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With mass adoption of smartphones and social media, traditional public relations, or PR 1.0, has evolved into PR 2.0. The traditional rules of PR for building reputation in key areas and conveying values have fallen to the way side, and a new paradigm has emerged. Instead of relying on media relations contacts as gatekeepers for the select few, authority and expertise is now flowing from a groundswell of faculty, staff, students and alumni conversations. The voice of authority has been replaced by the voice of many peer experts. Mass communications has been replaced with personalized messaging. Today’s public relations 2.0 marketers need to employ and harness personalized, story-centered communications to steer their institutional brand: Create Buzz on a Person-to-Person Level In contrast with the mass communications style of traditional public relations, PR 2.0 brand journalists create influence by starting, joining and shaping one-on-one conversations. They rely on storytelling rather than press releases. They make the faculty, students, alumni and the … Continue reading
Posted in: digital communication, higher education reputation building agency
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Communicating before, during and after a capital campaign requires the kind of symphonic thinking that author Daniel Pink explores in A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. Strategic visions and campaign priorities can quickly deconstruct into campaign inventory and itemization — losing all connection to a larger and more compelling story about why a college matters and to the invitation for how donors might connect their singular sense of purpose to something larger. It’s not a matter of longer versus shorter content, but a question of what Pink calls the “relationship between relationships.” Pink talks of the three types of people that thrive when asked to overlay little and big pictures. Boundary Crossers: comfortable with abstraction, they understand how a concept like regulation can inspire donors to support the training of future financial accountants who will police insider trading and osteopathic doctors equipped to ease an epidemic of diabetes. Inventors: able to project new … Continue reading
A familiar Chinese proverb instructs: “To know the road ahead, ask those coming back.” The current situation in higher education defies that enduring wisdom. Change arrived suddenly, with little regard for institutional history or might. In this respect, all colleges stand on relatively common ground. All college presidents, to a degree, have become new college presidents. It might be tempting in this moment of great uncertainty to think that successful colleges/presidents will be those that summon deeper reserves of managerial will or command with greater “corporate turnaround” intensity. More likely, how you and your college navigates this public health crisis and its aftermath will come down to something as fundamental — albeit elusive — as how effectively and artfully you communicate. Every college has crisis communications plans in place, and these plans have served everyone — especially students — well through the initial weeks and months of this crisis. We know that eventually, the urgency of this moment will give way … Continue reading
After the second world war, cold war ushered the era of government sponsored research. Government funding built and sustained higher education institutions. Workshops, conferences and journals ruled. Few media giants made and destroyed brands. As cold war came to an end, he world order changed. Governments reduced their research budgets. Hundreds of media channels were born. Internet was privatized and commercialized, Google came into the picture, social media flourished, and smart phones revolutionized communications. Academic capitalism funded by diverse corporate sources took on a new urgency. Power was distributed. As the world order changed, a new set of rules emerged to build and manage the reputation of colleges and universities. Becoming known as a college of consequence now takes talent, discipline, money and digital smarts. Born out of our experiences in serving higher education institutions, here are the seven best practices for improving college/university reputation and brand perceptions in the digital age: 1. Invest in Branding Leading universities invest in … Continue reading
Former Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight famously said to an audience of newspaper reporters, “All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.” Part joke, part poisoned-tipped joust, the heralded Knight voiced an ambivalence about writing and writers that lingers within many college marketing departments and their creative agencies. Entire blog columns and books have advanced the notion that “content is king.” That idea traces to an 1996 essay by Microsoft founder Bill Gates who envisioned an Internet buoyed by fresh, enlivening content. Google Ngram shows that phrase rocketing straight into conventional wisdom. One could argue the theory, but the eye test says otherwise — the vast seas of web content carry mostly ephemera. My first digital assignment — a 155-character meta description — began my re-education in a new hyper language, one that promised greater speed and potency. As newspaper writers, we learned a seven-second rule — the average … Continue reading
