My New York State School Boards Presentation

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I presented this weekend at the annual New York State School Boards conference, held at the Sheraton Hotel and Towers in Manhattan. It was a great, receptive group, although (and this happens often) a few faces were quizzical and downright skeptical. Nevertheless, there were many questions from the standing-room-only audience and I truly appreciate the interested many people have in Web 2.0 and social media.
School leaders are always a tough sell, but I’ve noticed a dramatic difference in the way everyone has become a bit more willing to suspend their disbelief about PR tools like Facebook and Twitter.
If you’d like to take a look, my presentation, Communicating in a Web 2.0 World, is available on my Slideshare page.

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Issuu – An Awesome App for Publications

In preparing for a presentation next week, I was trolling around for some interesting new Web 2.0 applications designed specifically around publishing and publications.

I stumbled upon Issuu (pronounced “Issue”, and tried it out. This free website makes it possible for you to download any publication you’ve created from your hard drive, which Issuu then displays on your homepage and turns your clunky PDF publication into an interactive digital publication. You can zoom in, use the right and left arrows to turn pages, and view your publication in a variety of ways.

What’s more, you can use Issuu as a library, storing all your publications and adding favorites from a growing library of other publications, all categorized by interest. The best part of using Issuu is the fact that once your publication is converted, you can then post or embed your publication anywhere online, including on your blog, website, Facebook, MySpace, etc. Issuu also provfides viewer statistics about your publication.

To test it out, I uploaded a recent Budget Book my office created, which now lives on the shelves in my Issuu library but also has been embedded on our organization’s website. Issuu provides you with detailed how-to videos as well.

This is an awesome app that I intend to use frequently.

Working with Scribd…

I have a presentation coming up on Thursday about using social media, and thought I’d root around in Scribd to see how it all works. I’ve heard a lot about how easy is makes work and blogging. The first thing I did was upload the PDF of an article I wrote last year that recently won an Excellence in Writing Award from the National School PR Association, and just accomplished that. It means my article is now online for everyone to see, complete with tags. But I also noticed an “embed code” for the document, which allows you to place it on your blog. So let’s see if this works! Very cool!

NSPRA Award Winning Article – Upload a Document to Scribd
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Tom Gould Says, “Tame the Beast”

More from NSPRA, where I attended a workshop by Tom Gould, Public Information Officer for the Oyster Bay-East Norwich Schools on Long Island. Tom’s workshop about self-publishing online showed school PR professionals and school leaders how they can manage their own messages by using Microsoft Word or Publisher to design their own online news pages. Tom starts several stories about his District on the front page of his online District newsletter, the Observer, then uses hyperlinks to take readers to the full stories inside.
Tom also showed us videos he produces and which appear on the District website and then are loaded onto YouTube. His superintendent of schools appears in the videos, which are useful ways to discuss ongoing issues or simply to let the public know what’s coming up in the District.
I have a screenshot of Tom’s enewsletter here or you can find it online here.

I am also embedding an example of one of his District videos, in case you’d like to see how he does it.


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Paper or Digital?

For as long as I’ve been doing PR work for school districts, people have asked me whether they should publish on paper or digitally. And that question comes up more frequently now, of course. All you have to do is watch the newspaper business in this nation to understand how important it is to evolve. The nation is rapidly going digital, and if you’re not keeping up, you’re falling behind.

Nevertheless, I still meet many people in the course of my life who buy their local newspaper at the same deli or newsstand that’s served them for the last 30 years, people who don’t know very much about the Internet, and still more people (even colleagues) who say that if it’s not on paper, they’re not going to see it. Yikes!

So if you’re a school official still struggling with the paper vs. digital divide, you might be able to satisfy all your constituents — parents, students, community members, senior citizens — by offering them news from your school district both ways. It’s Web 2.0, folks, and so many free content creation websites exist that you can create a digital newsletter in very little time, shoot it out to the public via email, and still print (but maybe a smaller print run?) a traditional newsletter.

