Whither the PR generalist?

November 29, 2009 · Posted in PR · Comment 

I have had the good fortune (and to a certain extent misfortune) to be a generalist during the course of my career in higher ed public relations. When I was first hired at SF State, most of the other staff were mainly tasked with media relations (and sometimes publications writing). Because I had the interest and skills (and because I had already been doing some of this as a student worker), I was the one who did media relations and internal communications (two print newsletters that I wrote, copyedited and did the layout on) and web communications. As e-communications became increasingly more important I branched out into e-mail newsletters, web content management (I acted as the managing editor of the online news site) and crisis communications (since so much of the activity in this arena involved e-mail and web). When I was hired at Dunwoody, I became involved in even more arenas (including acting as managing editor of the alumni magazine) because it’s such a small institution with a minimal marketing/pr staff (there’s me, my boss, and a coordinator).

I love being a generalist. I enjoy having a wide variety of projects and relationships, and I work well with all types of people — IT professionals, reporters and editors, faculty and students, graphic designers, etc. It’s fun. But it also means that it’s difficult to keep up in any in depth way with all the skills one needs to keep sharp in order to act effectively. I feel that I have enough knowledge of analytics/seo, web programming and layout/graphic design to contribute to and even manage projects featuring in-house experts or outside vendors. But what happens when, as is increasingly the case in the world of smaller budgets, you have to DIY?

So here’s my question — one that I will explore and attempt to answer for myself over the next few months — what other skills do I add to my generalist set? I’m assuming that to be an effective PR/marketing generalist one should already be a good writer, editor, proofreader and public speaker: basically an overall effective communicator. One should also be somewhat capable of traditional skills: parsing market research, facilitating a focus group, art directing a photo shoot, interviewing senior management and faculty and students, staging a press conference, basic photography and image editing, basic html, etc.

But what else? Here’s what I’m looking at right now:

  1. Web analytics. Yeah, I can do the basics of Google analytics, but right now it’s all mainly surface metrics.
  2. Photography. I’m an okay photographer. I can frame a shot and crop and color correct it. But I have yet to master the real mark of an expert — lighting.
  3. Videography. Both behind and in front of the camera. Editing. Both quick on the fly, low-res stuff for YouTube and more polished work.
  4. Advanced programming. I need to get better at CSS, for sure, but I wonder if PR folks need to know more about programming, especially app programming. Not necessarily enough to do all the work — this is an area where you need a specialist — but enough to be able to create help plan the concept, develop features, not get ripped off, etc.

As I look at these four areas, I’m struck by how much the younger generation has some of these skills — at least the basics — natively. I consider myself a digital native, but I cut my teeth on an Apple IIe. As much as I enjoy social media, my core love is blogging (yeah, I’m a Gen Xer). And while I can do photography and video, it’s not native to me the way it is to people in their teens and twenties. Perhaps there’s no need to worry about all this — I’m one of those who firmly believes that core of PR is to tell stories authentically, artfully and in the modes and media the audiences you care about prefer. But I’m going to do an inventory of my skills and the needs of my college over the next month or so and figure out where I need to go more in depth. Any suggestions of what to focus on and how to go about it are very welcome.

Tags: , , ,

The problem of the institutional “we”

November 2, 2009 · Posted in Education, PR · Comment 

The problem with the institutional we is that not only is it barely a step up from the use of the passive voice, but that just like the passive voice, it’s a way to diffuse agency. In addition, although it attempts to suggest timelessness, to sidestep the sticky issues of archives where names and titles can be found that no longer are part of the institution, it does not generally succeed. Rather it is a form of stasis.

More importantly, it raise all sorts of issues about community boundaries, institutional coercion and the agenda of the persons writing (or editing, or approving) copy with the use of the institutional we. For although it may be intended to appear inclusive, the we is always connected to a verb or a state of being and objects and noun and verb phrases and all those things that attempt to define who belongs or more often the actions and attitudes of those who do or don’t belong.

