The Power of the Old Media

My friend Dick Jones of Dick Jones Communications was instrumental in getting Mansfield University international publicity on our first year of sprint football. I asked him if he would adapt a query he developed to be used as a guest blog here. A lot of pros in the business have noted the decline in the print industry. Dick gives a behind-the-scenes explanation of why print is still important.

Any college or university that isn’t using Web 2.0 to its fullest is falling behind. We all know that. Colleges need to be rssing, digging, tweeting, blogging, social networking, virtual worlding, podcasting, flickering, Youtubing, and wikiing. (My apologies for creating new and possibly horrific verbs).

But they also need to continue to pay attention to the stodgy old traditional news media. There follows a tale:

Mansfield University, a public institution of 3,400 students in Mansfield, PA, this fall became the first school in the nation to have sprint football as its only football program. Others playing the sport also field heavyweight teams. MU also is the sole public university in sprint football. Sprint, which has one full-time employee (the head coach), no scholarships, little recruiting budget to speak of and no “extras” such as spring and pre-season practice, is much cheaper to run than is regular football. On the field it is identical to the regular game except the players are smaller. The other schools playing it are Princeton, Penn, Cornell, Army and Navy.

To attract students to play sprint football, Mansfield put a page on its website for high schoolers to submit an inquiry/information form. The page went active shortly after MU announced  that it was starting sprint football in autumn of 2008. Over the winter, spring and summer it yielded 175 electronically submitted inquiries, according to MU’s Director of Athletic Operations Steve McCloskey.

When Mansfield’s sprint football team took the field for the first time in September 2008, the unusual program was the subject of news stories on The Associated Press wire and on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Web metrics at Mansfield track a significant spike in page hits just after the stories ran. But that’s not the real payoff. In the month after the publicity, an additional 150 inquiry/information forms were submitted electronically.

So following the news media attention nearly as many inquiries were generated in a single month as had been produced in many previous months that the site was active.

What happened here? We all know that kids are not reading The Wall Street Journal. Nor are they scanning the news outlets where many of the AP stories ran. Conventional wisdom is that young males do not pay much attention to news in whatever form it is delivered. Yet there was a clear spike in interest after the publicity occurred.

My hypothesis: Parents and grandparents saw the stories. Uncles and aunts saw the stories. Neighbors saw them. And they showed the stories to the kids. Others, McCloskey says, alerted high school football coaches who told their squads about this opportunity. And the kids did what kids do; they went to the web to check it out.

The old media still have a lot of clout. They provide an approval that is important in an era awash with information sources. Young people may not pay day-to-day attention to the news, but they do value the third-party endorsement of a positive news story when it is called to their attention. It is not perceived as the institution saying good things about itself. Thus it has more credibility.

The moral: tweet while you toil. Wiki while you work. Have a nice first life while you’re in Second Life. But don’t forget the power of the traditional media. Do that and you’ll be as snug as a pea in a podcast.

In the next post I’ll look at the”halo effect” of sprint football and some very personal marketing.

My Happy Return to WordPress

A few hours after I was removed from WordPress, I was back up and  received a note of explanation:

Hi,
The link to bobjohnson.com did that. It’s a site spammers link to very heavily so it is automatically scanned for now.
Sorry it caught you.

Your blog will not now be checked by these scans so please do not worry about tripping one again.

I do apologize for the  shock and worry we caused you.

Mark

Now, Bob Johnson is a very respected higher ed consultant.  He does an excellent newsletter and a good blog.  There’s just nothing bad about the guy, but apparently spammers love his site.  I still don’t understand the mechanics of what Mark explained but I know many of you do.  So if you Web folks would send a note of explanation, all us PR types would be grateful.

I appreciated the response, which was fairly prompt, and the explanation.  I also appreciated the fact that Mark sent it to me.  It wasn’t signed The xxxxxx Team like so any other sites.  It was Mark and it was an explanation, and it was an apology (“for the shock and worry we caused you” — only a human could generate a message like that).

