I recently attended a conference of public relations folks from around the Southeastern Conference. It’s a great way to share thoughts, common experiences and challenges, and plan a little for how we can do more to promote our respective institutions.

Not surprisingly, despite differences in the sizes of our campuses and staffs,  the challenges we are confronting are remarkably similar.

We are grappling more each day with the diminishing size of the mainstream media that traditionally have been our bread and butter for coverage of our institutions. This dynamic poses a particularly significant challenge in promoting research. Science writers and teams have been laid off, in large numbers, at national publications. As a result, we are having to be more creative in reaching out to respected bloggers and free-lance writers, who have access to both traditional and non-traditional publications. At the same time, we are relying even more on creating our own content and the platforms from which to distribute it to tell our stories.

Increasingly, our departments are partnering more with other areas across campus, particularly with enrollment management, as we work together to build a strong brand identity for our institutions as we compete for students. What was once the province, largely, of liberal arts and private institutions — the idea of aggressively recruiting students — is now part of our daily lexicon and efforts.

Social media are transforming the way we think about our jobs and how we promote our institutions and connect with our most valuable constituencies. Perhaps more than any other place, platforms like Facebook, Twitter and others are affording us new ways to connect with vested publics and, at the same time, new challenges for communicating in a credible, transparent and resonant fashion.

These changing dynamics present both challenges and opportunities as, like many others, we face fewer resources along with an admonition to find ways to do the proverbial more with less.

And yet, those challenges, in my judgment, underscore the increasing importance of what we do in strategic communications. If universities are, as Google’s Eric Schmidt said, the key to the kind of innovation that will lead our country out of its economic malaise, strategic and thoughtful communications efforts will be a key part of that process.

How we handle some of the challenges posed by the changing media landscape will, in large part, determine our success.