Advertising Age Reacts to Web 2.0

Two articles in Advertising Age today aren’t anything new to most of us but it’s interesting to see their writers’ take on the news and branding angles of the Virginia Tech tragedy.

Big Media Blunted by Blacksburg Tragedy

Will No Longer Be Able to Control Major News Events as Victims’ Own Images, Words Tell Story

Whether it sparks a meaningful debate on issues such as guns or mental health, one thing is certain about the Virginia Tech massacre: It will go down as our first Web 2.0 national nightmare.

News Flash: Anything This Graphic Should Never Have A Logo by Simon Dumenco is downright bitter and he makes a good case. His conclusion:

We’ve come to the point at which murderous psychopaths and TV news executives are of the same mind when it comes to human tragedy: It’s a branding opportunity.

Traditional media is catching up with 2.0.

The reaction is fear and anger.

Emergency Procedures Plan in Wake of Virginia Tech

Hundreds of other colleges are doing it and so are we.

We’re updating our emergency procedures plan in the traumatic wake of Virginia Tech. Our plan has been updated fairly regularly, but, I discovered, not regularly enough.

I was reading our document and making a few notes when I came to my responsibilities as a member of the emergency response team. One sentence stopped me dead:

“Public Relations Director will write news release and send to the media.”

This action might just as well be 200 years old. That’s how outdated and worthless it is.

The VT tragedy was, among other things, a case study in the way communications work today. Students had cell phones aimed at the building as the shots were bring fired.

Now, I haven’t checked facts but it’s figuratively true that minutes after Cho Seung-hui killed 32 students, the videos were available internationally.

Bloggers were posting news and thoughts almost immediately. Members of the traditional media were calling bloggers for information!

We can talk among ourselves about how communications have changed, but to watch it on our “home turf” hour-by-hour as it unfolds is much more visceral.

“PR Director will write news release. . . .” The news release might just as well be a report for a history book or Wikipedia. Waiting for approval from a president in the midst of a crisis would waste valuable minutes.

Yes, in a crisis today, every minute is an eternity as hundreds of cell phones, digital cameras, camcorders and bloggers post their information, to say nothing of the thousands of text messages flying around.

Much of that information is going to be wrong.

In fact, the only information that’s going to be accurate is what comes from us as we get it from our police and, possibly, our buildings and grounds director.

Press release? No, the PR Director needs to be working intimately with the president, police chief and IT director to add accurate information to the website in a clear, concise manner the moment it’s available.

(VT communicators and web folks, by the way, did a commendable job throughout the whole ordeal).

I’ve been through a couple campus crises over the years. Information flowing upward and horizontally faces a turbulent, subjective ride. To sift through the information and pull relevant, accurate information is not easy.

But it must be done almost instantly.

With young people, the cell phone has become a really useful sixth finger. It records still shots, video, text, and oh yes, transmits the human voice.

Hopefully none of our campuses will experience a tragedy of any kind. But what hit home with VT is that tragedy can strike, anywhere, anytime.

Information, misinformation and opinions will appear and be available to the global community.

As PR people, we cannot control the flow of information, but we can work to manage accurate information.

We have a meeting about our emergency procedures plan next week. I am going to say, “In the event of an emergency, the PR Director will not write a news release.”

* * *

I would love to have a discussion on this to see what others are doing or get thoughts and ideas.

 

Communication Thoughts on the Virginia Tech Massacre

Mansfield University is a small, rural, liberal arts campus in north central Pennsylvania. But our day was interrupted yesterday with requests from media for reactions. Today, more media requests and a department chair meeting that was filled with thoughts and concerns about our own campus. The Virginia Tech massacre made it sickeningly clear that something like this can happen anywhere, anytime.

In collegewebeditor’s latest post, Karine Joly shares thoughts from Joe Hice, AVP of marketing and PR at the University of Florida that are thought-provoking.

Every higher ed administrator in the country is trying to figure out how to get immediate messages to an entire campus in an emergency like this.

When Mansfield University experienced the anthrax scare in Feb. 2006 involving a musician from New York City, the NYC mayor held a press conference at 3 p.m. Even though we had sent an email out to all students before the press conference, a good number of them found out from their parents who saw the news on CNN, and called students on their cells.

