news – Page 3 – Andrew Careaga

5 proven, mind-blowing ways to get people to read your blog

If 20th century headlines were rewritten to get more clicks (xkcd). Click (heh) to see original.

Today’s Friday Five is an experiment in blogging, social media and click-baiting. And if you read only this opening paragraph, you’ve taken part.

I hope you’ll read on, though. Because it gets better.

See that headline up there? That’s a departure from the usual Friday Five headline style I’ve been using on this blog since Friday Five became a thing. The usual Friday Five headline would begin with “Friday Five” and (usually) all fit on a single line. It would look something like this:

Friday Five: Draw readers to your blog

But for the sake of this experiment, I’ve tweaked the formula. I designed the headline for this post in a manner that has become the standard for many news-ish websites these days.

(Before I continue, I should mention that earlier this week, Georgy Cohen wrote a terrific post about the elements of headline style for this brave new online world. Unlike a lot of the click-baitish stuff that passes for news these days, Georgy’s post — We Blog About Headlines. What Comes Next Will Amaze You. — is worthwhile reading. You should check it out. She eloquently wove together many of the same thoughts I’ve been having about the creation of sharable, clickable headlines.)

Since Georgy has explored this topic already (as have many many others), it’s not like I’m breaking new ground here. (But what’s new? As this recent New Yorker piece points out, even Aristotle pondered what would make an idea go viral.) But it’s a topic worth revisiting, because the click-bait headline is quickly becoming a mainstay in the news industry, where clicks on headlines (or clever variations in social media) translate into advertising dollars.

Those of us in higher ed marketing may not be too worried about generating revenue, but we could learn a lesson or two from the click-bait artists if we want to do a better job of sharing our content and spreading our message. We just have to be careful how we do it. As Georgy points out in her post, a headline “has a lot of responsibilities.” We need to think carefully about how we use them.

So, as promised, here are five proven, mind-blowing ways to get people to read your blog — or at least click on your headline:

1. Over-promise

Click-baity headines tend to over-promise and under-deliver. They promise to blow our minds with new knowledge or insights, or let us in on some amazing secret. The headline for this post is probably no exception.

I wouldn’t recommend over-promising in any of your headines.

2. Include numbers

People love numbers in headlines, They love to click on headlines about “7 ways to…” or “The 12 best …” or “11 essential ingredients…” and so on. The Onion knows this.

The number strategy would work well for higher ed marketing. It’s worked well for us when we’ve used it on occasion. Just don’t over-promise (see No. 1, above).

3. Ask an absurd question

The answer to which is almost always “No.” This is known as Betteridge’s Law.

If the answer to your absurd question is “No,” you might reconsider re-writing your headline.

4. Explain something

This is the first rule of writing sticky headlines, according to this profanity-laced post (you have been warned). Sharing the “how” or the “why” of something may pique a reader’s curiosity. Instead of explaining the “what” of a story in your headline, think about the “how” or the “why.”

Here’s an example of how this might work:

From today’s New York Times comes this straightforward sports headline: Nadal Beats Federer to Advance to Final in Australia.

That tells you all you need to know, right? But it gives you no incentive to click.

How about these headlines instead:

How Nadal Beat Federer to Advance to Final

Why Federer Fell to Nadal in Australian Open

Maybe a slight twist in the headline would lead to more clicks.

5. Modify it

Adding modifiers to headlines seems to be a common approach, too. Say you have a number to include in your headline. Say you think 5 ways to get people to read your blog is a pretty good, sticky headline. But what if you added a couple of adjectives into the mix? Would that improve things?

For this experiment, the result was:

5 proven, mind-blowing ways to get people to read your blog

Better? Maybe. Baitier? Definitely.

6. Bonus, mind-blowing secret!

Are you ready for the truly mind-blowing secret? Brace yourselves.

None of this is new!

That’s right. All of these techniques were in use years before the arrival of the Internet, Upworthy or Twitter. Years ago, in the pre-Internet era, I heard Don Ranly, a retired journalism professor from my alma mater, talk about “refrigerator journalism” many years ago to refer to how-to stories, lists and other easy-to-read articles you’d want to cut out of a publication to post to your refrigerator.

This approach to writing headlines is alive and well on newsstands today.

Take a look at Woman’s World, Cosmo, Self or any of the other magazines in the checkout line at your local grocery store or Walmart, and you’ll find plenty of examples.

So, that’s it. Those are the mind-blowing ways to get people to read your blog. Maybe.

Media relations in a disintermediated world

As the lead of any news story should, the opening paragraph of The State of the News Media 2013, from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, encapsulates everything a skimmer of the news needs to know about the subject:

In 2012, a continued erosion of news reporting resources converged with growing opportunities for those in politics, government agencies, companies and others to take their messages directly to the public.

