"Our school punches below its weight." "Our school is not as visible at it should be." "We need to strengthen partnerships and engage more broadly with the business community." These are common refrains I hear from university presidents, deans, marketers and other school leaders. I would argue that it is virtually impossible to move the needle on these concerns if faculty are not engaged …
Experts Beware: Practice What You Preach
Let’s say that there is a particular leadership expert whose work you have admired for many years. You have consumed this person's content across various mediums and refer to it often for inspiration. Then one day, you find that the person that you so highly revered has actually been accused of abusing his power to sexually exploit women. Despite your initial shock, the women’s claims turn out to …
How Researchers Can Adopt a PR Mindset
By Kevin Anselmo Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine, noted the following in a BBC story: “Truth is no longer dictated by authorities, but is networked by peers. For every fact there is a counterfact. All those counterfacts and facts look identical online, which is confusing to most people.” Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year in 2016 was post truth: an adjective defined as ‘relating to …
How Media Relations Can Support Integrated Marketing Communications Goals
Technological advances, the ever-changing communications landscape and the disruption in the higher education space necessitate that marketing and communications departments strategically work together towards common goals. This means that everyone is aligned on what the objectives are and how to achieve them through the collaborative effort of those responsible for earned media (media relations), …
News Headlines and PR / Communications Implications
The following is a summary of some news stories from the past two weeks and the implications for PR professionals / communicators. Story 1: Live Streaming Summary: House GOP leadership shut off microphones and the video feed to C-SPAN leading to a sit-in by Democrats who started using Facebook Live and Periscope to film the protest. C-Span turned to the Periscope feed used by some of the …
Podcast Episode #56: Lessons from Ken Starr’s Media Interview Debacle
The media interview is not the right time to be reviewing answers and going over tactics! Ken Starr, the recently ousted president of Baylor University following an investigation into the mishandling of sexual assault at the school, and his media adviser Merrie Spaeth, founder of Spaeth Communications, learned this first-hand. In a KWTX News 10 interview from earlier this month, a journalist …
Podcast Episode #55: Steps to Conducting a Strategic Communications Review
Are you confident in your institution’s key messaging? Can you summarize it in a simple, clear and jargon free way to your different audiences? What about within your department? Do you know why the department for which you work exists? Do others know? Episode 55 of FIR on Higher Education will outline steps that you can consider adopting to answer these questions and gain clarity. Since …
Podcast Episode #45: Lessons for Communicators from the University of Missouri Protests
It has been a very difficult last couple of weeks for the University of Missouri as the school has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. African American students led protests because administrators were slow to respond to various safety issues raised. Things seemed to come to a culmination following negative student encounters with University President Tim Wolfe. One graduate student …
Podcast # 9: Building Online Community and Mobilizing Ambassadors to Promote New Books
Are you a new author and thinking about innovative ways to market your book? If yes, then you will want to listen to episode 9 of FIR on Higher Education. …
Podcast Episode 5: Discussion with Editor Jenny Rooney on How to Work With Forbes’ CMO Network
What does it take to become a contributor on Forbes’ CMO Network? What does a busy editor look for in a pitch? Jenny Rooney, CMO Editor at Forbes, shares insights on these questions and talks about ways she works with higher education to co-sponsor events on episode 5 of FIR on Higher Education. She talks about her editorial priorities in the months ahead and shares best practice for …
University online pressrooms – best practice examples
University communicators – how is your online pressroom? Is it meeting journalists’ expectations? If your media site is like the average, then according to a new survey your site needs some revamping. A study led by Proactive Report and Press Feed found that only 15 percent of PR practitioners are delivering the information that media need. Some 500 people journalists and media relations …
Trust and higher education – lessons for academics, presidents and communicators
We all know how important trust is for any aspect of life: personal, work and education. Edelman, the global public relations firm, has been surveying the trust levels of the public for the last 14 years through the Edelman Trust Barometer. Their annual survey was released earlier this week - 33,000 people in 27 global markets took part. There are a number of takeaways from this survey for …
Public relations advice for Bashar al-Assad
Dear Mr. al-Assad, It is with the utmost sadness and frustration that I have been following the horrible war in your country over the years. I studied your Instagram account and other social media properties in detail on the same day that I learned about the destruction and grief that was brought upon your people by a chemical weapons attack outside Damascus. Every indication is that your …
How to organize a media roundtable
Experts and public relations professionals interested in building media relationships + a group of targeted journalists + good food and drink = successful media roundtable. This above formula is a rather simplistic way to go about organizing a media roundtable. This past week at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, we used this approach in hosting a roundtable for local media in the …
Unpersonalized communication in our relational times
SPAM. Unsolicited emails. Unpersonalized invitations. Untargeted press releases. Odds are you received some of these types of communication in the last couple of hours. You may have received a message that might have the appearance of being personalized, yet a quick scan shows that it was the simple use of a mail merge. I receive all too many of these types of messages, and I find it mind …