Two sides of communication become very clear in the VT massacre. First, in a crisis like this, assessments and decisions must be made, followed by a call to action. I’m just not sure it can be done, no matter how many forms of communication we have.

Twitter has been mentioned as a possibility, but is not widespread at this point. And remember, if we were all having this discussion a year ago, Twitter was not even in the picture.

And I’ll guarantee, a year from now there will be a new “Twitter.”

Secondly, as Joe points, the citizen journalist has arrived. The hard rules of journalism and communication have become fluid and will continue to be.

In this case, cell phone videos are as common and as legitimate as the CNN footage. The sometimes grainy, grayish, jerky, unedited footage has an immediacy — and because of that a sense of honesty — that will forever compete with professional news.

I started my career as a newspaper reporter, as a lot of us did. In a crisis like this, competition for information and angles is fierce, even desperate. Is there a difference between interviewing the “man on the street” and the blogger?

Until a few years ago, hours were important to gather information and meet one’s deadline. Today, seconds are crucial. If you’re reporter under this kind of pressure, you’re going to find the people on the scene, the bloggers. You’ll find the people with seemingly inside information, the blogger. You’ll find the man on the street with an opinion, the blogger.

Two sides of communication. There are no fast answers anymore. We adapt in little steps as we struggle to keep up with the technology that continues to change the rules as it happens.

We’ll be talking about this for a long time.

More Directions

I want share some discoveries, thoughts and seek some feedback today. Karine Joly of collegewebeditor has a couple new and important articles. In Should higher ed institutions use social working websites, she interviews Facebook expert Fred Stutzman who explores the growing importance — and pitfalls — of sites like myspace and facebook in the marketing and recruiting process.

Her article 5 rules to market your university to prospective students using Facebook, MySpace and other social networking websites hit home to me as did invade a student’s space. She was a work study student of mine and had agreed that we could communicate on facebook. A couple weeks later she very politely suggested we go back to email, adding that “I prefer it,” so I knew that I was very out-of-place on her friend list.

Read the articles. They’re informative and helpful.

Technorati has acquired a company called Personal Bee. Dave Sifry says “the Bee platform will help expand Technorati’s Conversational Marketing System, our product that helps brands to engage their audience and enter the global conversation. . . “

Sifry describes the site as “a media collection platform that enables the each of us to curate and publish our own personal sites around topics, issues, or anything else we choose. It lets anyone (that means you) create and update collections of interesting citizen and mainstream media, publish them to a personal or public page, and start a following. . . .

“It’s all about democratizing the media. Social media has always been social for the people creating it, and now the people consuming it will get to join the fun. Anyone can be a publisher without having to write a blog, create a video, or anything else. All of us, the people formerly known as the audience, can create and publish collections of many forms of media, and attract our own audience if we choose.”

I checked out the site and it has large potential for folks in marketing and PR. For example, it looks like I could create a page and post Karine’s article, Dave’s article, the latest from Director Tom or even Lonely Girl 15. So, if I understand Personal Bee, as a consumer of these articles, I can collect them and publish them pretty much as my own e-newspaper so you have everything on one site instead of publishing them as links in this blog.

So Dave, or Ted Shelton, founder of Personal Bee, correct me if I’m wrong. This is one of those sites that feels exciting if used right. I’d like others to take a look at it and send in your comments, thoughts and ideas.

The key here is that creators and consumers can become publishers and grow their own audience.

Cool.

Bob Johnson and Market Clutter

I subscribed to Bob Johnson’s blog a couple months ago but didn’t pay much attention to it until a few days ago when a new posting showed up.

I started to skim his latest article on marketing clutter. One hour and 10 hyperlinks later, my brain was full. What I like about Bob’s blog and newsletter is that he focuses on higher education but doesn’t limit himself. He steps outside and looks at what marketing folks in other fields are doing.

For years (hmm, decades) higher education marketing and advertising have been pretty stale. Conservative administrations and copying each other pretty much guarantees dullness.

