The problem of the institutional “we”
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.
Features I want from Hulu, Netflix, Gmail and other web services
I have no major complaints about most of the web services I use*. Of course, that’s a bit tautological because if I hated them, I wouldn’t use them. But anyway, I do have some suggestions for minor improvements to the following web services:
Hulu: I would like a smarter queue that tracks what I have already seen. It’s great that you can subscribe to shows and when new episodes get loaded on to Hulu, they pop in your queue. But because episodes sometimes get taken down (after I have seen them) and then put back up (for example, to drum up excitement for the start of a new season), the queue oftens clogged with episodes of a show that I have already viewed on Hulu. I want an option to only show ones I haven’t viewed already — and for re-uploads to recognize that I saw them on the first go round.
Netflix: I would like a queue that’s just like the current queue but is for tracking purposes only, and I want to be able to subscribe to actors, directors, writers, studios, awards lists, certain critics picks, sub-genres and sub-sub-genres and when something new is acquired by Netflix that features the keywords and individuals I’ve subscribed to, I want those titles to appear at the top of that tracking queue.**
Gmail: I love Gmail. I’m one of those who immediately took to thread conversations and tags instead of folders. There is one feature I’d like though: the ability to tag an e-mail before (or as you go to) send it.
Google Docs: Yes, you can export Google Docs in a variety of formats, but there are occassions where I like to simply publish a Doc. For those instances I’d like to be able to have the option of auto-pagination (and be able to specify how many paragraphs or words for each page).
Twitter: I know this is supposed to be on the way, but, imo, the ability to RT from the web interface can’t happen soon enough. Yes, I use Tweetdeck and Hootsuite fairly often, but sometimes the web interface it just easiest to use, and I’d like to be able to easily retweet from it.
YouTube: I want 20 minute video uploads. Some better metrics tools (and even integration with Google Analytics) would be nice too.
Flock: I want it to open faster.
Flickr: I want the ability to batch organize sets and collections without going in to Flickr’s Ajax (sometimes browser resource heavy) Organizer e.g. just using titles of everything without thumbnails and the drag and drop feature — a light version, I guess, of the Flickr Organizer.
GoodReads: I want the ability to easily order titles on shelves (both drag and drop and enter number) and the ability to select multiple shelves and only show the titles that match all the selected shelves.
*Facebook is the Big Exception, but I’m not going to go in to all that in what is intended to be a light, quick post.
**I also want Linux supported Netflix On Demand, but that’s not a feature improvement, per se.
I want non-destructive editing for photos
I encountered two things recently that crystallized for me an issue I have been having with image files. The first was doing some reading on Final Cut Pro and finding out about non-destructive editing. The second was this Signal vs. Noise post by Jazon Z. titled Work in Photoshop, don’t Save in Photoshop. Jason talks about how when he works in Photoshop on user interface concepts, he no longer saves the results as PSD files (complete with layers), but instead he just takes a screenshot of the various iterations.
As I thought about those two bits of information, I began to realize that image management and editing is fundamentally lame because you have to save image files for every iteration of any photo you work with. Maybe I’m just doing it wrong. But there are times when I end up with a source photo, a photo with a conservative crop, one with a funky crop, the photo I upload to Flickr, the one that I size for placing on a web page, the one that I e-mail to people that’s print quality but under 3 mb (because that’s the attachment size limit at work), etc. etc.
What if there was some killer piece of image management software that helped you catalog and tag your photos AND kept a record of all the various pieces of specialized software that accessed the image, but didn’t keep any of the edits/filters/resizings you used. But then if you open the image in Photoshop (or GIMP or Aviary’s Phoenix, etc.), Photoshop itself has saved the various versions of the image that you told it to save and brings those up in a dialogue that you can scroll through and as you view each one, Photoshop is applying those parameters or filters, but the source image itself isn’t touched e.g. non-destructive editing. The same is true if you open it in Fireworks or Dreamweaver. The source file is the same but the filters native to that program and attached to that image come in to play when you’re actually working with it. And then, of course, the image that gets uploaded to the server is the correctly edited and sized jpeg or png or gif (or maybe even not then, but that’s getting in to some issues with cloud computing and future versions of html that are beyond my ken).
