You Need to Go to Unigo

The New York Times recently featured a piece about Unigo and the 20-something kid who dreamed up the idea, Jordan Goldman. I immediately checked out the site, and initially had trouble getting on. It might have sensed that at my age, I had no business being on a website created and maintained by college students.

But I tried again later, and it let me in. I have two college students, for crying out loud. And a $67,000-a-year tuition payment. I deserve a break today.

What I saw in Unigo was fun and promising, a classic example of Web 2.0 — user-generated content — about to take off from the crowded Internet runway but with good genes and youthful enthusiasm bearing it aloft.

Goldman, a graduate of Wesleyan University, spent a couple of years after graduation in Europe, then returned to New York City to develop his business plan and go begging for investors. His plan worked, and today he runs an office of about 25 young people who manage Unigo and a crew of intern correspondents spread out over the nation’s colleges and reporting back in with videos, photos and updates.

The site thrives on student-written critiques of their own colleges, and already would appear to be one step ahead of those on-paper college guides we all used in the past. Here’s what Goldman says in the Times piece about his site:

“My whole family chipped in for me to go to college,” he said. “They were saving from when I was 2 or 3 years old. That the best resource for a four-year, $200,000 decision are these books — with no photos, no videos, no interactivity, only three to five pages per school on average, fully updated usually once every several years — just doesn’t make the grade. This is the most important decision people that age have ever made, and the information is just not there.”

Here’s how it works:

Each Unigo editor has a list of 10 colleges (including, always, his or her own alma mater) to oversee; their most important task may be finding an unpaid intern on each campus willing to act as a liaison and an occasional reality-checker for Unigo’s efforts. The real masterstroke, though, was the purchase of a hundred Flip video cameras, which were delivered to the on-campus interns themselves with a minimum of instructions. The results are not only vivid in a way no guidebook can match but also, in the way of the generation that produced them, often guilelessly intimate.

The point is to provide students, and presumably their parents, with an unvarnished look at real life at the colleges they’re considering — something the colleges themselves are not good at providing. Who can blame them? As a parent who drove her kids to nearly every college on the East Coast, only to find that the tours were a bit too rah-rah superficial, I’d rather check out a school on a site like Unigo before packing up the van and heading out who-knows-where. Even if that means I might be watching someone talk online about the campus suicides or the black-white divide that still exists. I’d much rather get to the truth about a place before my kids get there, rather than after they’ve moved in.

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Help a Reporter — If He Helps You First

OK, so Peter Shankman is a handsome New Yorker with a pretty interesting blog. He writes a lot about keeping in shape, so that’s cool.

But wait — Shankman has a website, helpareporter.com. Not helpareportergethisfactsstraight.com, not helpareporterwriteasentence.com, not helpareporterwithgrammar.com, and not helpareporterfindajob.com. Now there’s an idea.

No, Shankman’s site permits PR folks (and the general public, I guess) to sign up as potential “sources” reporters can query. If you sign up, you get daily emails from Shankman, who does you the big favor of sending reporter queries your way, in case you can provide sources, names, phone numbers, ideas. I guess Shankman’s playing the buff middle man between the Great Fourth Estate and the unwashed masses of PR people. His website also warns us (because God knows we’re so out of control) not to spam reporters with unrelated, baseless attempts to get our “clients” some air time or two inches in the Business section.

Here’s my question — where’s helpaPRperson.com? I dunno, but it seems to me (I “represent” public school districts in New York) that PR people need a lot more help than journalists. I’m always wondering what’s happened to the press and where they’re all hiding. I’m always searching for a warm body with the least bit of interest in education stories. As a former journalist, I know a decent story idea when I see one or pitch one. But there’s never a reporter in sight, at least not in my neck of the woods. What’s a PR person to do? Start a blog? An ENewsletter? Use the Web to manage his own message? Now there’s an idea.

BTW — if you want to helpaPRperson, you know where to find me.

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NSPRA Kicks Off

The National School Public Relations Association kicked off its 55th annual seminar today in the nation’s capital, home of George Bush and humidity. But heck — this is a great place for a conference. I’m a jaded New Yorker, so I was pleasantly surprised when I caught a cab ride from Union Station to the hotel with the friendliest cabbie I’ve ever met. What a decent fellow — we talked about the differences between the Capital Fourth and the Macy’s Fireworks display. A far cry from the screeching, hair-raising New York cab ride I experienced just the other night. I found myself praying for the safety of the subway and digging my nails into the vinyl upholstery.

Back to NSPRA, where we attended the Opening Reception and caught up with fellow school PR folks. I was delighted to finally meet NSPRA Senior Associate Carol Mowen, APR, who discovered my blog post about NSPRA and is quite the web whiz herself. She’s giving a tour of the organization’s new website on Wednesday, in case you’re here at the conference this week. If you haven’t discovered the new NSPRA site, check it out at the same web address — www.nspra.org. Carol and I spoke for a few minutes about blogs, wikis, websites, social bookmarking and social networking sites. It was fun to speak with someone whose eyes don’t glaze over when the talk turns to netspeak.

The New York contingent already had its first surreal moment when it was approached during the reception by a couple of actors portraying ultra-conservative author Anne Coulter and former Democratic prez hopeful Hillary Clinton. Wasn’t it Coulter who recently said she’d rather support Hillary than McCain? You had to see the male actor playing Ms. Coulter. Someone took a photo of him next to none other than Vicki Presser of the Scarsdale schools — and I’ve posted it here.
Tomorrow, I’m looking forward to a keynote by Wendy Puriefoy, president of the Public Education Network and a nationally recognized expert on school reform and civil society. I’m also going to cruise as many workshops as possible, but particularly Tim Carroll’s workshop, “Byte into Technology to Energize Your PR Efforts, and Gary Marx’s “Five Forces…That Will Profoundly Impact Our Future.”

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