My colleagues and I have joked for years that all our classroom shots in our admissions pieces and ads are interchangeable. I had a classic example a few years ago when our freelance photographer sent photos from his latest shoot. One shot of a female music student at a piano was so atmospheric and lovely that I had it framed. It hung on our office wall for two years before a music professor visiting the PR office looked at it and said, “That wasn’t taken at Mansfield.”

I asked how he knew. “Because the piano is a Steinway. We use Baldwins.”

I don’t remember if we ever used the photo in a viewbook or an ad, but then, it really doesn’t matter, does it?

I digress. Bob has two postings on market clutter. This is from his April 9 post:

The need for very careful targeting of usually scarce dollars is even more important now than ever before. The main tenet of direct marketing is alive and well: the better you can profile your audiences (defined as those most likely to enroll, not who you wish might enroll in a perfect world), the more successful your marketing efforts are likely to be.

This holds true for traditional students, for adults students, for any type of student you want to earn your degree.

Good insights and great links.

And market clutter? As people we all suffer from it. As professionals we’re all guilty of it.

State of the Live Web is Eye Opener

Technorati founder Dave Sifry just issued his report The State of the Live Web and it blew me away.

Technorati is now tracking more than 70 million blogs. About 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day. That is, as Dave  points out, about 1.4 blogs created every second.

There are about 1.5 million postings per day, or about 17 posts per second. In October 2006, Technorati was tracking about 1.3 million postings per day, or about 15 posts per second.

Okay, lots of people are creating and maintaining blogs. Are other people reading them?

Possibly most significant for us in marketing, Dave says, “. . . Blogs continue to become more and more viable news and information outlets. For instance, information not shown in our data but revealed in our own user testing in Q1 2007 indicates that the audience is less and less likely to distinguish a blog from, say, nytimes.com — for a growing base of users, these are all sites for news, information, entertainment, gossip, etc. and not a “blog” or a “MSM site”.’ (MSM =acronym Mainstream Media).

He makes an excellent point here. While we all need titles and labels, we also must need to remember that when the label is stripped away, each medium is simply a vehicle for communication — the new media, what Dave calls Live Web. If folks in higher ed marketing aren’t using blogs, podcasts, vidcasts, etc. it will be increasingly to hard to catch up and be competitive.

There much more useful and surprising information in Dave’s report, such as the fact that use of tagged media is growing wildly, creating yet another revolution in how we seek, send and share information.

I’m going back to read it again.

Inauguration Patch

It’s been a crazy week with the inauguration of our new Mansfield University president, Maravene Loeschke. It was held at 4 p.m. Friday March 30. (Yes, we had rain or snow day planned. One never knows in these Appalachian foothills).

However, the day was sunny and in the 60s. If you’ve ever been through an inauguration you know that it involves numerous committees, months of planning and the work of dozens of people for what is essentially a 90-minute show. It’s an important ceremony for the campus and the community.

It’s also important to other people–faculty, staff, students, presidents from other universities, trustees, congressmen, the chancellor of our state system of higher education, and donors.

So there’s a lot of pressure to do it right. Period.

The last thing you want if you’re a president about to be inaugurated is to have your main speaker, James Fisher, a man of national prominence in higher education, to become sick and unable to deliver his address. He fell ill in the afternoon and a half hour before the ceremony it was certain that he could not read his address.

There are several ways to handle the problem. Dr. Loeschke handled it in the best way possible. She asked George Pruitt, president of Thomas Edison State College in New Jersey, and present as a guest, to fill in. They obtained the speaker’s script, went through some names to make sure they were pronounced correctly and with 10 minutes to go, went through the fine points of seating, the program etc.

When the guest was introduced, the person introducing told the audience that unfortunately the Dr. Fisher took ill and Dr. Pruitt, would be reading Fisher’s script.

The whole thing went flawlessly. Dr. Pruitt was excellent. The audience, of course, was fine with the change.

It helps here to understand that Dr. Loeschke spent much of her career as a professional actress, as well as teaching acting and serving in many administrative posts. As an actress, she’s used to the unexpected. Her experience in improv certainly prepared her for an unexpected turn like this.

Others might have handled it differently. Finding a substitute and being honest was, in my mind, the best possible solution.