Never, Ever Use Public Relations Without Measurement…
New Metrics for Fundraising!
Clarke L. Caywood
October 3, 2007 Wednesday
In this session Clarke Caywood, a leading expert in marketing and public relations, will discuss the use of newer comprehensive databases for electronic, web and print media and expert tracking in public relations and marketing. Dr Caywood will explore how charities can also track and measure their public relations effectiveness and offer tips for improving targeted community, press and expert awareness of their organizations.
About the Presenter:
Clarke L. Caywood is Director of the Graduate Program in Public Relations and past chair of the Department of Integrated Marketing Communications in the Medill Graduate School, at Northwestern University. Professor Caywood teaches graduate classes in crisis management, communications management, marketing and public relations. He was named by PRWeek as one of the most influential 100 PR people of the 20th century (PRWeek, October 18, 1999) and one of the top 10 outstanding educators in 2000 (PRWeek, February 7, 2000). He was named Educator of the Year by the Public Relations Society of America in 2002-2003). He received the Educator of the Year Award from the Sales and Management Executives - Chicago Chapter.
Learning Objectives:
Participants will be able to:
• Implement media and print tracking for public relations and marketing
• Audit their organization’s needs for commercial systems or “home grown” processes
• Judge the offerings of multiple vendors in this growing professional service
• Identify ways to track and measure public relations effectiveness
• Boost community awareness of their organizations
Target Audience:
Mid to Senior Level and recent graduate degree holders
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
American Academy of Advertising Comment
Integrating media planning in advertising and PR
One of the changing silos in our industry and field of study has been the consolidation of the media planning business. With consolidation came buying power. With power came new strategies, new leadership and newly named and renamed firms. While small buying groups exist, the newer model seems to be aligned with the growth of the marketing holding companies in advertising, direct database marketing, e-commerce, public relations and media buying. Yet, the last frontier for integration seems to be media planning. Why is that?
Our goal at Northwestern University has been to work with many of the holding companies to place our graduate students in summer internships, to visit their headquarters with students when we travel to other cities (like London Paris and Tokyo), conduct research, to invite their leaders to speak and to sit on the board of visitors for the school and to place our students in agencies. The placement in agencies comes after a long drought where more than 85% of the students over the last 15 years have graduated from IMC to work for corporations or other client organizations instead of agencies. Recently I have been working with the Counselor’s Academy of the Public Relations Society of America as a lonely and lowly academic. The objective is to reconnect our students to the agency world with new media planning and research skills.
One of my objectives has been to discuss new media planning during the recent month with a variety of agencies, industry organizations, companies, executive MBA students – mostly from four Chinese universities, MBA’s and our own graduate IMC students the value of integrating media planning. What we mean by integrated media planning is obvious to students and audiences when described as “coordinated research, planning, securing and evaluation of all purchased and earned media”. The obvious need to coordinate and jointly plan both advertising and other purchased media with earned media or public relations is not done according to the vendors who provide the tools that would permit advertising and PR to strategically plan media for a client.
Ask any advertising director in a company or agency what profitable target media they have chosen for message delivery of the new corporate or product/service brand strategy. Then, ask any PR director in the same company or holding company PR agency what their targeted media will be for the same program. If the communications leaders are not targeting the same media to reach similar readers, viewers and listeners; the C-Suite in the client company and marcom media companies would want to know why not.
Just as selecting media for advertising has become a science and management art; the field of selection and analysis of earned media (including print, broadcast and blowing) for public relations is now more of a science. Today, far richer databased systems permit media managers who want to know which reporters, quoted experts, trade books, new publications, broadcasts, bloggers and more are the most “profitable” targets for public relations developed messages. Using the new built-in media metric systems PR directors can calculate return on investment on advertising “versus” PR and with PR, read and judge a range of positive, neutral or negative messages, share of mind, measures of media impact, advertising equivalency and many more. Even ad equivalency, a number frequently challenge by some PR academicians, can be useful in the context of dozens of other financial and volume numbers.
