Today's blog is posted by Jerry Johnson, executive vice president at Brodeur Partners.

Late last fall, reporter Amanda Ripley wrote an article for TIME magazine with the ominous title “College is Dead. Long Live College!” It was the latest in a long litany of articles by reporters and pundits who have been doing a lot of rethinking lately about the institution long known as “the academy.”

Is the “academy” losing its relevancy? There’s evidence this may be the case with groups important to its future, notably parents, students, alumni and opinion leaders.

We’ve worked on numerous research projects with groups of people both inside and outside colleges and universities across the country. Everything suggests higher education faces significant challenges in three areas: financial, technological and institutional relevance.

Is the academy financially relevant? This question is being asked by both students and parents facing skyrocketing tuitions as well by alumni who, in light of the ever-increasing pressure for giving, are rethinking the utility of both annual giving and capital campaigns. Tuitions at many schools are out of the reach of the average family. That, in turn, has led to an unprecedented (and unsustainable) level of personal tuition loan debt. A recently released survey by The Princeton Review suggest that while in years past people’s primary worry was getting into the “right school,” today the primary worry is how to pay for whatever school you get in to.

On the other side of graduation, the academy is facing headwinds from alumni. The competition for gifts to “good causes” among affluent alumni is increasing. Moreover, the younger Gen X and Gen Y alumni show distinctly different attitudes and giving patterns to giving compared to their boomer counterparts. Add to this the declining government funding, and there are many nervous development officers wondering where the next funding dollar is going to come from.

Is the academy technologically relevant? Technology is fundamentally changing the academy the same way it changed the business of news media over a decade ago. As popular New York Times columnist wrote in a piece titled “The Campus Tsunami,” “what happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen in higher education: a scrambling around the Web.”

Why go to a university when one can get a considerable amount of instruction on the Internet for free? Indeed, the global demand for access to knowledge and the emerging opportunities for innovative technology to deliver it presage dramatic changes in “the academy’s” value proposition. Innovations like Kahn University and the explosion of MOOCs are just the beginnings of what will likely be very fundamental structural changes.

Is the academy institutionally relevant? Perhaps the biggest challenge is an uptick of people questioning the very being of the academy. Rightly or wrongly, almost every important audience we talk to – particularly employers and opinion leaders – are seeing a “profound disconnect” between what young people are learning and the world they’re going into. As one public policy executive told us, “The public institutions are in a crisis of declining public support … they’ve been slow to come to the reality that this decline is permanent.”

We don’t think it has to be. Amidst all this, we do see many colleges and universities successfully navigating a critical time of change. They have at least three things in common.

First, they are taking risks and taking action. The challenges of financing and technology will not change over the short- and medium-term. Institutions are experimenting, innovating and taking needed risks to restructure funding and curriculum.

Second, many of the best institutions are focusing as much in the “how” as the “what.” With the commoditization of information, the premium for the education experience increasingly will go beyond the lecture hall and into the streets.

Finally, we see colleges and universities rethinking, restructuring and rebuilding their ties to key communities – everything from students and parents to alumni to the towns and business sectors that they serve.

Those within “the academy” that best navigate the “digital disruption” taking place in education will be those who are most likely to be relevant to the students and alumni of tomorrow.

This blog was written by Jeffrey F. Rayport who is a member of the Brodeur Partners Advisory Board, a noted digital strategist and private equity investor. He was formerly on the faculty of the Harvard Business School.

Recently, I had the privilege of moderating a conference of global entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in Mumbai — an event called Founders Forum India. Founders Forum is a franchise started by two successful UK-based entrepreneurs, Brent Hoberman and Jonnie Goodwin, to stimulate US-style entrepreneurship in the European region, and now around the world. The event brought together some 250 entrepreneurs and investors for a series of panels, round tables, and a business plan competition. It also featured a showcase of hot new Indian start-ups.

