Reading Matter

Here's a must-read from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). It's an article called "Fear and Loathing in Web 2.0," published in the September 2007 edition of Currents. Here's how the article starts:

Talking the Web 2.0 talk has become commonplace for many campus communicators. Yet walking the walk is a different story. For some practitioners, relatively recent innovations like student blogs are old hat. Yet other communications offices continue to ponder jumping on the blog bandwagon.

Ask practitioners what holds some institutions back even as early adopters move on, and the word control comes up a lot. . . .

Rather than trying to control the mes­­sage, a new mindset is required — one that approaches the communications and marketing role as helping to facilitate a conversation about an institution in all its many facets. In this conversation, the institution has a definite voice; it’s just not a definitive voice. Having others — students, faculty, parents, alumni, the media, the outside world — be part of the conversation about your institution and thereby relinquishing the idea of control over your message does not mean relinquishing an institutional point of view or voice. In fact, in this new conversation, understanding and being true to institutional identity becomes more vital than ever.

When we say an institution (educational or otherwise) "doesn't get it," that's the "it" they don't get — they must change their notions about control. The idea that they have control over message anymore is an illusion anyway; their audience isn't listening to PR-machined slogans or marketing conceits in the first place. They're listening to each other.

Accordingly, institutions are stepping out from behind the curtain and presenting a human face, rather than a Great and All-Powerful Oz. A blog is an ideal vehicle for that face-to-face connection.

Another must-read (some of you may have already read it) is Clive Thompson's essay on "radical transparency" in the April 2007 issue of Wired. An excerpt from that article:

Not long ago, the only public statements a company [or university, for that matter] ever made were professionally written press releases and the rare, stage-managed speech by the CEO. Now firms spill information in torrents, posting internal memos and strategy goals, letting everyone from the top dog to shop-floor workers blog publicly about what their firm is doing right - and wrong. Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, dishes company dirt and apologizes to startups he's accidentally screwed. Venture capitalists now demand that CEOs be fluent in blogspeak. In February, after JetBlue trapped passengers for hours in its storm-grounded planes and canceled 1,100 flights, CEO David Neeleman tried to deflect the blast of bad publicity by using YouTube to air his own blunt mea culpa. Microsoft, once a paragon of buttoned-down control, now posts uncensored internal videos - and encourages its engineers to blog freely about their projects.

I'll have hard copies of both these articles for ev'yone at the conference.