Companies like Harley-Davidson with over a billion media “hits” on their 100th anniversary need artificial intelligence or its closest cousin to count and measure their media effectiveness and efficiency. The systems are used by high risk and high visibility corporations like McDonalds, Genentech, Bank of America and other firms with sensitive markets (food, pharma, environment, privacy, ethnicity, etc) who need to plan and adjust their media performance constantly and coordinate their results with the advertising plans.
At Northwestern with my colleagues Martin Block and Frank Mulhern; we have redesigned the traditional media class and other classes in Marketing PR and Issues Management in not so traditional ways to include the use of donated media metric services (valued at several thousand dollars per month) from educationally oriented companies including www.Biz360 for over 4 years. Other firms including VMS and Evolve24 have offered support.
Now, when the chief marketing officer and other C-suite officers ask the holding company’s integrated agency directors of advertising, public relations or IMC if they the media are fully planned to reach targeted audiences; they can answer affirmatively.
One of the changing silos in our industry and field of study has been the consolidation of the media planning business. With consolidation came buying power. With power came new strategies, new leadership and newly named and renamed firms. While small buying groups exist, the newer model seems to be aligned with the growth of the marketing holding companies in advertising, direct database marketing, e-commerce, public relations and media buying. Yet, the last frontier for integration seems to be media planning. Why is that?
Our goal at Northwestern University has been to work with many of the holding companies to place our graduate students in summer internships, to visit their headquarters with students when we travel to other cities (like London Paris and Tokyo), conduct research, to invite their leaders to speak and to sit on the board of visitors for the school and to place our students in agencies. The placement in agencies comes after a long drought where more than 85% of the students over the last 15 years have graduated from IMC to work for corporations or other client organizations instead of agencies. Recently I have been working with the Counselor’s Academy of the Public Relations Society of America as a lonely and lowly academic. The objective is to reconnect our students to the agency world with new media planning and research skills.
One of my objectives has been to discuss new media planning during the recent month with a variety of agencies, industry organizations, companies, executive MBA students – mostly from four Chinese universities, MBA’s and our own graduate IMC students the value of integrating media planning. What we mean by integrated media planning is obvious to students and audiences when described as “coordinated research, planning, securing and evaluation of all purchased and earned media”. The obvious need to coordinate and jointly plan both advertising and other purchased media with earned media or public relations is not done according to the vendors who provide the tools that would permit advertising and PR to strategically plan media for a client.
Ask any advertising director in a company or agency what profitable target media they have chosen for message delivery of the new corporate or product/service brand strategy. Then, ask any PR director in the same company or holding company PR agency what their targeted media will be for the same program. If the communications leaders are not targeting the same media to reach similar readers, viewers and listeners; the C-Suite in the client company and marcom media companies would want to know why not.
Just as selecting media for advertising has become a science and management art; the field of selection and analysis of earned media (including print, broadcast and blowing) for public relations is now more of a science. Today, far richer databased systems permit media managers who want to know which reporters, quoted experts, trade books, new publications, broadcasts, bloggers and more are the most “profitable” targets for public relations developed messages. Using the new built-in media metric systems PR directors can calculate return on investment on advertising “versus” PR and with PR, read and judge a range of positive, neutral or negative messages, share of mind, measures of media impact, advertising equivalency and many more. Even ad equivalency, a number frequently challenge by some PR academicians, can be useful in the context of dozens of other financial and volume numbers.
Companies like Harley-Davidson with over a billion media “hits” on their 100th anniversary need artificial intelligence or its closest cousin to count and measure their media effectiveness and efficiency. The systems are used by high risk and high visibility corporations like McDonalds, Genentech, Bank of America and other firms with sensitive markets (food, pharma, environment, privacy, ethnicity, etc) who need to plan and adjust their media performance constantly and coordinate their results with the advertising plans.
