Category: higher education

New higher ed blog: The Old College Try

Just discovered a new higher ed marketing blog, The Old College Try, that’s worth a visit. (Thanks to CollegeWebEditor‘s Karine Joly for the intro, via a recent “three questions for…” conversation with TOCT’s creator, Deanna Woolf.)

The blog’s been around since July, and I spent some time surfing its contents this morning. Woolf writes with a witty, engaging style, addressing issues like the lack of paid celebrity spokespeople for colleges and universities (“We can dream of the day when radio spots are read by Pierce Bronson instead of the local station’s go-to regular”), marketing safety on our campuses (“To me, it’s hard to ‘market’ a safe campus by citing great crime stats, the night watch/escort service, or the emergency phones every 100 feet. … People are going assess how safe they feel when they visit your campus and see it with their own two eyes”), or a different angle on college football photos (“[Y]ou could capture a cool photo of a pre-game tailgate party that would be perfect for the student activities brochure you do later in the year. … Or what about the president horking down a hotdog? What a great shot for an off-the-wall university magazine piece on her or him.”) Horking down? Not sure if that’s a typo or not, but it does conjure up an interesting image.

I, crisis communications expert

[shameless self-promotion]
Just thought I’d let readers know that I, a guy who usually tries to get reporters to interview other people, was interviewed myself as a *ahem* media expert by InsideHigherEd.com for a follow-up story to the whole Dalhousie/Facebook/puppy murder flare-up (Proving you’re not a puppy murderer, by Andy Guess).
[/shameless self-promotion]

Guess’ story views the Dalhousie situation — a resurgent Facebook group of 22,000-plus members that accuses Dalhousie of conducting inhumane research on puppies — in terms of crisis management in the age of social networks:

One of a public relations officer’s worst nightmares is a lie that won’t go away, and Dalhousie University recently confronted a doozy: that it was experimenting on cuddly, doe-eyed puppies and kittens.

Normally in such situations, a university might take steps to release information that rebuts the charges, or it might make contact with the source of the allegations. But in this case the statements in question were online, contained within a group on the social-networking Web site Facebook, and accessible to anyone with an account. The group … was founded by someone who apparently was never even a student there.

Now, after an inital attempt to have the group removed from Facebook failed, the university is considering its legal options. “It’s a clear case of defamation,” said Charles Crosby, media relations manager at Dalhousie, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The case illustrates not only how a university confronts allegations, but the evolving ways in which damaging information is spreading from multiple, uncontrollable sources online.

This case raises some interesting issues about communicating in the social media sphere. Dalhousie, the InsideHigherEd story points out, “is highlighting highlighting efforts by other students to counter the original group. One, a Facebook group called “Stop People From Spreading Lies About Animal Cruelty At Dalhousie”, was started by a student who works in a laboratory at the university. Still, they’ve got an uphill battle: Only a little over 400 members have joined that group, which can’t match the visceral hook of a vulnerable beagle puppy displayed on the original’s page.”

When I received Guess’s email query to chat about crisis communications in the web 2.0 world, I wasn’t mcuh up to speed on the latest developments at Dalhousie, so we spoke in broader terms of how colleges and universities might handle such crises. My lone quote is rightly buried in the story (paragraph nine, if you’re looking). Guess quotes some better experts, such as Rae Goldsmith of CASE and Teresa Valerio Parrot of SimpsonScarborough, whose quote at the end of the story wraps it all up nicely.