The difference between print & web, + how NOT to launch a student campaign.

(This is cross-posted from my other, more local blog, Regeneration Genesee, but I thought it was applicable over here, too.)

I love my alma mater, University of Michigan – Flint. It’s a great school, a great value, and its mere presence, especially with dorms now in downtown Flint, are doing wonders for the city. I still subscribe to the e-edition of their newspaper, The Michigan Times because it’s nice to know what’s going on at the school. (I was never a fan of the paper when I went there but it’s improved a lot since then.)

Being the web geek that I am, imagine my delight when I saw a headline yesterday in the email edition of M-Times that said, “SGC tells students to ‘Blog or Shut-up’: Student Government’s mobile efforts aim to raise awareness, get responses.”

This was a great idea from the Student Government Council for a campaign that unfortunately was only half-planned and half-executed. You may not be able to read the article because their platform may make you register or something (that’s a whole ‘nother post), but in a nutshell, SGC decided that in order to raise awareness on campus of their existence and get students to voice their concerns about different issues, they’d set up a “Mobile SGC” station in a busy part of campus and bribe them with pizza to fill out a “Student Concern Form” . . .

After filling out the form, students received a t-shirt voucher, to be redeemed at the SGC office, also on the third floor in the UCEN. The t-shirts are black, and read, “Shut up or Blog,” like the maize shirts for SGC members. They are attempting to draw students to the “Student Concerns” blog connected to the SGC homepage to give students a place to voice his or her issues. LeMay said she would probably use the blog.

There are two big issues with this:

They forgot something

1) Nowhere on this article was a link to said “Student Concerns Blog.” I literally had to go to the school’s homepage, search for “student government” in the search box, and then find it on the left column of the student government page. If you are going to write about a blog or some other kind of site, you need to include a link in the article. Nobody is going to do this kind of searching. It’s your responsibility as a writer to provide appropriate links for your readers.

Since my comment M-Times redeemed themselves and added a link to the blog at the end of the article, which is good, but somebody pointed out in a comment after mine that “The printed article has the info graphic that gives a direct link to the Web site…” and I couldn’t believe that I had to remind somebody that print and internet are two different media and there is no such thing as a “direct link” in print. Can I click on a newspaper and suddenly be brought to a web site? I just tried it — all I got was ink on my fingers.

What is written for print does not always translate to the internet and vice versa. Many a print-editor-turned-internet-news-editor discovers this every day, this which is common sense to those of us in my generation that grew up knowing and being able to understand the difference.

They more than “forgot something”

2) The second is the bigger issue, which is not M-Times, it’s SGC. If you follow the link to the student concerns blog, you will see that it hasn’t been updated since November 12, 2008. (I included a screen shot because I have a feeling this will change after somebody reads this… at least I hope they will.) The very blog they’re sending students to in order to voice their concerns hasn’t been updated in four months.

SGC giving students an ultimatum to “Blog or Shut Up” when they haven’t updated their own blog in four months? Do I need to say “pot, meet kettle” here?

As I commented on the article:

[Student Government] . . . can’t raise awareness and get responses if they themselves aren’t regularly updating their content. Having a campaign to send people to a blog with its latest content at least 4 months old is a waste of energy and makes SGC look bad. Send people to a landing page with a post about the event itself, or talking about SGC in general, thanking the visitor and then asking for feedback would be more productive. Instead, they’re raising awareness of SGC how? By showing them how they’ve been slacking on not updating the very blog they want the students to read.

I thought that it was common knowledge in the blogosphere that in order to engage and keep your readers, you must keep content fresh. Nobody likes an orphaned blog. And I thought it would be common sense that if you’re going to have a campaign to raise awareness of your group (whatever it may be, not necessarily in an academic setting, mind you) and purposely send them to your blog, you would have something a little more recent than four months old, preferably something relating to the campaign that got them there in the first place.

I can’t believe that for four months SGC has had NOTHING to blog about. They’re the biggest university in Flint, they have a new chancellor, new dorms, the mayor  FINALLY stepped down, they’re getting their own sports teams, etc. Downtown Flint is in the middle of an exciting Renaissance, largely in part to the existence of the new dorms, and they can’t find anything to blog about? SGC, if you’re reading this and you need help, Problogger has a new post on “7 Ways to Keep Fresh Content Flowing“, and here’s a good one from Copyblogger on “5 Ways to Keep Your Blog Content Fresh.” There are a gazillion resources out here to help you on this vast medium called the Internet, those are just a couple.

Honestly, if Student Government wants students to go somewhere online to voice their  concerns, then a blog really isn’t the way to go, especially if it isn’t going to be regularly updated. Installing a bulletin board would be more appropriate, then students could raise their own topics and it would be more conversational. They will probably have more concerns irrelevant to whatever blog post is current … if there is one, that is. PhpBBs are easy to use and easy to moderate, I’ve used them for years and moderated many communities.

So what are the lessons learned here?

1) Writing online is not the same as writing for print. If you write online about a website, or something on a site, a link is not only appropriate but expected.

2) Keep content fresh.

3) Know your needs and which social media tools are best for them.

4) No matter how good an idea it may be, if you launch a campaign that’s only half-planned and half-executed, it comes off as looking half-assed.

What do YOU think?

Photo 1 by numstead, photo 2 by sarrazak6881.