At Northwestern with my colleagues Martin Block and Frank Mulhern; we have redesigned the traditional media class and other classes in Marketing PR and Issues Management in not so traditional ways to include the use of donated media metric services (valued at several thousand dollars per month) from educationally oriented companies including www.Biz360 for over 4 years. Other firms including VMS and Evolve24 have offered support.
Now, when the chief marketing officer and other C-suite officers ask the holding company’s integrated agency directors of advertising, public relations or IMC if they the media are fully planned to reach targeted audiences; they can answer affirmatively.
New JIMC introduction
http://jimc.medill.northwestern.edu/JIMCWebsite/site.htm
The Stakeholder Curriculum of the Future Clarke L. Caywood, Ph.D. Professor and Publisher of the Journal of Integrated Marketing Communications, http://jimc.medill.northwestern.edu/JIMCWebsite/site.htm
Most of the business leaders we meet are initially curious about why the faculty and students researching, teaching and working in the field of integrated marketing communications (IMC) are in the Medill School of Journalism and not in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. The explanation is not complicated, but the question has become more common as the IMC students increasingly have been seen as business leaders with stronger financial, marketing and management knowledge and skills.
With over 115,000 people earning the MBA degree each year, the 80 plus experienced graduate students in IMC at Northwestern can be seen as even more valuable specialists with many of the same team, leadership and experience qualities. However, like any “product” in a competitive world the IMC students must possess skills and knowledge that will allow them to remove some burden from their manager or team and have knowledge and skills that their managers and other team members in their firm or agency do not know. In other words, bring something new and useful to the workplace. The competitive advantage of communications, IMC and journalism students is that they have the strongest possible knowledge and insight to the hundreds of categories of publics, audiences and stakeholders beyond the customer.
The history of the teaching of marketing communications, still called advertising and public relations, being taught in the Journalism and Communication Schools is not particularly remarkable. When the schools of journalism (Medill, Missouri, Wisconsin) were created in the very early part of the last century there was demand for educated and well trained men and women to work for newspapers. Before that time the work was not considered a role of higher education. The work included both working as reporters and editors as well as advertising specialists who filled the paper with as much advertising as they could sell and then leaving a “news hole” to fill with news content. At the same time, public relations specialists began to emerge as advisors to business leaders on how to work with the empowered media
To lead rather than follow industry and to offer newer knowledge and skills, during 2007 the Medill School of Journalism is seriously reevaluating its role in modern journalism and media. Under the direction of John Lavine as the Dean of the School (a former publisher and industry executive), the faculty and students are seeing substantial changes in the journalism curriculum. The IMC faculty have again rewritten our curriculum in the spirit of the changes in the market and academic and industry research in advertising, public relations, direct marketing, database marketing, e-commerce, communications, management and marketing.
Our most recent changes include a new core required course being developed by this writer for the class of 2008 students. The course will more fully develop the idea of “social media” as a more modern means to communicate and manage relationships with hundreds of stakeholders that impact a corporation and its employees. We have looked, of course, at the CEO use of blogs, customer blogs, pod and vodcasts. We have tested SecondLife.com as a three dimensional website for avatars (3-D representations of you) to meet and plan, learn and be trained (see Gronstedtgroup.com). We added content to You Tube, Face Book, BlogSpot, dostang, naymz, eon, Flickr and others for building an open source textbook on marketing and marketing communications. Naturally we will be looking at more traditional means to communicate with stakeholders as well. To add value to the process will be using the most advanced computerized media, expert, trend and web tracking systems available to industry. Description and predictive systems such as Biz360 and Evolve24 used by the very top firms in the world will be tested by our graduate students. As Senior Vice President of Grainger Corporation and Senior Lecturer in Investor Relations in our Department for 14 years, Nancy Hobor, noted, “CEOs are looking for leaders who can understand and integrate the corporate stakeholders, not just customer and not just business functions.” (See Caywood in Kellogg on Advertising and Media, Calder, ed. Forthcoming).
