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: <, , >

Why LinkedIn should support academic CVs

March 16, 2009 · Posted in Education, Social Media · 1 Comment 

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.

Tags: <, >