By Gayle Wayne
Are you wired, connected, networked? Are you blogging, videocasting, and getting your feeds on your PC, not your plate? Seen any terrific wiki blog mashups lately? Recorded your weekly podcast to staff?
Or, are you an analog administrator drowning in a digital world? Regardless of where you sit on the speeding technology train, one thing is absolutely certain – the world of communication is changing. Just watch today’s college students communicate electronically with each other if you doubt the tectonic shift under way. These people are tomorrow’s public school parents.
“When we change the way we communicate, we change society,” claims Clay Shirky in the book “Here Comes Everybody.” Think about it: newspapers are dying. More people get their news on the Internet these days than rolled up on their driveway. The cost of communicating has fallen off a cliff and the capability to reach people based on their interests and to create groups and build awareness is off the growth charts.
This is manifest in our ability, as citizens, parents, students or employees, to share, to cooperate with one another, to take collective action – all outside the framework of traditional institutions, organizations and schools – without opening our wallets.
Tools to enhance communication
If you’re using Twitter or Facebook now, already enjoined in a Professional Learning Community online, or podcasting to your troops, then you understand how they fit into your day-to-day operations. You already know these are useful communication enhancements that can add value to good school marketing/PR efforts if managed and delivered well. However, if the multitude of Web 2.0 communication tools are not on your to-do list or are not high on your “to-learn” list, here are some lessons that could change your thinking.
Our first lesson was well publicized – the integration of technology in the Obama campaign. Did you know it logged 14.5 million hours of YouTube video on political issues? This would have cost the campaign more than $47 million to purchase. Millions of e-mails went forth weekly over a year, sidestepping paper, printing and postage costs. At last public count, about 13 million voters were on the Obama e-mail list, according to the Washington Post.
We can also learn from other people’s bad news. Today, bad news about your school or district can go viral in seconds, with cell phone videos on national TV, blogging by self-appointed experts, and comment-posting by anyone with an opinion and an Internet connection. Everyone with a cell phone can be a reporter these days. When the US Air jet skidded into the Hudson River recently, Twitter had details on it well before the broadcast networks aired it.
Locally, it’s a good idea for you to realize that the “underground” of your critics can be live on the Internet in seconds, posting and e-mailing what may or may not be helpful or accurate about you as an administrator, or your school or district.
District Web sites are improving statewide, but there are still a great many that are static and tightly structured, posting lists of schools and departments, along with those board agendas and minutes that are read mainly by those who distrust you. Good news, meanwhile, languishes in printed newsletters with limited readership, often stuffed into student backpacks.
Since first appearing about five years ago, social media networking sites have become increasingly popular each year. They have overtaken pornography as the No. 1 use of the Internet, says Bill Tancer, the general manager of global research at Hitwise, a company that identifies online marketing opportunities for its clients.
More than half of the major companies surveyed by the Institute for PR Research (53 percent in 2007 and 69 percent in 2008) said blogs have changed how their companies handle external communications, while another fairly solid number (40 percent in 2007 and 45 percent in 2008) suggested this also was the case with internal communications.
The tipping point
It’s not a crisis for schools yet, but to borrow Malcolm Gladwell’s concept, we are not far from the “tipping point,” facing a social epidemic in which the old limitations of media have been radically reduced, with its power going to its audience. School administrators who find it complex and time-consuming to communicate with their constituencies in typical ways now are facing a future where these ways will be obsolete.
Just think about the new vocabulary that has developed over the past five years. “Google” is now a verb (googling), an adjective (google-type engine), and both a common and a proper noun; nine years ago it wasn’t even in the public consciousness. Unlike traditional media that limit participation, the Internet and its channels link the characteristics of empowerment with enormous scales of available information, and targets specific audiences directly.
(Think parents, critics, advocates, politicians, voters – all those with a stake in your school district – and remember that nearly all information is public information.) For a school administrator to be “too busy” or to dismiss this Web 2.0 arsenal as just a trend – (“something will replace it soon”) – may be tomorrow’s avenue for professional suicide.
The legal thicket surrounding social networking is still being explored. It is stilled banned in many places because in areas where freedom of speech and inappropriate content collide, there is risk. Despite this, the PR value of social networking is proving itself slowly in the few districts that use it. What do they do with it? What can you learn?
The payoff for schools
Seeking to find stellar examples, I conducted a rather extensive review of the tools that most professional communicators are using in industry today to sell product, build awareness, solve problems or establish a brand. Here’s where I found payoff for schools, and some learning opportunities for administrators.
Twitter: Few school districts are using it, but those that do see it as a workable, no-cost expansion to a Web presence. They use it for: announcing, reminding, refuting, informing, soliciting input (instant surveys), linking to resources, asking for solutions among like-minded followers, building communities within organizations (Professional Learning Communities) and more.
