The struggles of print media to adapt to the Internet age have been well documented. The implications of the Web for campus public-relations officers, in contrast, have received scant attention. But our day of reckoning has come.
We have two main issues to consider: Our Web sites represent a potent delivery system for disseminating stories about our institutions. Conversely, the gradual demise of daily newspapers means that we have fewer traditional opportunities to publicize our work.
But many public-relations officers have been slow to exploit the potential of the Internet. The programming language used to create a Web site's infrastructure is foreign to most of us. The Web has been seen primarily in academe as a recruitment tool, a forum for faculty and staff members, and a way to connect with alumni. It is all of those things, and more.
But the Web's proper role in campus marketing is still emerging. As we work to define it, the history of the technology suggests that what we know today may become passé tomorrow. Our goal, then, should be less about codifying new practices than about tapping equally into our experience and imagination.
The Web site as publication. For now, if the Web site is, as some suggest, simply a sophisticated electronic publication, we've ceded some editorial authority to the technicians, because we haven't fully grasped its capabilities and limitations. A casual survey of college Web sites suggests that basic editorial and design principles are sometimes compromised on the Web. That's because we think we have no choice, perhaps, or simply lack understanding of the technical implications of our desires.
The Web does require a distinctive approach — as watercolor does to pen and ink, poetry to prose, viewbook to press release. It's a unique medium, with its own rules, advantages, and disadvantages. For example, we know that the current state of the art favors sans-serif over serif fonts, for readability. The size of the screen and the browsing habits of visitors require minimal text, with a premium on clear and concise language.
The apparent simplicity is deceptive, however, because the Internet allows unprecedented opportunities to store and categorize information. Editors must learn to organize and manage a complex system of connections to, and from, other pages within the "book." Despite the general spareness of text, a campus Web site also requires occasional redundancy, since visitors can land on any page at any time and don't want to hunt for basic contact information. The Web merges our traditional ideas of print and electronic media, offering movement and sound in addition to artwork and text. Yet it is much more than an amalgamation of those parts.
Technology offers a new and improved means of communication that must, ultimately, serve editorial ends. Like any good publication, an effective college Web site needs to be clean-looking and attractive. It must not drown the visitor in its sea of information; it has to breathe, with adequate white space and judicious artwork. As in traditional print media, an editorial hierarchy must be established and maintained on the Web to help visitors assimilate and make sense of diverse news and information.
The first wave of college Web sites was primarily a migration of the catalog — a dry, straightforward document detailing policies and programs. The technology was so new and exciting at the time that it was enough to have a presence on the Web, without tailoring the content to meet the evolving needs of the medium or the audience. To this day, the language on many campus Web sites remains flat and formal, especially, ironically, when describing academic programs. Marketing language nominally intended for media-savvy 17-year-olds and their parents is often generic and limited to the college's home and admission pages.
As more and more colleges devote major resources to upgrade their sites, many continue to confuse quantity with quality. The sites are crowded with images and information. They take editorial shortcuts, settling for static hyperlinks where headlines are in order. They use the bells and whistles of the new technology in unimaginative ways: In a video of a student talking about the college, for example, he recites the exact points that would have been made in text.
While many decisions about campus Web sites fall to editors and graphic designers, it is becoming more and more crucial for college public-relations officers to be centrally involved, too. Web sites provide an instant, if detailed, snapshot of your institution. The site attracts hundreds, if not thousands, of unknown visitors each week, from prospects to the general public. A journalist on the other end of your telephone call may be browsing your site as you are talking, making judgments about the quality of your institution and, by inference, your pitch. With all of your audiences, it is essential that the Web site create a strong first impression.
News sources and consumers. Another reason that PR officers must be directly involved in their college's Web site is to adapt to the realities of the revolution among consumers and their news sources. On the one hand, the news hole in traditional print media is shrinking. When I started out in college media relations, The Boston Globe on Sundays devoted an entire section to education. Even the local daily serving the Amherst, Mass., area, home to the Five Colleges (Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts), assigned a full-time reporter to education.
Those days are history. Education receives less coverage today, and it can appear randomly, in different sections of the newspaper, or segmented by locality. (For example, much of the news about my institution, Elms College, in Chicopee, Mass., appears not in the regional daily newspaper, but only in a weekly local insert.) The most creative press release or resourceful pitch you make cannot change those facts.
Yet that has not dulled the public's hunger for news — it merely influences the delivery systems. Your Web site's audience is growing daily, but it is self-selective. We need to continually find ways to increase traffic to our sites. But we had better be ready to provide the information that visitors seek. Your college's site should no longer be viewed as a secondary outlet for publicizing campus news and events. It demands as much thought and attention as your outreach to the traditional news media.
A Web site is a moving target. It is never done. Here at Elms, we have been working on a new site for more than a year and still are not ready to launch. Elms is a small college, but there are more than 2,000 pages to be written, designed, and interconnected. Determining the best navigation, getting approvals for copy, sorting through the implications of design decisions (from headline size to column widths), working out technical bugs, and writing student and alumni profiles take careful deliberation, lots of time, and many people.
We are all learning, making it up as we go, borrowing from sites we like, tailoring solutions to our particular circumstances, testing new ideas. It's common sense to consult individual departments on the campus for guidance on their sections of the site. But that process has its limits. If those of us in marketing and public relations are still trying to figure out the Web, why would we expect someone whose main expertise is teaching mathematics, or overseeing residential life, to have the answers?
It is up to us to do the heavy lifting — determining how best to take advantage of this multidimensional communications technology rather than expecting others to lead the way. If we want those thousands of visitors to our site to leave with a positive impression, we've got to anticipate their needs and make it easy for them to find what they need.
As we forge ahead, here are some general guidelines:
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Simplify without being simplistic. A Web site is a vast store of information, but it is accessed at the visitor's discretion, and the speed and ease of the medium encourage a short attention span. Whether you are writing about psychology or accounting, make it relevant to your reader. But get to the point quickly, or your intended audience will move on.
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Don't make work. The text may be minimalist, but some things bear repeating again and again. It may run counter to your editorial instincts to include the area code in every phone number on every page, for example, but not to do so risks frustrating or alienating the visitor who does not already know it.
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Set priorities. Not all news is equal, and visitors to your Web site appreciate some guidance in clarifying, organizing, and ordering information. For campus news and events, that means writing unique copy stripped of extraneous information, with distinctive headlines, rather than relying on static, uniform hyperlinks to existing press releases.
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Be nimble. A Web site, and the technology that supports it, is not a destination. It is a continually evolving enterprise. Today's best practices must continually be refined and re-examined. We need to keep pace and match the Web's agility in our own thinking about how best to use it.
The ultimate success of your college's Web site is not the number of one-time visitors it attracts, but the number of its repeat users. It should make people want to come back because it is informative, dynamic, and stimulating. It should project the intellectual and cultural vitality of the college, in all its facets.
That is, indeed, the domain of public relations.
