Earlier in my career, I worked for a small PR firm in Manhattan. One of my primary roles was to help our clients, mostly small colleges, identify faculty who had smart, insightful ideas. I’d write a press release or op-ed, email it to reporters who might be interested, and dial and smile, encouraging them to write a story.
How times have changed!
We live in a world of 24/7 news. Reporters and news producers use the internet to locate experts and learn about their research. When news stories break, they pounce on people who’ve already published or spoken about a topic of interest and can be found through web searches. If they seek someone with fresh insights via HARO or ProfNet, there’s only a small window of time to respond.
Now, as then, the point of all this isn’t just to land an interview. The real tell of a great PR office is what happens after an interview airs, when you have the opportunity to borrow the legitimacy a shoutout in the press confers to differentiate your institution in some way. For example, how do you use an interview with a politics professor to showcase the expertise of her department and help to recruit better students?
In sum, I’d say everything is harder these days. More news outlets. More competition for coverage. More insights in faculty research papers, videos, and presentations scattered across the internet in academic journals, news sites, social media, and personal accounts. And on campus, more complexity, especially around technology. When one of your experts appears on the news, you have to hear about it, find the interview, and embed it on your website: it’s a lot of work.
Which is why I was fascinated to learn about ExpertFile, which offers an innovative, cloud-based solution to creating and managing a campus expert center for faculty and researchers. It’a problem that has vexed just about every campus PR office I’ve ever worked with, before and after the internet came along.
ExpertFile’s Expert Marketing Platform enables PR staff or a faculty member to quickly assemble and curate an expert profile showcasing their expertise, appearances in the media, postings on social media, and other content. The profile is fully customizable to match any institutional branding and the content is easily embeddable within a .edu website. ExpertFile helps PR professionals connect their faculty experts to real-time news, increasing the interest of journalists looking for expert opinions to cite in their articles or news segments, and gaining additional visibility and exposure for the experts and their institutions. In addition to reporting and analytics capabilities, ExpertFile offers widgets that allow institutions to embed content from their own experts on their websites.
Today, I’m delighted to announce that mStoner just entered into an extensive partnership with ExpertFile. Higher ed professionals can work with our team to evaluate current faculty content on their site and optimize the ExpertFile platform. mStoner will recommend best practices for each institution and identify opportunities to integrate ExpertFile across a website: from the home page to academic department and program pages, news centers, and other areas of a website. We’ll also help successfully roll out ExpertFile on campus.
ExpertFile’s current clients include Constant Contact, State University of New York (SUNY), Pearson Education, University Health Network, ADP, and University of Ontario Institute of Technology. They’re just entering the higher ed space, but institutions that have adopted the platform are reporting significant results. Consider this, from a Canadian institution:
- More than 30 total media, speaking, student admissions and graduate student employment inquiries
- Increased print and broadcast media inquiries and coverage
- More speaking inquiries for faculty experts conferences and events
We believe that this platform offers institutions a new and better way to leverage faculty and their expertise. If you’re interested in talking to someone at mStoner about what we’re offering, contact me or Fran Zablocki. And watch this space for more news about the fruits of our partnership.
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