The traditions of newsgathering and the requirements of more sophisticated management, marketing and communications are merging in this new curriculum at Medill. In part, the evidence will be in the likely renaming of the School to reflect the requirement that our school graduates, destined for the media and journalism world, will share and integrate some common values with our new undergraduate and graduate students in the IMC program. They both focus on newer technologies that deliver and drive the transfer of information. Even more important, from the value system of ethical public relations, advertising and marketing, we will be able to deliver valuable content to our most relevant; important; and socially, economically and politically crucial stakeholders.
The next generation of Medill graduates be able to identify the widest range of important stakeholders and be able to use the best of the traditional and newer media to reach them. They also will be educated and trained to use the most sophisticated statistical, analytical and insightful software to understand the customer, the media, experts, government and other stakeholders with artificial intelligence..
Over the past 16 years, this Journal has focused on a wide range of stakeholders and their impact on business and society. With the support of the new curriculum, the new connections to our colleagues and students in journalism and media, we expect to strengthen our new offerings of knowledge and skills to the market. You can hire a Medill student to do the core work of your organization but you can also count on them to bring something fresh and intelligent to help your organization achieve its goals.
The Stakeholder Curriculum of the Future Clarke L. Caywood, Ph.D. Professor and Publisher of the Journal of Integrated Marketing Communications, http://jimc.medill.northwestern.edu/JIMCWebsite/site.htm
Most of the business leaders we meet are initially curious about why the faculty and students researching, teaching and working in the field of integrated marketing communications (IMC) are in the Medill School of Journalism and not in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. The explanation is not complicated, but the question has become more common as the IMC students increasingly have been seen as business leaders with stronger financial, marketing and management knowledge and skills.
With over 115,000 people earning the MBA degree each year, the 80 plus experienced graduate students in IMC at Northwestern can be seen as even more valuable specialists with many of the same team, leadership and experience qualities. However, like any “product” in a competitive world the IMC students must possess skills and knowledge that will allow them to remove some burden from their manager or team and have knowledge and skills that their managers and other team members in their firm or agency do not know. In other words, bring something new and useful to the workplace. The competitive advantage of communications, IMC and journalism students is that they have the strongest possible knowledge and insight to the hundreds of categories of publics, audiences and stakeholders beyond the customer.
The history of the teaching of marketing communications, still called advertising and public relations, being taught in the Journalism and Communication Schools is not particularly remarkable. When the schools of journalism (Medill, Missouri, Wisconsin) were created in the very early part of the last century there was demand for educated and well trained men and women to work for newspapers. Before that time the work was not considered a role of higher education. The work included both working as reporters and editors as well as advertising specialists who filled the paper with as much advertising as they could sell and then leaving a “news hole” to fill with news content. At the same time, public relations specialists began to emerge as advisors to business leaders on how to work with the empowered media
To lead rather than follow industry and to offer newer knowledge and skills, during 2007 the Medill School of Journalism is seriously reevaluating its role in modern journalism and media. Under the direction of John Lavine as the Dean of the School (a former publisher and industry executive), the faculty and students are seeing substantial changes in the journalism curriculum. The IMC faculty have again rewritten our curriculum in the spirit of the changes in the market and academic and industry research in advertising, public relations, direct marketing, database marketing, e-commerce, communications, management and marketing.
Our most recent changes include a new core required course being developed by this writer for the class of 2008 students. The course will more fully develop the idea of “social media” as a more modern means to communicate and manage relationships with hundreds of stakeholders that impact a corporation and its employees. We have looked, of course, at the CEO use of blogs, customer blogs, pod and vodcasts. We have tested SecondLife.com as a three dimensional website for avatars (3-D representations of you) to meet and plan, learn and be trained (see Gronstedtgroup.com). We added content to You Tube, Face Book, BlogSpot, dostang, naymz, eon, Flickr and others for building an open source textbook on marketing and marketing communications. Naturally we will be looking at more traditional means to communicate with stakeholders as well. To add value to the process will be using the most advanced computerized media, expert, trend and web tracking systems available to industry. Description and predictive systems such as Biz360 and Evolve24 used by the very top firms in the world will be tested by our graduate students. As Senior Vice President of Grainger Corporation and Senior Lecturer in Investor Relations in our Department for 14 years, Nancy Hobor, noted, “CEOs are looking for leaders who can understand and integrate the corporate stakeholders, not just customer and not just business functions.” (See Caywood in Kellogg on Advertising and Media, Calder, ed. Forthcoming).