What the event made clear — beyond the striking array of talent in the room assembled by our Indian host, Reliance Group’s Rajesh Sawhney — was a stunningly bright future for all things digital in India. Indeed, practically any statistic you might cite about Digital India suggests that something unusual is going on. And the impact will occur in the next 24 to 36 months, based on the following data and projections:

Let’s start with Internet access. Today, India’s population of Internet users is 80 million, which equals a penetration rate of just seven percent (or 17 percent of the urban population). That is about to change. The government is rolling out what it calls its National Broadband Plan, a $4.5 billion initiative to build a country-wide fiber optic network that will connect an additional 160 million Indians by 2014. An Indian investment bank, Avendus, projects 376 million Indian Net users by 2015.

Part of what’s fueling growth in Net penetration is an explosion in mobility. The Indian government sponsored the introduction of 3G services in 2011 with a $30 billion spectrum auction. Morgan Stanley projects that 3G penetration will reach 22 percent by 2015. Government and the private sector have spent something like $55 billion on related infrastructure. Further, we’ll see a roll-out of 4G wireless services across the country in 2012. While there are nearly 800 million mobile subscribers in India, very few use smart phones; most have feature phones that deliver, at best, premium text-based services. As unit economics enable ever cheaper smart phones (the lowest price in the market is now $65), their penetration will rise.

Fueling this explosion is a fact of national culture: Indians love media. No one aware of the nation’s obsession with “ABC” (Astrology, Bollywood, and Cricket) will be surprised to learn that the average Indian consumes 4.5 hours of media and entertainment a day, while 70 percent of the national population spends money on content, both online and off. Time spent online already comes to 40 minutes per capita per day.

Mobility will drive much of the expansion in Internet usage. One of every four Internet users in the country now accesses the Net using a mobile device. A leapfrog effect will mean that three of every four Net users will do so by 2015. Bye-bye to the clunkier and more costly PC.

One result of this expansion is that e-commerce is rapidly taking off. Granted, only 11 percent of Indian online users are transacting online. As in China several years ago, there’s a reluctance to pay for goods using the Web; most of today’s online transactions are in the travel industry (representing 87 percent of a $6.3 billion e-commerce sector, says Avendus). Still, Amazon lookalike Infibeam is growing sales handily. It’s a reflection of what’s happening in the domestic retail space more broadly. Infibeam’s founder projects growth of the retail economy from $400 billion today to $1 trillion by the end of the decade. Digital will inevitably play a starring role in propelling this growth.

At the same time, there is an abundance of local capital ready to deploy to feed new ventures. Consumer demand for innovative digital services, when executed ably, seems unquenchable; and that demand is stimulating capital flows. For this reason, one entrepreneur observed, “More companies [in India] die of indigestion than of starvation.” According to Mergermarket, the value of investment activity rose from $111 million in 2010 to $829 million in 2011, while the number of deals doubled from 33 to 66. This expansion isn’t just domestic. Indian entrepreneurs are feeling bullish about global markets. One publicly traded company, OnMobile, an operator of premium SMS services, now does business in 52 countries around the world.

Growing confidence among Indian entrepreneurs is related to one other market attribute: Indian consumers are extraordinarily demanding. Many at the conference articulated the idea simply. As they say in Manhattan, the Mumbai crowd averred, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”

Yes, there are challenges. There are at least 16 languages spoken throughout the country. There’s the question of how to develop robust legal, regulatory, and financial infrastructure (including payment systems). There’s the problem of sound policing of intellectual property rights. There’s an aversion to subscription-based offerings. And, as ever, there’s something else you cannot ignore: executional risk.

But it was hard for me, from a moderator’s perch, not to feel exhilarated by the dramatic upside for Digital India. The subcontinent seems on the cusp of amazing developments, only beginning with broadband Net access, high-speed mobility, and e-commerce. The idea that India — with its scale, its energy, its consumers — could become a digital laboratory and growth engine for the world struck me as both likely and inspiring.

Given that, is it any wonder many who attended the conference regard India’s digital opportunity in the next few years as greater than China’s?