I recently gave a few such Web 2.0 tools a test run, and found one I like from Letterpop, a newsletter creation website that provides you with tons of potential templates, allows you to load photos, write captions, produce a multi-page newsletter. When you’re done, you can simply publish the newsletter and provide constituents with the URL. Voila.

At the moment, I’m using Letterpop to create an online tip sheet that I’m using as a speaker at the National School Public Relations Assocation conference in July. The tip sheet needs to be one page and my topic is: “School PR and Social Media.” So I’m definitely not giving everyone a paper handout (although the conference organizers are). As an alternative, I’m providing everyone with an online tip sheet, complete with built-in links.

Here’s what my tip sheet looks like so far. When it’s done, I’ll provide a link.

Using Google Docs

We have been using Google Docs in my office recently, particularly because my staff and I all write a gazillion profiles of individuals retiring from our organization, in preparation for our annual Retirement Reception. It’s a great tool because it keeps me up-to-date on everyone’s progress, and permits me to easily go in at any time to edit or write profiles. My secretary, the hard-working and intelligent Doreen, also can keep track.
Creating and storing your documents (this includes docs that work and look just like MS Word, Powerpoint and Excel files) on Google Docs means they’re stored online. That also means they can’t be deleted from your hard drive and that you can open them from any computer. No more flash drives, CDs for storage, or losing all your documents when you get a computer virus or when your computer goes kaput. Everything in Google Docs is secure and password-protected, but you also can invite “collaborators” (people who can edit and open your documents) or “viewers” (those who can only read them).
Here’s what Melinda Miller of Willard, Mo., an elementary school principal and author of The Principal Blog, says about her use of Google Docs:

* I started downloading everything that came as an attachment into google docs first and then save it also in whatever file I needed to. Other principals in my district and I send official documents back and forth for editing but they haven’t bought into google docs yet.
* PTO Notes – I type up monthly PTO notes for my PTO meetings regardless of whether I can be there or not. Instead of posting these in the teachers lounge or making a copy for each teacher, I “publish” the notes and then send a link to the teachers to read. I could still post one copy in the work room but I forget.
* End of the year checklist – Instead of giving all the teachers a copy of the end of the year checklist to lose, I just downloaded it to google docs, “published” it, and then sent them a link. I really just want them to have a copy to refer to and then I will give them a final copy but this is better than copying a lot of times. They can just refer to it until closer to the end of the year.
* End of year info – The end of the year comes at us so fast that I thought I would also type up some “helpful info” and send it as a document as well. This one is a work in progress and I told them that I would be adding to it and not to make a bunch of copies but to just save the link and refer back to it. (I don’t think they have even explored delicious yet.)

Try using Google Docs. Go to docs.google.com and open a free account and just start. It’s worth it and I can almost guarantee that it will save your sanity. Once you’ve mastered using it, sign up your colleagues. It’s an efficient way to share and communicate. If you’re still a bit reluctant, take the Google Docs tour first.

Write, Create, and Collaborate Online

If you’re still attaching Word documents to emails, sending them back and forth between you and the superintendent, business official or principals you represent, you’re bogged down in emails and attachments. And which version is the right one? With online writing and collaborating software like Google Docs and Writewith, you can work collaboratively on any document from any computer. You can simply go into your mutual Google Docs folder and work. And most online software applications permit you both to see and track any revisions. The best way to illustrate how Google Docs works is with this video from the clever folks at Commoncraft.com:

Today I Presented…

…a two-hour workshop for the Westchester Rockland School Public Relations Association on social bookmarking, online press releases, eNewsletters, blogs and Web 2.0 in general. We discovered Facebook as a group, online collaboration and networking, Google Docs, and a host of other tools that we hope to begin implementing. Already, my small staff is jazzed about this and we’re starting small. We are responsible every year for writing profiles of our organization’s retirees, and those profiles are published in our newsletters and are used by our District Superintendent for his annual tribute to our retirees at a June Reception. We will work as a team this year, sharing our profiles via Google Docs and tracking our progress as we struggle through some 20 profiles.

I really do want to share the presentation with the world, so feel free to take a look. Enjoy, learn something and whatever you do, catch that train before it leaves the station.