The traditions of newsgathering and the requirements of more sophisticated management, marketing and communications are merging in this new curriculum at Medill. In part, the evidence will be in the likely renaming of the School to reflect the requirement that our school graduates, destined for the media and journalism world, will share and integrate some common values with our new undergraduate and graduate students in the IMC program. They both focus on newer technologies that deliver and drive the transfer of information. Even more important, from the value system of ethical public relations, advertising and marketing, we will be able to deliver valuable content to our most relevant; important; and socially, economically and politically crucial stakeholders.
The next generation of Medill graduates be able to identify the widest range of important stakeholders and be able to use the best of the traditional and newer media to reach them. They also will be educated and trained to use the most sophisticated statistical, analytical and insightful software to understand the customer, the media, experts, government and other stakeholders with artificial intelligence..
Over the past 16 years, this Journal has focused on a wide range of stakeholders and their impact on business and society. With the support of the new curriculum, the new connections to our colleagues and students in journalism and media, we expect to strengthen our new offerings of knowledge and skills to the market. You can hire a Medill student to do the core work of your organization but you can also count on them to bring something fresh and intelligent to help your organization achieve its goals.
Fall 2007 work on "newer media" from Northwestern IMC
Readers: My graduate students at Northwestern University's IMC (Integrated Marketing Communications) Department completed some work that may interest you. They used several newer media including You Tube, Blogspot, Justin.tv, Second Life, podcasting, blogpodcasting and more to promote "from the customer and stakeholder viewd" IMC. Some sites had over a 1,000 hits in under 24 hours, some are already listed on itunes! One team used Second Life to recruit new students with the support of Medill administrators. One team became an aggregator of the new "unofficial" IMC content on their blog.
I have asked the students and faculty to consider some "newer media" challenges 1. why "giving up control" is a necessary rule about newer media in the IMC Department and in IMC practice, 2. a voluntary and self-regulated code of ethics on new media use and recording in IMC, 3. the range of legal issues on use of image, use of music, school logo etc. 4. selective and student permitted use of student work for the "official" IMC sites on newer media. 5. more resources for training students to refine their use of the newer media (a request has been presented for more on Second Life and web space access). 6. the "shocking truth" about newer media, 7. new product development by IMC students on Web 2.0 and more.
The final project for the year will be a formal Second Life presentation next week from the students. The speakers include professionals in media from this exploratory channel and medium for IMC. They will provide a training presentation on how to "ramp up" on Second Life and a real meeting with Crayon (a leading new company on Second Life that was featured in the Wall Street Journal-traditional media).
This is a selected list.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boXGK_L0ZjM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0em9-DYJBQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLPLnIzSyUg
http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=MZWAUbiT_EY&eurl=http%3A//insideimc.wordpress.com/social-media/
Blogs with a number of links may be useful to you.
http://insideimc.wordpress.com/category/northwestern/
http://nuimc.blogspot.com/2007/08/why-i-chose-imc-over-mba.html
http://medill-imc.blogspot.com/2007/11/watch-imc-students-live.html
http://whyimcatnorthwestern.blogspot.com/2007/11/here-comes-masa-medill-asian-student.html
Podcast
http://medill-imc.podomatic.com/
I have asked the students and faculty to consider some "newer media" challenges 1. why "giving up control" is a necessary rule about newer media in the IMC Department and in IMC practice, 2. a voluntary and self-regulated code of ethics on new media use and recording in IMC, 3. the range of legal issues on use of image, use of music, school logo etc. 4. selective and student permitted use of student work for the "official" IMC sites on newer media. 5. more resources for training students to refine their use of the newer media (a request has been presented for more on Second Life and web space access). 6. the "shocking truth" about newer media, 7. new product development by IMC students on Web 2.0 and more.