I don’t know for sure how to get around it. I personally rely much too heavily on “the College” in my writing for work and ‘I’ in my own writing. But it seems to me that that “we” needs to be made more explicit at times and/or that managers and administrators or going to need to be more willing to use first person singular and speak for themselves because in the world of social media everybody is speaking about the institution and speaking as themselves in relation to it.

Tags: , ,

Professors, PR and the public

July 22, 2009 · Posted in PR, Social Media · 5 Comments 

I’ve been thinking about a comment that I made on Gideon Burton’s Academic Evolution blog. In a post titled Scholar or Public Intellectual? I briefly talk about the sometimes uneasy relationship between higher ed pr professionals and academics and then state:

If PR can continue its turn towards authenticity and engagement and story-telling, and if academia can embrace its role in creating and disseminating knowledge, then I think we could get something really good going. Part of that means, of course, that academics are going to need to speak for themselves and PR people are going to need to be less gatekeepers as curators, connectors and consultants.

I wonder how that really would work and if it really could. I may get to some methodologies in later posts, but what I want to do first is pinpoint where my optimism lays. I think it comes down to this:

a) some academics are genuinely interested in playing the role of public intellectual or (because I think that term is a bit too laden with meaning) at the very least in using their expertise to help create a better informed citizenry.

b) some higher education public relations professional find helping bring that expertise to the public (and in a form that at least a portion of the public finds understandable and somewhat palatable) to be a very satisfying experience.

c) some of the general public finds scholarship that is translated (which doesn’t necessarily mean watered down) in to approachable forms/narratives interesting, illuminating and worth spending a bit of time with.

Given those assumptions — and yes, it gets sticky when one moves from the abstract to real world specifics — it seems to me that the media relations driven method of publicizing the work of scholars has been somewhat ineffective. In general, the news cycle and the needs of editors/reporters choose what research is of value and interest and how much of the news hole to devote to it. What’s more, it is told solely in narrative format without references to prior work and without conversation and often without much context (and generally forgotten the next day). The exciting thing about social media and about the concept of open scholarship is that good academic work packaged with the help of pr pros no longer needs to live or die (or be completely misinterpreted in some cases) by newspaper and TV news editors. The difficult thing is to figure out how to find the specific publics and match them with the scholars that share a mutual interest and finesse what the role of pr pros should be in that exchange. I have some ideas percolating. Hopefully they will soon be in expressible form.

Tags: , ,

A method for composing stories/pitches/releases (or: throwing off the shackles of Microsoft Word)

April 2, 2009 · Posted in Media Relations, PR, Social Media, Technology · 1 Comment 

A few weeks ago I realized that the current system our office had for information management for our stories, pitches, news releases, event announcements, etc. just wasn’t working. I was tired of formatting issues cropping up as I moved content between platforms. I was worried about how much was stored in the e-mail in-boxes of me and my co-workers rather than on our share drive. And I was beginning to understand that engagement with social media — even on a straitlaced, low-frequency scale (which I’m not necessarily happy about, but we’re doing the best we can with a small shop) — meant that viewing content as A News Release or A Magazine Story wasn’t going to work.

Here’s the solution I came up with the help of one of my co-workers:

  1. Everything is now a story — we don’t think of content by what platform it’s going to be featured on/in.
  2. Any story, no matter how big or small or important or whatever other adjective you want to apply to it, gets a text file created about it (in Notepad) as soon as we know about it. This text file is placed in a Stories folder on our department’s shared rive. The filename consists of a status tag, key words, and a month. The status tags are a = active, t = tickler, z = archived e.g. a_NewStoryMethod_April09.txt. The idea here is that stories with the same status will group together.
  3. The text file is set up with three basic areas separated by a few hyphens as a visual divider. The areas are: Publishing , Story and Source.
    • In the Publishing area we list the platforms we think this story should be published too. This includes News release, Web site, faculty/staff newsletter, student newsletter, alumni newsletter, alumni magazine, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and more. When we publish to those areas, it gets noted next to the platform. Sometimes that’s a date and URL. Sometimes it’s just a date posted. Sometimes it’s a reference to an edition. Whatever makes sense so we can look it up later if we need to. If we’re sure this story isn’t going to be represented in one of those areas, that tag gets deleted.
    • In the Story area we have a bunch of different content fields. How many all depends on the story, but the possible fields so far are: Photos, Video, Headline, Subhed, Excerpt/Summary (1-2 paragraphs), Story (with a lead paragraph and as many paragraphs as the story demands — in some cases this may be Bullet Points or the Who/What/When/Where of an event listing rather than Story), Quotes (with notations about approvals or needs), and Boilerplate. For photos or video we copy and paste the file path to where those photos or videos are located. And these fields change depending on the nature of the story. Basically we dump them all in the template and then remove when we’re sure we don’t have to worry about that field.
    • In the Source area we dump everything that we get as raw sources — the text of e-mails, resumes, the results of Q&As, transcripts of tape-recorded interviews — with a note on where that info came from.
  4. Obviously this is just the source product. If we need to create a formal news release in Microsoft Word complete with letterhead then we do that and it’s housed in the News Releases folder just like ones created before this new system. And created isn’t the right word — it’s assembled from the pieces — the quotes, the explanatory paragraphs, the lead, the boilerplate. And for our alumni magazine, we’ll use this as a source and plug in quotes, but probably rewrite the lead and headline so it’s more feature-like. In addition, for pitching the media, I may rewrite the excerpt/summary to make it more relevant to the targeted publication. And when translating the headline for posting to Twitter, I may make it more colloquial. But the point is this the story source from whence all other pitches, stories, news briefs, releases, Flickr set summaries, etc. etc. flow.
  5. This could all change and we could ditch the system next week and it really only works well if everybody who is generating and disseminating content buys in to it. One cool thing is that it allows me to outsource some of dissemination work to a co-worker. And conversely, if a co-worker has a Story that was featured in, say, the faculty/staff newsletter and we decide to elevate it to the alumni magazine or a pitch, I know where to go first to get up to speed on what info we already have.

Hopefully my explanation is fairly clear. If not, I’ve uploaded a sample content_template that may help.

We’ve used this process for three stories so far, and so far I think it’s fantastic. I love not having to worry about formatting issues when I copy and paste*. I like that when I go to post an affiliated Flickr set or a Facebook note, I can pick and choose the language and details I want to add (and then modify if needed for tone and length). I find it soothing to not compose in Word.

Now there are a couple of downsides to this method. First, there’s no spellcheck**. Second, you have to remember to turn off word wrap when you copy and paste from Notepad — otherwise you end up with weird line breaks. I’d love to use Gedit (which I use at home on my Ubuntu box), but we’re a Windows XP shop at work. At some point, I’ll check out other text editors for Windows (anybody have suggestions?). But for now, Notepad is working just fine. It’s pretty sweet how quickly files open and save and close — and how small they are even if I’ve dumped several pages of stuff in to the Source section.

Keep in mind that there’s only four of us in our department, and we don’t publish a ton of content so this may not work for other college pr and marketing offices, but so far it has been a very positive change. And really, the key message of this post is not the method, but rather this: with a million places to publish, you better have some way of storing all the bits and pieces of content you need to tell your stories. And e-mail isn’t it. And a formal news release archive with nicely formatted MS Word docs isn’t it, either.

* Seriously — have you ever seen the crazy html code that MS Word creates when you try to copy and paste in to a CMS like Dreamweaver, WordPress or an e-newsletter service? Or even just in to an e-mail. It’s so annoying.

** I believe there are text editors with spellcheck. I’m looking into it and will post a comment if I find anything interesting to report.

Tags: , , , ,