And when I got the note, I loved Mark as a person and WordPress as a responsible and responsive site.  (Although fo awhile I felt like a Kafka character thrown into exile by anonymous machines and left to float in a cyber junkyard while the emotionless army of  x’s and o’s trudged onward).

Thanks Mark and WordPress.  It was a glitch.  You responded, explained and apologized.  It was good customer service and good marketing.

(Now, somebody, translate Mark’s explanation).

My Short Forced Exile from WordPress

It was 7 p.m. November 4. I had just finished a post about the election, a passionate sort of reflection on how I had seen the country change over the decades. The post would have freshness for about one day. As always I read through it several times to see how I could tighten it or make sentences work more effectively.

Finally, I hit “publish.” I visited my site to make sure it was there.

Usually, that’s where it ends. I go onto something else, but an hour later I checked the site again. I was greeted with the message that my site had been removed. I had violated something or I was a spammer. “You are not welcome here,” it said.

I was stunned. I went over and over the blog in my mind. It was a thought piece. I was writing about my America. In addition to being just plain confused, to be truthful, I was hurt. “You are not welcome here.”

Then I realized that two years worth of work was gone. Yes, the message said WordPress would move my posts to another site when I found one, but I wanted to stay here. WordPress is home.

I emailed a message saying there was a huge mistake. I have been WordPress two years. I explained I was in higher education and my blog is about higher ed marketing and PR.

I waited. No response. Meanwhile my time-sensitive blog about the election lolled in WordPress Limbo.

I wondered if I should write another plea for my return to the WordPress family, or would that look like I was a desperate spammer? I finally broke down and sent a second reasoned but passionate plea.

I want to emphasize here that I was not angry with WordPress. I knew there was a glitch somewhere, but when we’re all working in the machine (red pill please) you are helpless until you connect with an appropriate human.

Obviously, I did and I’m back.

Why was I exiled? I doubt if you could ever guess unless its happened to you. And it very well could happen to you.

Next post: Why I was removed and why I still love WordPress.

Years of Struggle, A Night of Hope

Karlyn Morissette’s recent blog about the election and Karine’s and Alison’s response gave me pause to think about what’s happening right now as I write this.

As a Baby Boomer, I’ve experienced a fair amount of American history.  I remember what junior high classroom I was sitting in when we were told President Kennedy had been assassinated.

I watched the news of the moon landing and feeling very much part of an exuberant, proud and united America.

We experienced other assassinations that both shocked and divided the country.

In 1969, as a young reporter, I nearly caused a riot in my hometown because I wrote an article about a local boy who dodged the draft, taught music to needy kids in San Francisco and came back to town and said he thought he was doing as much for America as soldiers in Vietnam.  The story came out one week after I did an article on the first hometown boy to die in Vietnam.

The resignation of President Nixon was traumatic and healing to an entire U.S.

Future historians looking back at the last eight years, I’m sure will deem it one of the darkest times in our history.

Oh, and the Civil Rights movement.  It took time and results were gradual but we’re seeing them in full now.

I don’t know if Barak Obama will win.  I hope with all my heart he does, for many reasons.  One of them is, like John Kennedy, Obama inspires hope and unity.  We desperately need these things back in our lives.

Karlyn, thanks for making me think about my experiences in the context of history.  Karine and Alison, thanks for your perspectives and enthusiasm.  I really hope tomorrow morning you have reason to be proud of America.

I hope we Americans can once again be proud of America.

I hope we can all look back and say these were the years America struggled, and stumbled, and finally grew up.

What’d I Do Wrong?

Last weekend I posted Streaming Print on a Pickle Jar (Yes, They’re Dancing) about the current issue of Esquire that incorporates “electric ink” to produce a form of streaming type on the cover.  I thought the concept is a revolutionary breakthrough.

I had fun with it, speculating on what it will be like to go shopping in the near future.  I included a lot of links and tossed in the Chiquita Banana Girl logo.

The post tanked.

It sank like a lead fish in a muddy pond.

What did I do wrong?  I’d like to hear from anyone –bloggers, PR people, marketers, Web folks — with any ideas.