The final project for the year will be a formal Second Life presentation next week from the students. The speakers include professionals in media from this exploratory channel and medium for IMC. They will provide a training presentation on how to "ramp up" on Second Life and a real meeting with Crayon (a leading new company on Second Life that was featured in the Wall Street Journal-traditional media).
This is a selected list.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boXGK_L0ZjM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0em9-DYJBQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLPLnIzSyUg
http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=MZWAUbiT_EY&eurl=http%3A//insideimc.wordpress.com/social-media/
Blogs with a number of links may be useful to you.
http://insideimc.wordpress.com/category/northwestern/
http://nuimc.blogspot.com/2007/08/why-i-chose-imc-over-mba.html
http://medill-imc.blogspot.com/2007/11/watch-imc-students-live.html
http://whyimcatnorthwestern.blogspot.com/2007/11/here-comes-masa-medill-asian-student.html
Podcast
http://medill-imc.podomatic.com/
Friday, July 20, 2007
Searching for faculty in PR and Marketing
One of the advantages of being a full-time faculty member of the Medill School at Northwestern University is the intelligent mix of faculty. While it would seem to make sense that a professional school (strong career education orientation) would hire both full-time and part-time senior practitioners in the relevant fields. Naturally a research level I university would also hire individuals holding a doctoral degree emphasizing advanced research in related areas of academic study. The marketing and public relations department (Integrated Marketing Communications - IMC) has balanced this approach for a number of years to earn the respect of colleagues at other schools and the support of the NU administration. Our journalism colleagues have not succeeded in balancing the model and have found themselves in some jeopardy with the University and with their colleagues in the accreditation process. This month, the NU administration lead by President Henry Bienen and Provost Larry Dumas with Associate Provost John Margolis approved the hiring of two additional research trained and educated professors for IMC. We will offer more undergraduate education for the extraordinarily qualified NU undergraduates. One of the posts will be for a researcher and teacher in marketing and marketing communications with special knowledge of the consumer. The other post will be for a junior colleague (usually recent recipient of a doctorate) in journalism-mass communications, communications or business management. They should be able to work with senior faculty on some traditional areas of stakeholder relations, PR metrics and newer areas such as communities. As the details are written, I will post the requirements here for your review and discussion. We expect to interview for the positions at the AEJMC and AMA August 2007 meetings and through the Fall of 2007.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
What about IMC?
As Northwestern University's Medill School sorts out the future of Journalism and its business related academic and professional partners of advertising, public relations and direct database marketing we are considering expanding more business fields of study into the undergraduate program. Over 30 years ago such a program existed but the last age of excitement in Journalism (Watergate) probably helped to move the undergraduates out of "harm's way" with only a concentrated program of journalism.
In discussions about the new offerings of courses to undergraduates I note: Our undergraduate program does not show the most recent work of the IMC faculty to offer classes to J students with a certificate or "minor" for non-J students. I hope that we can secure a pre-accreditation review of our ideas so that we might push the limit more on the range of new courses offered in the IMC category to J students - especially related to the highly related field of PR. If the new courses can be listed it will help the new and current J students to see the opportunities for careers using communications. We also need data on the career paths of J undergraduate and graduate students from 1-5 years out and 6-10 and 11 and beyond.
The IMC program shows nine so-called "branding" courses (there is no sector, professional field or organization for branding) and only 5 courses in the "analytical" realm. The concept of "analytical" was not meant to differentiate qualitative from quantitative disciplines or courses. However, the sorting of them seems to suggest "hard" from "soft". In fact, the Marketing PR class listed under branding requires the use of at least two beta tested softwares to perform analysis of millions of words in messaging about a firm or organization. It is certainly analytical in its recommendations to clients such as Coca Cola, Aidmatrix and others.
