Category: media relations

Putting on my PR hat

I’m heading to Baltimore to attend and present at How Colleges Can Obtain National and Regional Publicity, an annual conference put on by Keith Moore Associates. On Monday, I’ll be co-presenting with Dan Forbush, one of the pioneering PR-on-the-web guys, and I’m looking forward to it greatly. I’m also looking forward to sticking around for the entire conference. It’s been a while since I’ve been to a conference that focused mainly on PR. It’s also been a while since I’ve been to a conference where I wasn’t spending most of my time presenting or moderating.

This conference will include plenty of discussion about new media and media convergence. Dan and I will present on “New Media Promotion: Facebook, YouTube and Bogs,” and it should be an interesting discussion. As I mentioned, Dan is a veteran in online PR. He’s the founder of Profnet, a service that connects journalists with colleges and universities. He founded Profnet back in the early 1990s, when only a few journalists were online and they all had Compuserve accounts. Profnet later merged with PRNewswire, and Dan is now executive director of communications at Skidmore College.

I remember hearing Dan talk about the impact of the Internet at a CASE conference in Denver, circa 1994 (when the only web browser was Mosaic), and something he said back then has stuck with me and is still relevant all these years later. It went something like this:

We’re in the middle of a revolution, and in a revolution, kings lose their heads. Therefore, think like a peasant.

I don’t know if Dan remembers that quote but it made a big impression on me. The kings of marketing and promotion, with their institutional, top-down, command and control approach, are headed for the guillotine. The “peasants” are creating their own marketing, and the smarter of us will be working with them and thinking like them.

If you’re planning to attend the conference, give me a shout.

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Now playing: Los Campesinos! – Broken Heartbeats Sound Like Breakbeats
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del.icio.us as a PR measurement tool

The communications staff at Missouri University of Science and Technology (that’s where I work) recently created a del.icio.us account to keep track of our online news stories and blog posts. (We use Google Alerts and Technorati to find the stories in the first place, then we select the ones we think are the most important or most closely tied to our key messages to post on del.icio.us.)

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Using del.icio.us makes it easier for us to keep track of media coverage, but we’ve also discovered a side benefit: del.icio.us gives us yet another tool for measuring and analyzing our media relations activities in the sphere of online social media.

del.icio.us shows you which stories are saved by others, which is an indication of popularity. If no one else is saving your stories, then there’s a pretty good chance that either:

  1. the online world finds your stuff borng, or
  2. the stories aren’t getting to the right websites

A quick case study: Last week, when the earthquake hit the Midwest, we touted one of our quake experts (J. David Rogers, the Hasselmann Chair of Geological Engineering) to the media. He spoke to 15 different media outlets that Friday, most of them from the Midwest but including our state’s two largest daily newspapers and a couple of TV and news radio stations. But none of the stories were saved by other del.icio.us users except for a LiveScience.com story that quoted Rogers and appeared on Yahoo! News. Now we know that 10 other del.icio.us users also saved that story. We also can find out who those users are and what else they’re interested in.

Another recent news release — about some research on biodegradable plastics bags — got picked up by Popular Science magazine’s blog PopSci.com, and that also was saved by 10 other users. (Another popular sci/tech blog, Gizmodo, picked up the story, and although no other del.icio.us users have saved it, a quick look at the comments shows a high level of interest among Gizmodo readers.

So, the takeaways here, I guess, are:

  1. del.icio.us is a great, simple tool for posting and tracking your institution’s online news and blog mentions
  2. del.icio.us gives you an opportunity to see who else is interested in the story, which could possibly lead to new connections and conversations with alumni, researchers, other academics
  3. del.icio.us may give you insight into which online sites are most popular for niche readerships, which in turn may help you adjust your media relations efforts

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Now playing: The Raveonettes – Blush
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