For an ad lover and athlete like myself, the olympics are like super bowl, but better — I get to experience great ads for two weeks straight. (The only difference is the advertisement restrictions that the International Olympic Committee for non-sponsors but this isn’t a blog about those rules. This is a blog about the awesomeness that has unfolded in the last few weeks.) I’ve shared my top three from the 2016 Rio Olympics: Bronze: Samsung Samsung took a bit of several national anthems — the parts that talk about unity — and mixed them into one song. Stuff like this gets me every time. Silver: Google Photos #relatable. #toorelatable. Gold: Nike – The Iron Nun Nike’s UNLIMITED ads knock it out of the park, and this one is my favorite. Their ability to combine together professional athletes with 9-minute-mile schmoes like me has forever earned my brand loyalty. I love the concept of breaking the fourth wall. And how the narrator and athletes interact. Also watch … Continue reading
Posted in: digital communication
With the holiday rush upon us and a new year quickly approaching, taking a moment to reflect on past victories and envisioning future endeavors is a welcome pause. Changing behavior, enacting new ideas and nurturing relationships should be at the forefront of all businesses this holiday season and into the new year. In fact, it is pretty much the story line for the redemption of infamous businessman Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. If you aren’t familiar with or need a refresher on the tale then here’s the lowdown. Scrooge was a shrewd businessman with a bad attitude who made his fortune managing a London accounting house. A full-fledged curmudgeon with quite a few nasty quirks like rudely hovering over stacks of coin, brow beating his sole employee Bob Cratchit, hoarding the office coal and frequently venturing on profanity laced tirades of “Bah!” and “Humbug!” To take it a a step further, he likened taking a vacation day … Continue reading
Posted in: digital communication, Digital Marketing
Most people draw a clear line between conventional marketing of products and services, and social marketing, which broadly defined applies marketing principles to change human behavior in order to improve health or benefit society. But what happens when you bring a social issue forward that almost nobody knows even exists — one that goes to the very heart of an American ideal as old as the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. True in countless respects, but not when it comes to gauging a child’s future academic success. Some children simply are born “gifted” or “talented” — and that wealth of talent spreads equally across all segments of the American population, regardless of race, religion, geography or family income. Researchers count about 3.4 million academically gifted American school children in grades K-12 who happen also to be poor. Here is where the story gets interesting. Year after year, grade after … Continue reading
Digital (i.e. web+search+social+mobile) has changed everything in the world of marketing. Digital is doing to marketing what quantum mechanics did to newtonian mechanics. Let me share five indicators of a tectonic shift taking place right under our feet: 1. Communications models are now based on themes, not on THE BIG IDEA. The evidence of this is all around us. Think of your favorite brand and see how it is speaking differently to various audiences in different channels. Interestingly, a richer multi-dimensional argument has replaced cartesian coordinates stemming from a single point. Google, with its smart semantic and natural language processing capabilities, is able to understand themes and is creating winners by serving up theme leaders via Google search. 2. Iterative experimentation is replacing getting it right the first time. Analytics/testing are being used to narrow winning messages and weed out losers. Marketers are increasingly relying on A/B testing to guide message refinement. Intuit-Write-Measure-Adapt loops are replacing the traditionally linear research-write-measure … Continue reading
Posted in: digital communication, Digital Marketing
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the need for judicious consideration of whether to embark on an app-building journey or build a mobile-friendly website. A couple of days later, Buzz Andersen at Tumblr said something in an interview that rings true for most of us not profoundly drunk on the Kool Aid of the so-called app economy: Really since the introduction of the iPhone, but particularly after the advent iPad, this concept of “apps as content” has gained a lot of currency, and now every media company in the world feels compelled to be in the business of developing native software as a distribution channel. Despite the press’s tendency to portray this trend as futuristic, I actually think of it as a bit retrograde—particularly since we’ve actually been evolving an incredibly sophisticated medium for content presentation and distribution for over 15 years now: the web. – Buzz Andersen, Director of Mobile Development at Tumblr Good lord, is “retrograde” ever … Continue reading
Posted in: digital communication, mobile, user experience, ux