And did I mention that the source file will keep data on where it’s been uploaded via the image management software (whether that’s Picasa, iPhoto, F-spot, or Lightroom or Aperture, etc.) so you can see if you uploaded it to Facebook or Spreadshirt or icanhascheezburger or Google Presentation (and when)? Because that’d be cool. Frankly, image/photo management is a huge pain and the number of different versions of a photo or image one needs is verging on the ridiculous. Is this an unreasonable request? Is something like this already being worked on? Is anybody else as dissatisfied as I am with the state of photo management?
Professors, PR and the public
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.
The online/offline networking circle
Sometimes lost in the breathy enthusiasm for social media and the skepticism by old-school business-card-in-hand networking types is this simple fact: communities that form in the metaverse always end up meeting up in meatspace.
Every listserv, web forum, MUD, blog community, Facebook movement and Twitter niche that I have actively participated in or observed has invariably at some point felt the need to have some sort of meet up, social hour, service activity, con, trip, etc.
That’s not surprising — when people discover that they have a lot in common, they want to do things together. They tend to want to meet in Real Life. What’s more, such events almost always strengthen the online community, creating closer ties among members and a pool of shared memories that can help sustain online engagement. And, in fact, such meet ups even benefit those members of the virtual community that are not able to attend (because of distance, other commitments, interminable shyness, etc.) because even though there may be some sense of feeling left out, such events lead to online reports and stories about the personalities involved that help the entire community get to know more of its members better. It also generates excitement for the next event and/or the impetus for others in the group who live in or are traveling to a different geographic location to plan events of their own.
And it works the other way too. When members of an online community meet in meatspace, there is often less overall awkwardness (although there is always a certain amount of awkwardness whenever diverse personalities meet) because members feel like they already know quite a bit about each other. At the very least, small talk becomes easier because attendees have been storing ambient awareness about the other people at the event. You don’t have to go through the lame roster of “Where do you work? Where did you go to school? Do you have a family?” because you oftentimes already know much of that information. You can dive right in to conversation about, well, what you were talking about on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ning, somebody’s blog just yesterday or last week.
And when communities are truly engaged, this online/off-line activity creates a circle of relationship building that ensures a healthy, long-lasting network of individuals.
So yes, when we (and I’m especially talking about Alumni Relations professionals here*) talk about the benefits of social networking, we should talk about the benefits of ambient awareness and the fact that it’s not just who you know, but also who who you know knows. But especially when dealing with those who think collecting business cards = smart networking, we should talk about not just the online tools, but how the online tools can facilitate the building of vibrant communities.
* I’m not in Alumni Relations, but I’m involved in it from the marketing/PR side.
Why the media doesn’t get Twitter
I find it interesting that the mainstream media doesn’t seem to understand Twitter (and I’m being reductive here — obviously some MSMers get it). In particular, I’m amused that the words inane and superficial tend to come up a lot (or even if those exact words aren’t used, the impression of what Twitter is always seems to head in that direction).
The media doesn’t get Twitter because it obsesses over the contents of the tweets (and in many cases because the commentator has only experienced Twitter as the content of the tweets). This is a completely understandable mistake to make. But it misses what Twitter is — or at least the Twitter I know. I’m sure that there are parts of Twitter that are completely inane.
The comeback from many of us who use Twitter tends to be: it’s all about the conversation and the community. I agree, but also think that it’s a bit more complex than that. After all, there are much better platforms for having meaningful conversations — FriendFeed, e-mail lists, blogs with threaded comments, and web forums all provide a better way of managing the flow of conversation.
In addition, the business press has gotten all hot and bothered lately with the idea of real-time search. I think that’s an intriguing direction, but except for certain topic areas, it’s not quite there yet.
Here’s what Twitter really is: a stream of triggers. It’s not so much the content of individual tweets that matters as the effect a tweet has on a reader. Or to put it another way — each tweet is an invitation.
Each tweet provides one or more of the following:
- A link to click on
- A reminder to do something related to your life or job
- An opportunity to ask a question
- A recommendation
- An amusing tidbit to brighten your day
- Another piece of info about a person that may become an important part of your personal network
- An invitation to interact, to reply ,or re-tweet, or direct message, or comment on a blog, or donate, or take a survey, etc.
