By Russell S. Powell

You can't get far in academic PR circles these days without the conversation turning to technology and social networking. It's all the buzz: how best to exploit Facebook and MySpace for marketing purposes, what to make of Twitter. Add in the hardware: BlackBerrys, iPhones, and other ever-more-powerful and sophisticated mobile phones. Then there's YouTube, not a social-networking site per se, but a place where people flock in great numbers and share information.

It's easy to see the reasons for the excitement. With the steady decline of one of our most reliable platforms—print media—and the enormous growth and popularity of the new social-networking tools, we public-relations professionals need to adapt and incorporate the latest technology into our marketing plans. We need to be savvy about the information-gathering habits of the next generation of college students, not to mention communicate effectively with our current students and young alumni. We ignore social networking and communications technology at our peril.

I'm like most of my peers: fascinated and eager to learn, yet wary at times, and sometimes old-fashioned in my thinking. A revolution is taking place, and I would be a fool not to take part in it. But "new" does not always equal "better," and, to borrow an expression from the fading Pulp Age, it's critical that we not lose sight of the forest for the trees. Revolutions, after all, can be alternately energizing, unstoppable, and unsettling, and sometimes the wrong people get beheaded.

So count me in—with an asterisk. More and more of my work takes place in cyberspace, via the college Web site. I'm lost without my BlackBerry, use Facebook daily, and have a Twitter account (as yet little used). I am incorporating YouTube into my marketing plans. I acknowledge I have lots to learn (that, too, is in my marketing plan). But as I go forward, here are some principles I think are critical to hold on to while riding the wave of these new communications tools:

The technology is a means, not an end. Remember fax machines? Cordless (land-line) phones? They were cutting-edge technologies not so long ago. Then came e-mail, which most of us thought of as durable for years to come. Today, e-mail remains a major player in most of our communication lives. But its influence is waning among the younger crowd, supplanted by social-networking sites and texting, to the point that some institutions, such as Boston College, have dispensed with the practice of assigning e-mail accounts to entering students.

So let's not get too carried away by the current rage, or we risk squandering precious resources and falling behind when the next wave of communications tools emerge. Recent history tells us that that day may be sooner than we think.

It's not just a technology issue. The hardware and software developers, after all, are not working in a vacuum. They are responding to the needs of the end users. Part of the reason e-mail has become less popular with young people is that it has become (relatively) messy and inefficient. It takes too much time, is vulnerable to spam, and lacks immediacy.

Given the pace of technology, it is easy to feel like a dinosaur before you are 50. But what still feel to us like major improvements over previous communications tools can seem ponderous and slow to a generation that never had to deal with inconveniences like tractor feeds and dial-ups. Time is relative; a 30-second delay today feels like a lifetime to people who have become accustomed to instant messaging.

E-mail is slow and impersonal compared with social-networking sites, and phone calls require more time and effort than text messages. What does that mean for those of us in campus public relations? For one, if we choose to flood the social-networking sites with marketing messages, we likely will hasten their demise.

In thinking about ways to exploit social-networking sites, we are trying to piggyback onto a system that was not created with us in mind. The novelty of having your college contact you—whether through fellow students, an academic department, or the marketing, development, or alumni offices—will eventually wear thin when everyone in higher education is doing it (not to mention the restaurant, fashion, gaming, finance, and new-media industries, to name a few). As we consider this new opportunity for getting our messages heard, exercising some restraint and judiciousness is in our own self-interest.

In our youth-dominated culture, it's all too easy to fall victim to techno-savvy insecurity and confuse the delivery systems used to reach audiences with the audiences themselves. In our effort to stay current, we focus on the tools, sometimes obscuring their real function. Fascinating as that new iPhone is, it is inert, inanimate. Neither a mobile phone, nor an Internet search engine, nor a computer-software program will ever apply to your college or donate money to it.

Our technological insecurity can encourage false assumptions—and often negative stereotypes—about students and young alumni who use the newest Internet tools. How many times have you heard people complain, for example, that the younger generation has a short attention span? It is not meant as a compliment. It reveals a gap in understanding that no amount of immersion in technology can mask.

If we become overly fascinated or focused on the technology, we overlook some basic facts. High-school juniors and seniors, after all, are still teenagers. Technology may change radically from one generation to the next, but the human species evolves much more slowly. Tomorrow's students are neither appreciably smarter—nor less intelligent—than the previous generation. They simply operate within a different paradigm. Their basic human needs have not changed. They still are all (or most) of the things we were at a similar age: intellectually curious, socially active, trendy, vulnerable, occasionally overconfident, worthy of our respect, and in need of guidance and positive role models.

There are still just 24 hours in a day. Although it may seem that young people are permanently wired to their technology, they still eat, sleep, go to class, play sports, and gather together in real time and space. The goods that are sold online, the videos on YouTube, the entries on Wikipedia (not to mention our colleges) refer to and exist in a physical time and space. While it is true that more and more friendships form in cyberspace, they often lead to corporal connections of one kind or another, whether with photographs, phone calls, or eventually meet-ups in person.

We in academic public relations share that goal: We are not satisfied with cyberrelationships; we want prospective students to visit our campuses, meet our faculties, walk through our libraries, and enroll.

Oddly, despite our sensitivity to language in the public-relations trade, we use dreadful terms like "viral marketing" to suggest that our online efforts are the wave of the future (as long as we are the ones doing the viral marketing, and not having it done to us). Even the oft-maligned Wikipedia knows better. Here's how it describes the term:

"The buzzwords viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. … The term 'viral marketing' has also been used pejoratively to refer to stealth marketing campaigns—the unscrupulous use of 'astroturfing' (formal political, advertising, or public-relations campaigns seeking to create the impression of being spontaneous 'grass-roots' behavior) online combined with undermarket advertising in shopping centers to create the impression of spontaneous word-of-mouth enthusiasm."

Spreading viruses of any kind is hardly virtuous. Let's keep an open mind about social networking, and keep the conversation going about how best to incorporate it into our marketing plans. But our goal should be how to communicate better with our audiences, not how to infect them.

Russell Powell is a public-relations officer at Elms College, in Chicopee, Mass. He previously worked as director of public relations at Hampshire College and at Greenfield Community College, and as a consultant. He writes for On Message, our column on career issues in academic public relations. If you would like to write for the column, send your ideas to careers@chronicle.com.