Month: October 2013

A new ranking for faculty-media interaction

Old NewsMy 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.

Apple’s branding breakthrough and what it means for #highered

Earlier this week, Interbrand unveiled its ranking of best global brands for 2013. And for the first time since Interbrand began keeping score (way back in 2000), Coca-Cola has been dethroned. The new king of the global brands is Apple. Google takes the No. 2 spot, and Coke tumbles to third place.

A BloombergBusinessweek timeline of Interbrand's top 10 global brands since 2000. (Click image for larger view.)
A BloombergBusinessweek timeline of Interbrand’s top 10 global brands since 2000. (Click image for larger view.)

Interbrand’s methodology for determining brand value is about as arcane as U.S. News & World Report‘s approach to the annual college rankings. (For example, Interbrand relies on something it calls the “Brand Strength framework,” which is some sort of “diagnostic tool that delivers actionable insights.” Um, okay. That certainly clarifies things.)

But people in the branding world pay attention to Interbrand’s scorecard, just as higher education administrators do the U.S. News rankings. And both sectors love to brag about their organization’s rating when the scores look good and to loathe the rankings when the scores look bad, it gets people talking.

So let’s talk about brand rankings.

How did Apple dethrone Coca-Cola? And what could higher ed brand managers learn from it?

Getting emotional. Apple’s stock price has tumbled from $700 a share in September 2012 to the neighborhood of $478 per share recently, according to this analysis of the Interbrand rankings. So, considering stock value alone, one might conclude that Apple has even less value today than a year ago. But that would leave out one important component of the brand’s value. “Less tangible strengths like emotional intelligence and psychological insight are proving to be just as vital to leading a brand today as the ability to generate high ROIs and increased shareholder value,” says Interbrand CEO Jez Frampton in a statement. It is “a sign of the times,” Frampton says, that Apple, “a company that has changed our lives, not just with its products but also with its ethos,” has risen to the top of the brand hierarchy. For higher education, the takeaway is about the emotional value our institutions provide students, alumni and others.

Global and the new normal. Frampton also points out that “in a world that is increasingly globalized and interconnected, ‘developing’ countries like China are now poised to become bigger players, and collaboration — across borders, across silos, or co-creating with consumers — is more crucial than ever.” How will colleges and universities in the U.S. — or anywhere else, for that matter — position themselves to compete in this global environment?

Can you be both cheap and good? Apple becomes No. 1 on the heels of its recent announcement of a new, less expensive line of iPhones, a move that some see as risky. It actually bends one of the so-called “immutable” laws of branding (see this post), which says, in essence, that your brand should stand for something simple and narrow (more about this here). Apple has been known for high-end, well designed products. Are they now lessening their worth by offering a $99 iPhone? It’s a risk that may pay off. Consider what Stanford and others are doing with MOOCs, or Georgia Tech’s gambit of offering the $7,000 computer science degree. Will expanding access and dropping prices help build these brands or will it ultimately hurt? Time will tell. But time is not on the side of being both cheap and good.

Then again, Apple is known to “think different.” I wouldn’t bet against them, and look for them to stay on top of the charts for a while.

Disclaimer: I am not an Apple fanboy.