We continue to have discussions about the direction of the program regarding the so-called specialties of advertising, public relations and direct marketing. Each of these academic bodies of knowledge are far, far more substantial than IMC as a field but we continue to deny that the market recognizes them as field of work. The memberships in the two leading organizations in public relations exceed 40,000, direct marketing 20,000 and advertising should be comparable. While we declare these professions "dead" the demand for junior, mid and senior level professionals still call for men and women with this knowledge and experience. We are confusing rather than serving the market of firms who hire our graduates. IMC as a self-standing field is still a "nice to have" not a "need to know" in the 21st century marketplace. This is not to say that IMC is not a leading edge example of best practices, but it is "not asked for by name". Pieces of IMC are asked for but that is another story.
We will confuse the undergraduates and their parents (and grandparents) over "what are you studying"? with IMC and we confuse the graduate market with majors in branding and analytics without any supporting work in the jobs in PR, Adv. and DDE they are hired to fill.
We need more conversation on this topic. More to come.
In discussions about the new offerings of courses to undergraduates I note: Our undergraduate program does not show the most recent work of the IMC faculty to offer classes to J students with a certificate or "minor" for non-J students. I hope that we can secure a pre-accreditation review of our ideas so that we might push the limit more on the range of new courses offered in the IMC category to J students - especially related to the highly related field of PR. If the new courses can be listed it will help the new and current J students to see the opportunities for careers using communications. We also need data on the career paths of J undergraduate and graduate students from 1-5 years out and 6-10 and 11 and beyond.
The IMC program shows nine so-called "branding" courses (there is no sector, professional field or organization for branding) and only 5 courses in the "analytical" realm. The concept of "analytical" was not meant to differentiate qualitative from quantitative disciplines or courses. However, the sorting of them seems to suggest "hard" from "soft". In fact, the Marketing PR class listed under branding requires the use of at least two beta tested softwares to perform analysis of millions of words in messaging about a firm or organization. It is certainly analytical in its recommendations to clients such as Coca Cola, Aidmatrix and others.
We continue to have discussions about the direction of the program regarding the so-called specialties of advertising, public relations and direct marketing. Each of these academic bodies of knowledge are far, far more substantial than IMC as a field but we continue to deny that the market recognizes them as field of work. The memberships in the two leading organizations in public relations exceed 40,000, direct marketing 20,000 and advertising should be comparable. While we declare these professions "dead" the demand for junior, mid and senior level professionals still call for men and women with this knowledge and experience. We are confusing rather than serving the market of firms who hire our graduates. IMC as a self-standing field is still a "nice to have" not a "need to know" in the 21st century marketplace. This is not to say that IMC is not a leading edge example of best practices, but it is "not asked for by name". Pieces of IMC are asked for but that is another story.
We will confuse the undergraduates and their parents (and grandparents) over "what are you studying"? with IMC and we confuse the graduate market with majors in branding and analytics without any supporting work in the jobs in PR, Adv. and DDE they are hired to fill.
We need more conversation on this topic. More to come.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
What is community?
The courses in my field are always changing. The crisis class I teach can use the news as a source of information and inspiration each quarter. A new class that I have been asked to organize "Community" is more of a challenge. I met briefly with Mary Lou Song (earliest employee and founding member of eBay. She has consulted on the topic of community. We plan to talk some more to help the IMC students understand the richness of the reach to various stakeholders that the newer technology provides. A long reading list starting with Surowiecki's The Wisdom on Crowds, Rheingold Smart Mobs, Tapscott and Williams on Wikinomics, Le Bon The Crowd (for perspective) and a range of books on blogging (Naked Conversations, Blog Marketing,) Ahonen and Moore on Communities Dominate Brands and a wide range of books on the digital divide seem to be related. This must be sorted out, but some history (mobs), some policy challenges (divide), some technology (InfoLab at NU), some entertainment (Fans, Bloggers and Gamers, by Jenkins) and some business need to be combined. Experiments in You Tube, blogging, podcasts, Second Life may be useful. More to come.
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