This is not exactly breaking news. The news media are in a tough spot and have been for years.

Their predicament also puts organizations that have relied on media coverage for much of their visibility — like colleges and universities — in a similar pickle.

Higher education has never been a big news topic. K-12 and higher education combined made up just 1.4 percent percent of national media coverage, according to a 2009 report, and I doubt things have improved much since.

Given such a low level of media coverage, it may become even more difficult to justify media relations activities in higher education. Yet it’s been my experience that the demand for media coverage of our higher ed institutions (from administrators, alumni, trustees, etc.) has not decreased, even though our efforts to tell our own stories directly to our audiences has increased.

So how should higher ed communicators adapt to this environment of fewer opportunities for media coverage coupled with no lower demand for such coverage from our audiences and those we report to?

If the news media’s ability to cover our organizations is on the wane, and the news hole for education is already incredibly small, then what level of resources should we devote to our media relations efforts?

The disintermediated world

I’ve written here before on the subject of disintermediation in the news business. “Disintermediation” is a big, awkward, ugly word that, in economic jargon, refers to the removal of intermediaries in the supply chain for delivering goods and services. To borrow language from the factory outlet store marketers, disintermediation means, “We eliminate the middleman.”

We’ve seen disintermediation disrupt entire industries, thanks to the Internet. (When is the last time you went to a travel agent to plan a trip? You can just log on to Travelocity or Priceline and find the best rates yourself.) The same sort of disruption is happening in the news business, and it heightens the need for college and university PR organizations to think differently about how we deliver the news.

We need to deliver their messages to their audiences through other avenues. It’s critical that higher ed PR, marketing and branding staff think like a media organization — a publisher of news content — to get their messages out. (We’re already doing this, to some extent. Visit most any higher ed website and you’ll find some news or feature story about some slice of campus life.)

Media coverage matters

Yet for many of our audiences, getting the news about our institutions directly from the source doesn’t carry the same weight as seeing positive news coverage of our institutions in mainstream media outlets. Here are a couple of reasons why:

Third-party validation. It’s one thing to say, “Look what great things our organization is doing!” It’s quite another to have some established authority say, “Look what great things this organization is doing!” That’s what positive media coverage of our institutions helps with. So, yes, it’s important to deliver the news directly to our audiences. But it’s tough to beat a reputable third-party endorsement of what you’re saying. The idea goes back at least as far as the Old Testament Book of Proverbs : Let someone else praise you, and not your own mouth; an outsider, and not your own lips. – Proverbs 27:2. Even wise old Solomon knew the value of third-party validation.
Rankings. Yes, rankings. People love to compare their affiliated institutions with others. And media organizations know this. That’s why the higher ed rankings game has exploded in recent years. Everyone from the granddaddy of the ratings game (U.S. News & World Report) to President Obama has gotten in to the ranking game. They may or may not be helpful to prospective students looking for a good fit, and they may be nothing more than “pageantry” and nonsense to some observers. But many audiences take them seriously. It’s another form of third-party validation. For better or for worse, media relations efforts don’t have much direct influence with where an institution may fall in the rankings. But there is a theory that PR efforts, like sharing an institution’s media placements with leaders of other institutions in order to influence those leaders’ vote, can help an institution in the rating game.

Opportunity and the new media mix

So, where does this leave today’s higher ed PR/media relations professional? To go back to that report on The State of the News Media, it leaves us in the land of opportunity.

We have more opportunity to share our story than ever before. Here’s why:

