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Intelligence
Get Ready for Authenticity

Intelligence

Get Ready for Authenticity

Feb 06, 2007By Michael Stoner

How do I know this? Because the term “authentic” is everywhere these days, touted in marketing articles, headlines, and exhortations from conference keynote speakers. In a time of so much hype and cynical posturing, when companies are spending millions trying to turn infants into brand loyalists, when we understand “truthiness” because we’ve experienced it—we’re all looking for real, honest, forthright expressions, from real people. Not actors or paid touts, but people just like us who tell the truth. We’re in an era when marketing and reality must be closely aligned. There are just too many ways to find out if it isn’t.

Visitors to your websites, viewers of your videos, and readers of your newsletters, magazines and viewbooks have the same expectations. They demand honest, authentic expressions, especially on the web. Not surprisingly, as organizations of all kinds have invested in delivering high-quality, relevant and increasingly authentic content on their websites, public trust in the reliability of the web as an information source has gone up, especially when that information is presented by nonprofits.

Your visitors expect web content to be genuine and to present the reality of an institution. They don’t want to see Photoshopped images of residence halls and find out that when they get to campus the dorms are mouldering. If you say that professors teach classes, they don’t expect to find graduate assistants giving lectures on quantum theory.

Student-authored content is one way to bring truth to your communications. A real student is writing those words, not a member of your Admissions office staff. This is one of the reasons why student-authored content is so popular. Put that content on a blog where real audience members can ask questions or have a dialog with the student bloggers, and that’s even better.

And what about blogging from others in the community? If your president is blogging, readers hear her voice, read her words. It’s an excellent way to convey a true sense of the administration, and provide a window into what life on campus might be like.

One warning, however: lack of authenticity has its consequences. To any readership you’ve built up, learning that the president doesn’t write those words, or that the student blogging is actually a “student,” is a disappointment. At best, it makes your readers more cynical about a person and an institution: it’s not real, it’s not authentic. At worst, it ends a potential relationship with a prospective student, parent, or donor.

The stakes are high in this year of authenticity. So, what are you doing to make sure that your communications are authentic?


  • Michael Stoner Co-Founder and Co-Owner Was I born a skeptic or did I become one as I watched the hypestorm gather during the dotcom years, recede, and congeal once more as we come to terms with our online, social, mobile world? Whatever. I'm not much interested in cutting edge but what actually works for real people in the real world. Does that make me a bad person?