The Three P's

Burst of energy after a long week heading up to the first Fayetteville football game, but this one came to me in the customary place -- the shower -- this morning.

Our jobs are radically changing, but I see the new roles emerging for the college sports publicity expert falling into three areas:

Promotion -- Protection -- Preservation

Uh, where's the publicity? It's a mind-set that I'm afraid is trapping the current best of practice in the old "SID" world. Going out and seeking publicity, frankly, isn't that hard. Working the phones, writing a few press releases -- that's very 20th century now.

I'm favoring promotion. Creating the publicity release remains a staple, but one has to be ready to promote the story within your own media vehicles, get it to your traditional media followers, cross index and link it within social media settings.

The publicity message may be written, but it's likely encompassing of two or more media formats -- visual still, visual motion, audio, streaming, data form.

Last night, I had management of the two Twitter feeds and a live blog. At the same time, I needed to be ready to finish our "AP" style game story, create and link to it our statistical reports and presentations (the data), coordinate with our video folks for the postgame capture of the coach's press conference, link it with the replays of the game in audio and video, PLUS send out links to participatory media sites, email some of this material to legacy media groups.

Today I needed to make sure we were moving forward with our youth initiative by getting in coloring entries and pushing out the new ones, check with my graphic art student about the next wallpapers for this week's game.

All of this in pursuit of promoting our football team. A long way from writing the game story and faxing a box score.

What about protect? Here's the traditional public relations director part of our jobs that we have not done as aggressive a job in promoting the skill set associated with a trained media director. It is the obvious -- protecting the integrity of the brand you work with, having crisis plans ready and being willing to use them, having a sense of the public by using metrics to gather meta data but also an ability to sort that for the relevant anecdotal evidence.

This is one reason why I created the panel at this past summer's CoSIDA Convention with Lou Marciani from National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security. The SIDs were on the outside of the Incident Command looking in, and I hope there are some other members of our profession who will volunteer to staff up a CoSIDA committee on this very important part of our jobs.

To that end -- how many of you are involved right now in your institutions' H1N1 business continuation plans, FEMA or campus mandate emergency plans?

The last P could be the longest lasting because if we don't Preserve the records, the images, the data, the recordings of our institution's activities; we will wake up one day in the future and discover that the legacy of a great event or moment has literally disappeared.

Everything we do is some mix of these 3 Ps -- usually it's in the order above, but get into crisis mode and promotion can take a fast back seat to protection and preservation.

As usual, the board is open for comments.