; cross-platform social-media engagement; a strong CMO-CEO connection.” (Hat tip to @DebHammacher for sharing.)
10 rules for creative projects from painter Richard Diebenkorn, by Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings.

A new ranking for faculty-media interaction

My inner media relations/lisstmaking nerd was intrigued by a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article (subscription required) about the Faculty Media Impact Project. The brainchild of anthropology professor Rob Borofsky, this project aims to rank how well university researchers share their research with the public via the news media.

It’s an interesting twist on an old problem in media relations: How do we qualify the impact of media relations?

Unfortunately, the Faculty Media Impact Project doesn’t answer that question. But it does offer yet another perspective on the issue of measuring media relations.

In one sense, Borofsky’s effort is narrow in scope. It examines the media mentions of social sciences faculty from 94 universities. Disciplines outside the social sciences disciplines of anthropology, economics, political science, psychology or sociology were not part of this research. (Borofsky deliberately restricted his research to social science researchers because, as he told the Chronicle, “people dealing with social sciences should be dealing with social concerns.” True, but the same could be said of any academic discipline, I think.)

But even with this narrow focus, the research involved sifting through a lot of data. “To devise the rankings,” the Chronicle reports, “researchers ran searches of the Google News archive to find out how often more than 12,700 faculty members had appeared in 6,000 news sources from 2006 to 2011. The citations for the professors in each department were tallied, averaged on a per-faculty member basis, and then ranked relative to the federal funds their programs had received.” (The rankings are available from this website. Rice University tops the chart, with Southern Methodist and MIT rounding out the top three.)

Flawed methodology

The assumption behind Borofsky’s methodology is that those faculty who are cited most frequently in the news are somehow “reaching out” to the public to share their expertise. But as the Chronicle report points out, that assumption — and this ranking system, like all others — has its flaws.

For one, some researchers may benefit from whatever may be current in the news. For example, many political science professors in the study had high media citation scores, perhaps because their governor was running for president during much of the time period covered by the study, the Chronicle article suggests. So universities with strong poli-sci programs may skew the results.

The study also lumps all institutions within a single university system together and doesn’t take into account the type of media market where a university is located. So the University of California’s 10 campuses are all lumped together, even though professors at Berkeley probably get more media mentions than, say, Riverside.

I think it would be interesting to expand the study beyond traditional news media sources and consider non-traditional sources, such as blogs and social media mentions.

Also, a lack of coverage in the news media doesn’t necessarily mean faculty are not engaged in social concerns. The media don’t always devote the most space to social issues, anyway.

Whatever happens with this project, it’s likely to suffer the same fate as every ranking ever created: Loved by those who fare well in the rankings, and hated by those who do not fare so well. As Borofsky tells the Chronicle, “Everyone complains about rankings but uses them.”

Photo: Old News by Doug88888 via Flickr.