Free your stories on the web. It’s trite to say that our websites are the front doors to our institutions. But there’s truth to that saying. By thinking like a media organization, we can publish our news before we share them with the news media (or at least at the same time). We can also do the once-unthinkable: Share stories created for other media (such as a story written for the alumni magazine) on our websites. Maybe not every story that goes into your alumni magazine is appropriate for sharing on your website. But I bet many are. So why not reuse and repurpose that content for other audiences? As Georgy Cohen put it in this nearly two-year-old (but still relevant) post, Reinventing News on Your University Website: “[W]e need to start finding ways to own our stories. We don’t need to rely on the media. They should be an amplifier, but not our main conduit for communications. “
Use social media to amplify your news. As Georgy said, the news media can be an amplifier. So can social media. Judiciously share your news via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or other social platforms so that your fans and followers can share with their networks. Quoting Georgy again (dang, that woman’s good!), “News content is our ambassador. A news story may not be our most visited page, but it may be our most well-traveled.” Just don’t be an automaton in your social media sharing. Don’t throw every news release out there in an RSS feed. Be human about it. Sharing stories via social media is especially important if you want to reach younger audiences. According to a 2012 study, one-third of people under 30 get their news from social networks.
Lose the “news” view. Sometimes we get too hung up on our traditional perspective of news. In the digital world, we can loosen up a bit. Get your students and alumni involved with your social media presence through contests (as we did over the summer with an Instagram contest in partnership with our campus bookstore) or through special hashtags for events like commencement or move-in weekend. Then collect and share that information in various ways (see item 7, below).
Share that third-party coverage. It’s OK to share the relevant positive media coverage your institution receives from mainstream media. In fact, that might be the best content to share with some audiences. Include in alumni newsletters, notes to trustees, on social media and anywhere else where you think it would matter. This includes those rankings (assuming you can say something good about your institution’s spot) or third-party stories about your institution’s position in the rankings. (A year ago, we got good play in social media and elsewhere by sharing an ABCNews story about 12 Colleges Whose Payoff In Pay Beats Harvard’s. But again, be judicious with your sharing. Don’t overdo it.
Share, share, share. I know I just advised you to not overshare information. But sometimes we’re guilty of the opposite sin: We undershare information, assuming people who should know about our news coverage actually do know. One audience that often gets overlooked is the internal audience of students, faculty, staff and administrators. They need to be in the know of all the great news coverage your efforts are yielding. They, too, can be great ambassadors of your stories. These individuals already have a strong connection, and they are able to reach audiences who might otherwise ignore your stories. So work a reporting mechanism into your media relations plan to ensure internal audiences know what’s being covered and what’s being discussed. This can work both formally (daily reports of news coverage) or informally (sending an email of thanks to a student or professor who worked with you on a press release that got great media coverage, and cc’ing upper-level administrators and that person’s boss).
Think differently about third-party validation. In the online world, your networks contain important influencers. Students, alumni, faculty, other campus staff, administrators — they all have networks that extend beyond your official online presence. Think of them as third-party validators of your news. Anytime they share your content, they are adding value to it within their social networks. They provide credibility that an institutional account might not bring. At Missouri S&T, we’re fortunate to have a chancellor who is very active on Twitter (@SandTChancellor) and a CIO who is active on Twitter (@ghsmith76) and also blogs about technology in higher education. Their networks add value and validation to your institution’s stories.
Gather and curate. Social media tools such as Storify make it easy to pull together all types of digital content. Use them to your advantage. Create an account (here’s ours) and use it as a digital depository. You can then share the information on your website, via social media or electronic newsletters, or elsewhere.

Media-morphosis

What’s the takeaway from all of this?

It’s that media relations has morphed. PR professionals at colleges and universities are no longer just pitchmen and pitchwomen to the press (if they ever were). Nowadays, we need to cover our institutions as a reporter might — seeing them as communities where interesting stuff is happening all the time — and then creating and telling those stories about our institutions to our various audiences. Those audiences include the traditional media outlets we’ve always served as well as newer audiences, those that are inside or closely connected to our institutions, and those social-media influentials who can share the stories even farther than they would otherwise go.

At the same time, media relations pros need to be social media-savvy, able and willing to monitor social media for mentions of their institutions. We need to be ready to share those mentions that could cast their college or university in a positive light. We also need to take on the role of curator, to collect and share stories — those we create and those covered by third parties — with our audiences.

What did I miss?

P.S. – If you enjoyed this post, I suggest you also check out a virtual roundtable discussion titled The Future of Public Relations in Higher Ed, moderated and curated by (who else?) Georgy Cohen and featuring me and three very savvy PR/digital pros: @tracymueller, @loripa and @bonnerj. Even though that post is two years old, much of what we discussed then is still relevant today.

Photo: Newspaper sunny yellow by Jon S/NS Newsflash via Flickr.

A new ranking for faculty-media interaction

My 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.

How journalist-friendly is your #highered website?

news Media relations and PR in higher education continues to evolve. The old days of pitching story ideas or blindly sending out news releases is giving way to a different model — one that relies more on the Internet to connect us to our audiences.

We’re trying to optimize our websites to make them easier for journalists to find and easier for Google to index. We’re sharing more news with our audiences via social media. We’re putting our content in more media vessels than ever before, re-purposing print stories for the web and web for print, posting video and audio online, encouraging interaction through blogs and social. More and more, we are relying on the Internet to help get our news and our stories to our audiences.

That audience includes journalists, and many of them rely on the Internet to conduct research about the stories they’re working on. If we’re doing a good job getting of making our institutions visible in the online world of search and social, then chances are a journalist will end up on our .edu site in search for background information, or perhaps a source for an interview.

So, how well do our websites communicate the type of information journalists are looking for?

To my knowledge, no comprehensive study of .edu pages has tried to answer that question. But PR on Websites, a recent study by Nielsen Norman Group, does look at corporate, government and non-profit sites, and much of the information from that study translates well to the higher ed sector.