Podcasting/video collaboration: These are widespread in business, but not in school districts, or perhaps my Google search finding was sparse because those who do them keep them private. Short, effective podcasts and video archives of presentations from superintendents in particular are highly valued by the staffs in districts where they are a regular component of internal communications.
In one district where I survey staff annually, there was a 22 percent increase in positive responses regarding the effectiveness of internal communication in the year the superintendent began simple podcasting. In five-minute segments, he welcomed newcomers, defined budget issues, explained the budget cuts to diminish the expectations of staff regarding salaries, announced the end of negotiations, immediately informed the staff of the death of a popular Board member, and more. With just 15 minutes and his notes, a Mac computer, GarageBand and Audacity software and a mic, he was in business.
(For detailed directions on how to develop longer, more comprehensive podcasts made available through iTunes, see www.speedofcreativity.org/2009/10/23/how-i-create-and-publish-podcasts. For video-sharing and multipoint video collaboration and conferencing, see www.elluminate.com or www camtasia.com. To link podcasts and blogs, see http://edublogs.org.)
Facebook: Schools spent the most of this decade banning Facebook, and setting their Internet filters to outlaw its use. Things are turning around as the benefits become more obvious, and the options for privacy are better understood and more robust. You can see the benefits if you visit teacher and classroom pages. In this regard the classroom is taking the lead, and while the potential for questionable content exists, it has not stopped proponents.
Districts are using it for linking up internally, and externally setting their pages up as “fan pages” – for posting resources and running indices and links to their own Web site information, for pushing event attendance, posting award details and photos, linking to background information on critical decisions and blowing their horns.
District Web sites: Continual updating and useful well-organized content is the best way to develop a Web site that becomes the go-to, essential location for information. It is highly valuable to staff and parents. Tie its use to Google Analytics or Technorati (free analysis of Web site traffic, providing results that are both helpful and surprising to most) so you can respond to the data appropriately.
A single person with communication/PR expertise should manage it, because it is the “online face” of your school or district. Would you put your I.T. department in charge of your district recruitment brochure? Probably not, but it’s the same issue and an estimated half of district Web sites are managed solely by I.T. technicians.
There are many more opportunities for administrators who want to learn. TICAL (Technology Information Center for Administrative Leadership) is a great launch point with interactive presentations and examples, but using the technologies is different than reading about them online. They also differ in their focus, which is how they impact the classroom, not how they can enhance, or torpedo, your communication efforts.
Sign up for services like Twitter, and start following another school or school district and some of your favorite gurus. Twitter works on PCs, though not instantly like a text message on your phone. It’s still useful for learning.
It’s helpful to keep a pulse on the tech penetration in your neighborhoods so you can recognize how close you are to the “tipping point” of technological dependency for communication. Some areas are fully saturated, with a 90 percent Internet access and cell phone statistic; many are not. The digital divide is narrowing however, and many expect it to be nearly erased by 2015.
What are the costs?
We are facing the worst budget situation in decades. What are the costs? Most of the cost of Internet-dependent communication is the upfront development in design and equipment. Thereafter, it is maintenance and oversight.
Twitter is free, but its delivery options include some with charges. Designed as a mobile communication system for delivery on cell phones with text messaging capabilities, these have built-in user costs. Averages range from $5 to $15 per month, depending on how many “tweets” and text messages you receive or send. It works on PCs for free through Gmail and others, or through the browser on your desktop, but it loses the aspect of immediacy in this venue unless the user is in chat mode.
And the labor cost? For the purpose of this topic, it’s probably just you, and unfortunately, on your own time.
Which one is best? Different things for different purposes is the simple answer. You will never reach everyone unless you have them all in one place, face-to-face, which is always the best alternative. Tomorrow’s administrators will have a variety of options at their fingertips to reach target audiences quickly, graphically and wherever they are, and will have tools to know if a troubling school issue is viral locally as soon as damaging comments hit.
We are not quite there yet. New strategies, services and options for communicating are expanding and developing exponentially and at such great speed that as one pundit put it recently, “Today’s college graduate from a fine school will leave with a gold-rimmed diploma and an education with a six-month shelf life.”
References and resources
Baron, Dennis. (2009). A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution. Oxford University Press.
National School Boards Association. (2007). Creating and Connecting, Research and Guidelines on Online Social and Educational Networking. Alexandria, VA.
Shirky, Clay. (2008). Here Comes Everybody, The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. New York: The Penguin Press.
Wesch, Mike. Future of Communication. National Geographic Explorer, http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/blogwild/2009/08/mike-wesch-on-the-future-of-co.html.
Wright, Donald and Hinson, Michelle. An Analysis of the Increasing Impact of Social and Other New Media on Public Relations Practice. Institute for Public Relations, www.instituteforpr.org.
Gayle Wayne is the CEO of Management Support Services in Orange County, providing communication expertise to public agencies. She also serves the Orange County Department of Education as a technology consultant, and works for CTAP, the California Technology Assistance Project, in its support efforts to local school districts.