Category: media relations

Web 2.0 on the agenda for CASE conference

As co-chair for next month’s CASE Annual Conference for Senior Communications and Marketing Professionals, I’m thrilled with the lineup of web 2.0 topics on the agenda.

Those of us who do PR and marketing for colleges and universities need to pay more attention to how web 2.0 is changing the nature of our jobs. So I’m glad to see CASE (that’s the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education) taking web 2.0 issues seriously.

My co-chair (Lynette Brown-Sow of the Community College of Philadelphia) and I have worked hard to recruit some of the top experts in online communication and marketing for this conference. The faculty for the three-day session (Sept. 13-15 in Philadelphia) include:

  • Karine Joly of the popular blog on marketing, PR and the web, collegewebeditor.com. Karine is also a web editor for a liberal arts school on the East Coast and writes for University Business magazine. She’s taken time out of her busy schedule to do a couple of sessions during the conference.
  • Joe Hice, associate vice president of marketing and public relations for the University of Florida. Joe and his staff at Florida are doing some creative things with marketing and the web, and he brings a corporate marketing background to the job. He’ll be co-presenting with Karine Joly on some web 2.0 stuff and also sharing some marketing lessons from the corporate world.
  • A couple of real live bloggers from the Philly area: Daniel Rubin, a Philadelphia Inquirer journalist-turned-blogger who writes about pop culture, politics, technology and anything with a Philadelphia connection in his Blinq blog, and Dave Ralis, another refugee from journalism who blogs about sports for Phillyburbs.com, contributes to the community blog PhillyFuture, and occasionally posts at his personal blog. I’ll be joining these two guys for a fun panel discussion about the morphing of blogging and journalism.

Those are just a few of the folks who will be presenting. We’ve also got great speakers on marketing (such as Larry Lauer of Texas Christian University), crisis communications and the Solutions for Our Future initiative to promote the value of higher education.

This promises to be a terrific conference, with lots of time for discussion, interaction and learning from each other as well as from our presenters. If you haven’t already signed up, you should do so now. Or if you have any questions about the conference or any of the sessions, feel free to email me: andrew DOT careaga AT gmail DOT com.

Welcome, CASE ‘Currents’ readers

If you have any thoughts about my article on new media in the latest issue of CASE Currents, feel free to share your thoughts here.

I haven’t gotten my copy of the magazine yet, but I am assured it’s on the way.

Also, once the issue is online, I will post excerpts from it here.

Culture clash: corporate vs. academic PR

PR consultant Dick Jones discusses several of the differences between corporate and academic public relations in this article in the latest PIOnet newsletter. While more college and university campuses look outside the world of academe for PR expertise, those from the corporate side who make the shift to academic PR sometimes struggle with the culture shock.

As Jones explains:

Some fail to appreciate the difference in governance. In the corporate world, the hierarchies typically are simpler. The PR director may take marching orders only from his boss (the vice president) and her boss (the president). And there may be only one message: that Company Name is the undisputed leader in (fill in applicable adjective) technology.

A college or university, however, is more like a feudal kingdom. The president is still the PR director’s chief “client,” but other, additional constituents have real, and sometimes conflicting, PR needs. Continuing Education’s messages and needs differ from those of the College of Liberal Arts, for example.

Jones makes some terrific points in this article. It’s worth a read.