While e-books are growing in popularity, they represent only 8% of all books sold today. Sales will continue to climb as new concepts hit the market like the iPad-based Official Stoker Family Edition of Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula.

• Can’t read a page because it’s too dark? Light a candle, then move it closer to the text.
• A heavy gravestone slab is blocking your path… so… drag it and listen as the stone scrapes and moves away.
• As Stoker describes Lucy being hypnotized, she appears in illustrated form, eyes open. Move your finger across her face and she falls into a trance.
• Press the tip of a transfusion needle and blood flows through the tube.
• Tilt the iPad and a character’s face changes from glorious to macabre.
• Blow leaves off a tombstone so you can read the text beneath.

Snow falling across the page…Touch an envelope and out comes a handwritten letter…Press a (blood) red word and it launches you to a just-received telegram…Rats scramble across the page… Open the window of an insane asylum and peer inside…Unlock a mausoleum’s door with a key…Feed sugar to flies as they buzz across a page.

• The entire 1922 film Nosferatu, based on the 1897 Bram Stoker Dracula
• The entire Orson Welles radio adaptation of Dracula
• The death certificate of Bram Stoker

As I watched The Office the other night (missing its original cleverness & quirkiness), I wondered: what’s jumping the shark in the world of tech?

But what’s jumping the shark before our eyes? Consider the following candidates - some are unquestionably declining; others remain arguable in their pending sharkiness :

There was steady chatter from 2007 through 2009 about the potential death of PR. Social media - the new game in town – might make PR irrelevant. Companies and organizations could now go direct, building their own conversations, communities and visibility.

Like many others, I shared my points of view along the way via blogs like Pitching is passé, What PR isn’t and Tired, faded and dead PR words.

But true public relations practice isn’t publicity. It’s much broader, taking into account every stakeholder (or “public”) with which an organization interacts: 

Strategically practiced, PR takes on a wide-ranging role, focused on earning a trusted reputation by acting in the best interests of these publics – not the organization’s own myopic agenda.

Social media is the latest expression of relationship building (a two-way model that’s far more inclusive and participative); other exciting new iterations will follow. Solis and Breakenridge were right, we’re the industry in the best position to “put the public back in public relations” and keep it there by never staying put.

Wednesday I experienced a cool one-two punch: Enterprise 2.0 & Vinnie Mirchandani.

If you’re not familiar with Vinnie Mirchandani, he’s a former Gartner analyst, active blogger and author of “The New Polymath.”

Vinnie said the characteristics of E2.0 organizations are these:

He believes “polymathing” (if I can turn it into a verb) is the key to innovation because it encourages curiosity and “an openness to accept ideas from left field.” It also triggers the “building of widely-rounded enterprises” that are more adept at discovering new markets and technologies. Polymath thinking is helping our world tackle and resolve the “grand challenges” of our day.

Vinnie believes the world of E2.0 is creating a need for more “black swan” public relations as crises reveal themselves instantly and spread more virally than ever before. “Look no further than BP and Toyota,” he said, “it could happen to any of you.”

For communications professionals, branding gurus and PR experts, there are five takeaways:

5.  Good communications starts internally, not externally. Engage and empower your employees first – start there. Adopting new enterprise 2.0 technologies will help. 

4.  The functions of communications/branding/PR no longer reside within the confines of a “department.” These walls are breaking down and should keep breaking down.

3.  Communications 2.0 must be holistic, embracing the entire organization and all stakeholders. Communication experts can strategize, monitor and help shape, but “non-communication experts” will positively contribute to brand enhancement when properly engaged.  

2.  Transparency remains a vital idea, not a cliché. Top-down autocracy is dead. Two-way communication triggers curiosity and fresh ideas.

1.  Public relations is in an ideal position to catalyze this historic change. Remember what Vinnie said: the world of enterprise 2.0 is defined by organizations that are “people-centric,” “globally well-connected,” “advocates for transparency” and “media/PR savvy.” That’s us, right? 