The free, 287-page report 287-page report offers more than 100 design recommendations for improving the design of PR areas of corporate websites, as well as helpful screenshots, discussions and quotes from journalists who took part in this comprehensive usability study. This is the third edition of this report, but it’s the first one I’ve read, and its expanded list of tips — 103 this time, as opposed to 32 from the first edition — provides a wealth of takeaways that should benefit anyone interested in making their websites friendlier to journalists.

Despite the report’s length, it’s an easy read — as you would expect of any report created by usability guru Jakob Nielsen and his company — so if you do no more than skim the executive summary (pages 3 through 7), you’ll glean some useful information.

“Ultimately,” write report authors Kara Pernice, Hoa Loranger and Nielsen, “PR-related usability comes down to a simple question: Why spend a fortune on outbound PR (trying to pitch journalists) when you neglect simple steps to increase the effectiveness of inbound PR (satisfying journalists who visit your website)?”

Some takeaways for higher ed PR folks and web designers:

Ditch the marketing talk

This should be a no-brainer for anyone with a PR background, but it’s worth emphasizing up front. “Journalists are not gullible,” the report notes, “and they don’t take a company’s own word as truth. Indeed, almost all journalists said that press releases were useful only to find out how a company is trying to position itself.” I would like to think that those of us in higher education are less buzzwordy than PR folks in, say, the tech sector. But I’ve seen my share of marketing dreck in higher ed PR pieces. (Heck, I’ve had to put my fair share of said dreck in press releases.)

The Nielsen folks further advise: “[B]asic information must be easy to find and should be cleansed of the marketese and excessive verbiage that smother the facts on many sites. Journalists don’t have time to … sift factual wheat from marketing chaff.”

How much of your PR content is actual wheat and how much is chaff? Better to do the sifting before you put your content on the web.

Facts, not fluff

Related to the point above, journalists want access to facts about our organizations.

In general, the more interesting facts you present about your company, products,and executives, the better for PR. Journalists look for facts they can use in their stories. Our study participants were much more excited about genuine information than about marketing claims, which they immediately discarded.

How easy is it for journalists to access interesting facts about your school?

Making contact

Make it easy for journalists to contact the people they need to contact for their stories. Doing so “can set you apart” from the competition.

Specifically, the study says journalists want to be able to easily find this information from our websites:

Press: Name, telephone number, and e-mail address
Company overview: What the company does, its purpose
Products and services: Information at the right level of detail
Financials: Trends (e.g., current and yearly earnings)
Management: Names, images, and bios of high-level executives
Philanthropic involvement: Information on social and environmental responsibility or other goodwill.
Spin: How the company wants to be perceived, its angle on a story
Images: Downloadable, high-resolution images of important people, products, services, and events
General facts: The basics of the company (e.g., CEO, headquarters, number of employees, year established)
People: Names and contact information for people who can be interviewed

We should assume they’re looking for the same from us.

Get discovered

Above all, make sure that your institution can easily be found via a Google search. “When looking for information and getting to the company’s website, the majority of the participants used Google and typed the company name in the search bar.” Journalists also relied on Google to get contact information. As one is quoted as saying in the study, “I use Google a lot to get people’s e-mail and phone number. Google is a time-saver.”

* * *

Higher ed websites try to serve a multitude of audiences, which makes focusing on a single one (like journalists) tough. But many of the same features journalists are looking for are useful to other audiences, too. The point this underscores for me is an idea that I’ve made before in this space: the colleges and universities need to start thinking like a media organization.

The Moody’s forecast: A time for bold action

Moody’s Investors Service gave U.S. higher education a failing grade in finance on Wednesday, presenting a negative outlook for the entire sector, with the exception of only the most elite private and public institutions.

The reason, according to The New York Times, is that “even the best colleges and universities faced diminished prospects for revenue growth, given mounting public pressure to keep tuition down, a weak economy and the prospect that a penny-pinching Congress could cut financing for research grants and student aid.”

“The U.S. higher education sector had hit a critical juncture in the evolution of its business model,” wrote Eva Bogarty, the report’s author. “Most universities will have to lower their cost structures to achieve long-term financial sustainability and to fund future initiatives.”

How can we turn around this pessimism? Bogarty writes:

The sector will need to adjust to the prospect of muted revenue growth. Strong governance and management leadership will be needed by most universities as they navigate through this period of intensified change and challenge.

The Times translates that as “bolder actions by university leaders to reduce costs and increase operational efficiency.”

“What’s new here is not the individual pieces,” a former college CFO told Inside Higher Ed. “What’s new is that in a collective way, the model that we in higher education have been employing since the 1960s is really being called into question by external factors. And it’s that collectiveness that creates a new sense of urgency.”

Sounds like the time is ripe for higher education to take bold action.

It’s our move.