Category: higher education

Hitting the books for PR School 2.0

I’ve been busily working on thinking about my upcoming presentation for the Higher Ed Experts webinar I’m presenting as part of PR School 2.0: How to survive and thrive in the new online world of Public Relations and Communications, to be held in about a month. My session is titled “Upgraded story pitching: Do’s and Don’ts to keep your clip book fat.”

I’m not sure how many PR folks keep a clip book these days. (We don’t, unless our online del.icio.us version counts as one.) But the concept behind the webinar is simple: new media is gaining prominence as a distribution outlet for institutions’ stories. I’ve got a lot of ideas in my head about this session. I just need to get them down on slides.

Anyway, I hope you’ll set aside some time and budget to catch at least one of the three webinars in the PR School 2.0 series. Here’s a rundown, lifted straight from the site (sans the HEE graphic):

Webinar Series – PR School 2.0: How to survive and thrive in the new online world of Public Relations and Communications: October 21, 22 & 23, 2008

“PR School 2.0” is a 3-webinar series that will bring you up-to-speed on the new higher ed PR practices powered by Web 2.0 technologies. It will show you how you can put the online monitoring of your brand on autopilot at almost no cost, upgrade your story pitching with best online practices and cross over to online news publishing. Designed for seasoned PR practitioners as well as new comers, this series will give you the tools necessary to do your job in the conversation age.

October 21, 2008 1PM-2PM ET – Rain date: October 28, 2008 1PM-2PM ET
Monitoring 360: how to make sure you hear it and see it before they do
Responsible for the Web and Social Media initiatives at Texas A&M University College of Engineering, Matt Herzberger will guide in the maze of free and for-a-fee monitoring tools to help you set up an effective system that works but doesn’t require hours and hours of your time. By sharing best practices and good tips, he will help you monitor your brand online without any information overload side effects.

October 22, 2008 1PM-2PM ET – Rain date: October 29, 2008 1PM-2PM ET
Upgraded story pitching: Do’s and Don’t’s to keep your clip book fat
Andrew Careaga, director of communications at Missouri S&T, will share creative strategies and techniques to help you keep your stories and your institution in the old and new media. With his list of do’s and don’t’s, you will make the best use of the Web and other online tools to successfully pitch reporters, editors and bloggers.

October 23, 2008 1PM-2PM ET – Rain date: October 30, 2008 1PM-2PM ET
Online news publishing 101: how to go beyond online press releases with a dedicated news website
Geoffrey Mock, manager of internal communications at Duke and editor of Duke Today, will explain why and how his institution launched Duke Today, an online news website serving the community. He will also share lessons learned on covering, writing and publishing news for an online daily publication and how to drive readership to the site.

* * *

I hope to see you there!

A ranking that might really matter

This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that aerospace giant Boeing is poised to enter the college rankings business. According to the (password-protected) Chronicle report, “The Chicago-based aerospace giant has spent the past year matching internal data from employee evaluations with information about the colleges its engineers attended. It has used that analysis to create a ranking system, which it plans to unveil in the coming month, that will show which colleges have produced the workers it considers most valuable.”

With a 160,000-person work force that includes 35,000 engineers worldwide, Boeing may make a mark where the government and others have not — raising the possibility that employers could become a major force for college accountability.

“We want to have more than just subjective information” for evaluating the colleges that Boeing visits to recruit and hire, said Richard D. Stephens, the company’s senior vice president for human resources and administration. “We want to have some concrete facts and data.”

Boeing plans to keep the rankings confidential, much to the chagrin of college administrators who hope their institutions make the top grades. “Self-promotion is especially likely because some lesser-known institutions will be revealed as having done an ‘excellent’ job of producing high-performing Boeing engineers, Mr. [Richard D.] Stephens [Boeing’s senior VP for HR and administration] said, without identifying any such colleges ahead of their expected notification.”

It will be interesting to see how this plays. For a school like ours, with a heavy emphasis on engineering, a good grade from a company like Boeing would be well worth trumpeting. Verification of our programs from a major employer of our graduates would carry a lot of weight with the parents of prospective students, especially in these tough economic times. But there’s always a down side to playing the rankings game. No matter whose doing the ranking, there’s always a chance that you won’t make the grade next year.