Category: public relations

Q&A with SimpsonScarborough, and cultivating a blog culture

Teresa Valerio Parrot of the higher ed communications firm SimpsonScarborough asked me to talk about blogging for her company’s blog. I’m always more than happy to talk about blogging (or about myself), even when I don’t really know what I’m talking about (on either subject), so I was happy to oblige. Anyway, she posted the result. Enjoy.

Everything in the Q&A is accurate. But the intro part, where it says, “He maintains three blogs for the university as well as his own,” is not. I do not maintain three blogs for our university, and I apologize if I gave that impression. I’m fortunate to be a part of what — based on what I’ve seen in higher ed PR and marketing shops — I would call a fairly progressive blog culture. I’m one of five staff members who blog regularly on five different sites at UMR.

So, a shout out to my hard-working fellow UMR bloggers: Lance Feyh, Mindy Limback and Mary Helen Stoltz, who all co-blog with me on Visions; and John Kean, who maintains our sports blog and who has somehow managed to avoid posting an easily Googleable bio. Someone should interview all of you about all the good work you do. Maybe I should do it. Sound like fun?

We maintain three other blogs: Experience This! (Lance Feyh’s main domain); our name change conversations blog (my project); and eConnection, our internal newsletter, which is making a monumental transition from email newsletter to blog over the summer. Working behind the scenes to make things happen are Cheryl McKay, Mark Remer and Kevin Tharp, who constitute our office of electronic marketing communications.

While I’m confident that our staff is fairly progressive in the use of blogs and blogging as far as colleges or universities go, we could still be doing a lot more than we are (as I mentioned the other day). One thing about being a part of a team that embraces the changes online communications has wrought is that they’re ready to launch into new projects and explore new ideas. More often than not, it seems, I’m the one dragging the feet.

So, how did we cultivate this blog culture? It sort of sprung up. It began with Visions, which began as an electronic newsletter about UMR research that we put together and emailed quarterly to alumni and other readers. The problem with a quarterly newsletter sent out electronically is that a few days or a week after it hits the inbox, most people forget the newsletter exists, so when they receive the next issue some 11 weeks later, it’s not fresh in their minds. We wanted to be fresh in their minds — at least in the minds of those who would actually care. So we switched to a blog format. This gave us more freedom to write less and more frequently about more things. It seemed to work, and it really wasn’t much additional work. In fact, it was kind of fun to blog. We could experiment with less constrained, non-traditional (read: non-press release) writing styles.

Then John Kean worked with EMarComm to convert his sports website into a blog. A few months after our chancellor started talking about a name change for our university, we launched the name change conversations blog to encourage discussion about the merits of that proposal. (Now we’re using that blog to share information as we move from one name to another by Jan. 1.) This past spring, we launched Experience This! to promote our student design team work, and then this summer we switched to a blog for our internal newsletter. This latest project has been perhaps the most challenging, because we’re asking our internal audience of about 1,000 faculty and staff members to move into a blogging culture with us. But we’re committed to moving forward with this. There’s no turning back now. Once you’ve fallen down the rabbit hole, there’s no climbing out. Who knows? Maybe one day we won’t even do news releases. Maybe we’ll just blog our news for all to read.

Participatory PR

Back in my college days, when I was learning about how to be a news reporter, I became interested in the notion of participatory journalism. Of course, back then, video display terminals (VDTs) were slowly replacing IBM Selectrics in newsrooms across America, the term referred to journalists like George Plimpton, who would play a role — for Plimpton, it was as a quarterback for the Detroit Lions — and then describe the experience for readers, listeners or viewers. (I was more interested in the participatory style of renowned gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, but that’s a topic best left alone for the moment.)

These days, participatory journalism refers to the readers, listeners or viewers actually participating in the process of gathering and reporting the news.

Now, Micro Persuasion blogger Steve Rubel in introducing another concept: participatory public relations. According to Rubel, it’s a brand of PR in which the flack (and I use that term as a term of endearment, for I am one) moves away from the time-honored practice of “pitching” a story idea to a media outlet to one of contributing and sharing — e.g., participating — in online social networks.

Also according to Rubel, PR agencies aren’t quite ready to give up the pitch for participation. “Many in PR seem to be treating Web 2.0 as simply an extension of the traditional media – another venue for buzz. They are pumping thousands of email pitches into the community every day.”

I just wrapped up an email interview with a fellow blogger who asked me about the state of readiness among higher ed PR flacks to enter into this world of participatory journalism. I’d say we aren’t much further along than our corporate counterparts. At UMR, we’ve been using blogs (here, here and here) to connect with some of our audiences, and to talk about some big changes on campus. Difficult as it has been for some of us (read: me mainly), we’ve dropped our “press release voice” when we blog, opting for more authentic, real tones in our writing — stepping out from behind the curtain, as Rubel suggests all good PR practitioners do. We’ve even posted some video on YouTube, and some staffers in our communications department share feeds from our blogs on their Facebook pages. But we’ve got a long way to go before we achieve Rubel’s vision of participatory PR.