I’ve had a few emails asking why the blog has gone silent over the past six months. Well, teaching a college class and taking over as president of the local Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) chapter will do that.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to give a presentation on “social branding” to a local chamber of commerce. I’ve embedded the slides below. I discussed developing a “social persona,” branding, Facebook, Twitter, and how to optimize content to reach your target audiences, among other topics.

P.S. What are the best apps for networking? I game my opinion to U.S. News. Which are your favorite?

@MikeLesczinski

For those in higher education PR/Marketing, Georgy Cohen is a certifiable rockstar. She is a writer, speaker and founder of Crosstown Digital Communications who in a previous life, led the development of Tufts Now, for my buck, the best higher ed online newsroom in existence. When it comes to content, she is Queen.

Today on her website, Meet Content, she published a feature focusing on developing content for recruiting prospective students to online programs. I was fortunate enough to share my thoughts for the piece.

Below is an excerpt, but make sure to read the entire column, which includes contributions from Higher Ed Live’s Seth Odell.

Lesczinski: This past January, our School of Liberal Arts hosted a campus panel on career options for criminal justice graduates. We brought in practitioners from a number of criminal justice fields including a police officer, criminologist, lawyer, researcher, etc. The one panelist that couldn’t make the actual event in person, actually called in from his squad car. The students definitely got a kick out of that.

We crowd-sourced panel questions to our students, registrants, and members of online criminal justice communities leading up to the event to generate interest and then provided ample opportunity for attendee to interact with our panelists. The feedback from this event made us realize the importance of trying to personalize our events. We don’t need to attract thousands of students or registrants for these types of events to be successful. In fact, we can better foster that sense of community by focusing on smaller, more intimate events tailored to specific target audiences that will allow for more personal interaction.

@MikeLesczinski

I had the opportunity this week to chat with Menachem Wecker of U.S. News on the newly released “#SocialMedia and Advancement: Insights from Three Years of Data” study conducted by mStoner and Slover Linett Strategies, in partnership with CASE. Some of the findings are intriguing, including the low number of colleges using social media as part of their crisis management strategy.

Wecker’s piece, Colleges May Neglect Social Media in Times of Crisis, Study Says, was published this morning.

Here’s what I had to say:

Although he was also surprised by the survey findings on crisis management, Lesczinski has a hunch that a large percentage of institutions are either developing or planning to increase their crisis communications on social media for the future.

“Because students tend to tune out single streams of information, it is vital that institutions use a variety of channels such as E-mail, social [media], and text [messages],” he says. “Institutions have to ensure they are participating in the conversation both to correct inaccuracies and because students are more prone to seeking out trustworthy sources.”

Read the full article.

@MikeLesczinski

As you can tell, I’ve taken the summer off from blogging. It’s been fantastic. Of course, it doesn’t mean I’ve quit my day job or stopped reading what others are writing.

This one was too good not to share. Michael Stoner takes the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research to task for its recent report “Higher Ed Documents Social Media ROI: New Communications Tools Are a Game Changer.”

Read Michael’s whole post but here’s my favorite part:

1. Don’t believe everything you read! In this specific case, I venture that it’s not that teens love social and hate print. It’s that admission officers think they do just because they’re teens. In my experience, adults usually always over-estimate the appetite of young people for technology; they’re much smarter about it using it than we give them credit for.
2. Don’t dismiss traditional channels quite yet (and I include email and websites here). We’re in a time of change, so those channels still work and are often critical sources of information. Isn’t that what the Noel-Levitz data tells us? It’s not that teens don’t like print (they told Noel-Levitz they do), they’re discriminating: they don’t like print that sucks, just like they want web content that is informative and relevant, delivered in a way that helps them find information quickly.

@MikeLesczinski

Last week Excelsior hosted a summit on “serious gaming” and higher education. (Yes, video games can be educational!) Being a distance learning institution, we decided to livestream the panel for all those who couldn’t travel to Albany. We spent a little over a month trying to raise awareness of not only the event, but the issue of serious gaming in general.

I decided to use Storify to capture a snapshot of our PR activities.

The Counselors to Higher Education Senior Summit is the premiere event for higher ed communicators.  Annually held in Washington, D.C, the CHE summit is a unique opportunity for senior-level professionals to network with fellow practitioners and learn from industry thought leaders. I was honored to be part of the planning committee and take charge of social media throughout the three-day conference. (And, quite exhausted, and definitely quite sick of Twitter in the ensuing days after.)

The educational value of the plenary sessions was only matched by the diversity of the speakers and topics. Michael Smart, a private media trainer, and former BYU media relations wunderkind, led practitioners through an eye-opening seminar on the “new rules” of pitching, demonstrating how to mine story angles from less than groundbreaking academic research, attract a reporter’s attention by tapping into their ego, and leverage niche coverage into mainstream appeal.

Crosstown Digital Communication’s Georgy Cohen illustrated how to transform a news page into an institution’s branded news organization, Michael Warden walked us through how Georgia Tech leverages their brightest minds with the GT Amplifier, and the Capital Region’s own Amy Mengel (readMedia) focused on finding the right balance of paid, owned and earned media. Deborah Wiltrout even offered a peek behind the scenes at American U’s “Wonk Campaign” demonstrating how PR and marketing can work together on a distinct and bold marketing campaign.

Other topics broached included crisis communications within university athletics, developing strategic communications plans, and introducing emergency alerts systems, capped off by a media relations roundtable featuring representatives from the Washington Post, The Chronicle, Inside Higher Ed (IHE) and Diverse Issues. Media tours of NPR, Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle, and Washington Post were icing on the cake.

And if that wasn’t enough, IHE’s Doug Lederman even hosted apps and cocktails at their headquarters.… Read the rest

After four months of planning, the PRSA Counselors to Higher Education Senior Summit is here. I’ll be in D.C. all week, networking and enjoying some great craft brew. As for the sessions, Michael Smart, formerly of BYU, just gave a phenomenal presentation on the new rules for media pitching. I’ll definitely share some thoughts on that a bit later.

Yesterday, I also had the chance to tour NPR. Here’s a quick video I took with readMedia’s Amy Mengel, discussing a few of her takeaways.

I presented a webinar to a few of our School of Business & Technology students last week. The topic was social media governance. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at a few of the segments:

and part two, “Challenges & Solutions”…

I’ve been researching some background information for a social media governance webinar I’ll be hosting this Wednesday for our Human Resources students. It’s been fun to take a break from higher education for a week and place a renewed focus on how private sector businesses are using social.

I’ve been taking a look at a few of the business surveys conducted by the Society of Human Resource Management and have been surprised by some of the results*. While social media adoption is on the upswing, many organizations, in fact 47 percent, began using social media only within the past two years. And of the companies who allowed their employees to use social media, a whopping 73 percent did not provide training. That according to a November 2011 SHRM business survey. Together, this data seems to indicate that most organizations surveyed have no set policy or procedures in place.

How can this be? 73 percent do not provide training? I wouldn’t go to an untrained barber (yes, Mike, but it wouldn’t matter anyway you’re nearly bald, hardy har funny guy), why would so many companies let their untrained employees tweet on their behalf?

Now there may be improvement since last November. In January, a follow up survey found that 68 percent of respondents had at least a code in conduct in place and 39 percent were monitoring their employee’s activities – a 7 percent improvement.

I’m going to have to take a look at some other data.

*Anomaly?