A lot of the negative reaction to Twitter follows from the platform itself. In particular, the 140 character limit and the fact that the platform name itself suggests a certain superficiality. And really, it’s interesting how much of the reporting/commenting on Twitter revolves around the name* and the character limit as if that really said it all about what happen on Twitter. There is an immediate negative reaction to the idea that anything could be communicated in that amount of space.
I say the focus on content — on what’s being communicated, the story being told — is understandable, and it is. But let’s be clear that when it comes to print journalism (as well as TV/radio), the obsession with content, on a certain method of storytelling and how that is defined as good or important or successful is a product of its own set of (not 140 character) limits.
On the one hand, you have the content creators — the reporters, editors, producers — who tend to measure the success of content for how well it would communicate with/appeal to an ideal reader/viewer.
On the other hand, you have the sales and marketing people, where the measure of success is ratings and ad rates — e.g. the response of the readers/viewers in aggregate.
Neither measure of success necessarily has a whole lot of meaning to the real flesh-and-blood individuals who are consuming the content. Certainly, news stories and advertisements can be triggers, invitations, calls to action. That’s the whole Faustian bargain of the old business model, right? The ads are meant to influence behavior but are tolerated because they subsidize an informed citizenry, the two sets of triggers living side-by-side, not holding hands, of course, but always twinned.
Twitter is also a medium for delivering content, but by focusing solely on the nature of that content, the meaning of each individual message, you miss out on why the content — whether you think it is inane or not — is important to those who create and consume it. Simply put, Twitter affects your day (or night).
With Twitter, you choose who you follow — you choose who you allow to send triggers your way. And in return you create triggers, some that are calculated to speak to all of your followers, some a sub-set (hashtags!) and some to just one person. And you choose when to dip in and out of the flow of triggers, and how they are delivered to you — mobile, web, widget, app, feed reader, etc.
So, of course, the mainstream media doesn’t get it. Just like they didn’t get blogs at first. The audience isn’t only talking back, it’s going off on its own and creating networks of people that enrich each others lives. Sometimes that expresses itself in superficial and inane ways, but here we get to the real genius of Twitter: every trigger, every invitation has to happen in 140 characters or less. Which means that skimming, processing, reading, in short, consuming a call to action takes very little time at all. Not every tweet is a hit for every Twitter user. But if you get the right collection of people you follow, enough are that, corny as it is, your life is better because of it. And really, that’s what all human interaction should be about.
* And I can’t help but note that the riffing off of the name and the claims of superficiality are a bit rich when they come from the nattering nabobs of the chattering classes (yep, I’m not afraid to smugly combine alliterative insults).
A method for composing stories/pitches/releases (or: throwing off the shackles of Microsoft Word)
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:
- Everything is now a story — we don’t think of content by what platform it’s going to be featured on/in.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Why LinkedIn should support academic CVs
David Erickson’s Slideshare presentation Expert Positioning Using LinkedIn spurred me to write up some thoughts I’ve been having regarding LinkedIn and academia. I’ll develop this further, but the basic idea is this: LinkedIn needs to come up with a way to better support the presentation of academic CVs, and in particular, those massive lists of papers, presentations, book reviews, etc. that form the key research core of an academic CV.
LinkedIn currently does a decent job of helping its users present positions with a company and affiliations with professional organizations and other groups. What it doesn’t do so well is support anyone whose work consists of and professional identity is built out of lists of works. That includes, not only academics, but also actors, directors, artists, freelance writers, authors, etc.
I don’t have any amazing solution for how this should be implemented. I only dabble a bit UI and I’m not a graphic designer so no mock ups. But at the very least there could be a tab that displays The List of Stuff, and most importantly, any such solution should be able to automatically parse and tag discreet items in a CV/resume and allow for that data to be downloaded. I realize that pulling out data is not what LinkedIn is going to naturally support, but I think it’s in their best interest to do so.
Here’s what’s in it for them:
1. LinkedIn is pitching reporters on the idea that it is a great place to find experts. I don’t doubt that reporters are using it. But it’ll be even more valuable when one of the key group of experts — academics — embrace it more fully and especially when the information they present is as rich as their CV.
2. Faculty members (as well as freelancers and actors and directors, etc.) tend to be highly connected individuals, in part, exactly because of the List of Works they are involved in. Their projects aren’t confined to work colleagues and consultants.
