Higher ed bloggers: show your power!

Doing a bit of blog-surfing this evening and followed a link to the Ad Age Power 150 ranking of the top marketing and media blogs.

power150.png

The Power 150 was created by Todd Andrlik, who developed a simple multimetric algorithm (later expanded) based on page rank, links, subscribers, etc., to provide PR and marketing people a ranking of our own. (Being a marketing exec himself, Todd knows how obsessed we marketing and PR types are with rankings.)

I posted something about the rankings more than a year ago and, being the good PR guy that I am, decided to engage in a little self-promotion. So I submitted this blog to the rankings. I didn’t think I’d crack the top 150 but figured I wouldn’t know unless I tried.

To no one’s surprise, this blog is not listed among the elite top 150. But now the Ad Age rankings include 658 blogs, and this one has found a respectful niche in the middle of the long tail. As of today, Higher Ed Marketing is at No. 340, right between HRmarketer.com and Drew B.’s take on tech PR. (Technically, these three blogs and six others are in a nine-way tie for 338th place, as we all have 44 points.)

What really surprises me, and bothers me, is that I appear to be the only higher ed blogger in the rankings! Or at least in the top 500. I didn’t bother to surf the remaining 158 blogs, because I figured if some of the best higher ed blogs weren’t in the top 500, they most likely weren’t in the list at all.

My fellow higher ed bloggers, this state of affairs is unconscionable. There are some terrific higher ed blogs that focus on marketing and PR. Many of them are listed on my blogroll. None of them are in the Ad Age rankings. Why?

There’s no excuse for higher ed bloggers to be absent from this list. So consider this an open challenge to the higher ed blogging community to get its collective act together and get on the Power 150 rankings.

It’s as simple as visiting this site, filling out an online form and clicking the submit button. Really, how much easier does it have to be?

Friends! Romans! Countrymen! Lend me your URLs!

I’m issuing a challenge to five veteran higher ed bloggers: Karine Joly, Andy Shaindlin, Robert French, Brad Ward and Kyle James (OK, Kyle’s not a veteran but he blogs like one). Here’s the challenge:

  1. Submit their blogs to the Power 150 rankings, and
  2. Challenge five other higher ed bloggers to do the same.

Let’s get off the sidelines and into the game! After all, we are in the marketing business, right? It shouldn’t take the guy who runs the 340th most influential marketing blog to remind us.

—————-
Now playing: Radiohead – 15 Step
via FoxyTunes

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.

—————-
Now playing: Los Campesinos! – Broken Heartbeats Sound Like Breakbeats
via FoxyTunes