Checkmate readers are corporate communications, branding and public relations professionals. They’re Independents, Republicans and Democrats. There might even be a few Libertarians in the mix too.

1. Crisp, consistent messaging still rules - Obama started off his campaign with “change” and “hope” and stuck with it until the end. McCain, by contrast, embraced multiple messaging points, particularly in the last month of the campaign. Maverick. Country first. Fighter. Experienced. Leader. Independent. Straight talker.
2. Social media changed the ballgame forevermore - both candidates embraced social media. They both understood its power to engage, mobilize and raise gobs of money. Obama had more success, yes, but they both leveraged it. There’s no going back.
3. The big three got bigger – Facebook, YouTube and Twitter emerged as vital strategies. Obama’s Facebook network exceeded two million and McCain’s was nearly 600,000. Obama's YouTube presence was five times greater than McCain's, including subscribers and videos.Obama has over 118,107 Twitter followers to McCain's 4,942.
4. Traditional TV was still king – although millions were spent online, the big bucks went to the “it’s so yesterday” boob-tube. Obama spent more than $100 million alone; his half-hour infomercials exceeded $3 million.
5. Storytelling works – prior presidential elections used this technique, but in ‘08, it was more popular than ever. Tales were told through colorful characters, from Joe the Plumber to the 106-year old lady. Proving the value of storytelling, the latter example was used in the very last speech of the campaign by Obama Tuesday night.
6. Soundbites stick – people remember a few oft-repeated phrases and slogans. Hockey Mom. Joe Six-Pack. Maverick. Socialist. Lipstick on a pit bull. Soundbites are not only vividly recalled, they also shape our perceptions and opinions.
7. Teleprompters are double-edged –yes, they improve delivery but teleprompters can also create a false sense of reality. Sara Palin, for example, did a terrific job at her coming-out-party speech at the RNC, but subsequent interviews created the impression she was effective when controlled and scripted, but less so in impromptu conversations.
8. Body language matters –the Town Hall debates helped shape public opinion when people had the chance to see the candidate in more natural settings. Voters repeatedly stressed Obama’s calm demeanor. Polls revealed McCain came across erratic and less even-tempered.
9. Repetition works – both candidates understood the benefit of repetition. No new taxes. Yes we can. Essential points have to be emphasized over and over to break through and stick.
10. Great Web sites are part of a larger conversation – official campaign Web sites were vital but only one element in a much broader conversation that took place online, in real-time, everywhere. News, ad campaigns, campaign accusations and rebuttals broke on YouTube, Twitter and social news sites long before they appeared on mainstream media. The debate was shaped online.

We call them cell phones, but they’re also little text machines. Now it’s official: Americans are doing more texting on them than talking. Youngsters 13-17 are leading the charge, with the 18-24s right behind them, says a Nielsen Mobile survey. Only at age 45 and beyond do calls still outnumber texts.

Then why so much texting? My guesses:

• Kids are texting when talking is impractical, like in class, like when parents are “over shoulder,” like when they’re in a group and want to have a back-channel conversation. OMG, cn u b leev she’s wearing that?
•  Texting is convenient. You don’t have to “answer” it like you do a ringing phone, so we’re texting a lot for the same reason we email a lot.
•  Texting is polite. Rather than interrupt someone’s meeting, sleep or vacation, you can quietly send a text.
•  Texting doesn’t tie up the phone, so you if you have fast fingers, you can carry on multilateral conversations not just bilateral ones.
• Texting makes driving exciting.

What does hyper texting mean for business? Well, phones with QWERTY keyboards are no longer status symbols; they’re standard tools for anyone who interacts with a team or customer base. If you’re not texting, it’s time to learn. And if you’re texting on a phone-style 0-9 keypad, you really should think about upgrading.  

For communications and branding, the ascendancy of text means words still have a central place in a world dominated by images and icons. Just remember to kp it brf.