3. Faculty members bring in students and that’s a userbase that LinkedIn is, I would assume, hoping to attract because they’ll soon be in need of the services that LinkedIn provides (and because they tend to be active social media users and activity among a few people in a network can increase activity across the network thus proving and increasing the value of the platform the activity is taking place on).
And here’s why, if LinkedIn better supports academic CVs, faculty members should actively participate in LinkedIn (especially if the solution makes it easy to manage CV-related data):
1. Currently, faculty members rely on
a) individual bio pages/Web spaces provided by their academic institution — these may or may not be kept up by academic support or by the academics themselves
b) faculty experts databases created by the institution’s PR offices
c) their own website or blog that they maintain (either paying for hosting of using free hosting)
d) minimal presences in directories of organizations they may be affiliated with
None of those solutions is ideal. In some, they don’t have control of their data and what is presented in others, they have control, but may not have the time to keep things up-to-date or to provide nice design and stable hosting solutions. Let’s be honest there are a lot of ugly, out-of-date faculty pages out there.
LinkedIn provides a professional space and is about as stable of a social media company as you can get these days.
2. A university pr office has limited resources — certain faculty are going to get privileged when it comes to media inquiries and those inquiries are almost always mediated. I realize that many faculty prefer not to work with the media, but I strongly believe academics (and really all of us) are going to increasingly find themselves needing to take charge of their own promotion and interaction with the public sphere rather than relying so much on the security of their individual institutions. I’ll talk more about that in another post. Also see Gideon Burton’s Academic Evolution blog for more on faculty taking charge of their research and online presences.
I know some faculty hate having to screen media inquiries and make the pr office do it, but that only adds time to the process. Obviously whatever solution LinkedIn were to come up with, another thing they’d need to figure out is settings and ways to regulate inquiries. This is something I need to think about more and may post on in the future.
3. Even faculty experts who become stars for the college, sometimes find they aren’t getting the calls they were because the reporter or editor who loved them has left and taken his or her rolodex. If faculty use LinkedIn in great numbers and journalists respond to this by managing more of their experts with it, it’ll become much each easier to pass on experts (and to discover them in the first place).
4. LinkedIn is a fantastic way to stay connected to the work of former students, research assistants, etc. This will be even more true, esp. for those in the sciences, if it better supports papers, presentations, etc. Imagine being able to go through your list of old papers and have a name of a grad student pop out at you — someone you haven’t thought of in awhile — and be able to click on their name and bring up their LinkedIn profile and catch up on the interesting research they’re doing.
Now, if all the above were to happen, what’s in it for higher ed pr pros? What if this leads to more reporters cutting us out of the picture?
I say it’d be great if it does. I don’t know that it’d necessarily stop the calls, but if it does then that’s time that we can put in to training faculty on how to work with the media. It’s time that we can put in to other pitches. It’s time we can spend on monitoring and metrics. And it’s time that we don’t have to spend updating our experts databases.
I don’t handle that many faculty experts calls in my current position, but I know how much time they can take up. I don’t want to shift that time entirely over to the faculty, but honestly a lot of what happens is matchmaking that could take less time if the right reporter was getting to the right faculty member in the right way. I think LinkedIn is potentially a powerful platform for doing that, but it’s not there yet.
Wm’s Twitter stream- morriswm: @dub_jeff I don't think that's a mere suggestion, Jeff. Steve used JJ and LG in the keynote. That means you too are required to follow. September 2, 2010
- morriswm: If iPod Touch includes a video camera, then it becomes a great portable, content creation tool w/out data plan & perfect for higher ed use. September 1, 2010
- morriswm: Fantasy Football draft verdict: I did the opposite of all the things I was planning on doing. The result isn't pretty. August 30, 2010
- morriswm: RT @dunwoodycollege: Yes, it's Camille Paglia, but you gotta love the notion of "revalorizing the trades": http://ow.ly/2wJjj August 30, 2010
- morriswm: @andygifford This is why I advocate for aggressive ice cream management. Also: milk shakes. August 29, 2010
- morriswm: @yelvington There you go. Although if you are going to mess around with that -- might as well do the whole hobo meal in foil. August 29, 2010
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