Working three years in the Luther College Public Information Office gave me experience with and training in the art of marketing and public relations, the art of making your company or employer look really good. When EPals.com's cloud-nine press releases kept coming up in my searches for reviews of the site, I knew that people on their marketing team were doing their job while - at the same time - making my job as a reviewer much more difficult.
Article: Fash, Sandy. (2009). Epals honored with two 2009 EDDIE awards from ComputED Learning Center. Retrieved from http://www.cblohm.com/news/ePals/EP_091008/index.html.
Article synopsis: The article announced the two awards recently received by Epals for EPals.com and In2Books. In2Books, the site's literacy e-mentoring program, received the Annual Education Softward Review Award (EDDIES) for Best Language Arts Web Site for Early Elementary from the ComputED Learning Center, and EPals.com received the same award for Best Internet Communication Website in the Multi-Level category. The awards have been given for fourteen years and were chosen from an international applicant pool, awarding "innovative and content-rich programs and Web sites that provide parents and teachers with the technology to foster educational excellence."
The "Resource Review" verdict: Given the source of the article, it is to be understood that the primary purpose of the article is to help enhance EPals.com's image and credibility, providing affirmations of the overall ethos associated with it. Rather than news only being sent to those sites associated with education and collaborative learning, internal marketing seeks a wide reach in its consumer population in order to make people aware of the website and wow audiences with its prestige. The article discussed elements of In2Books that supports how it increases literacy and provides excerpts from the judges' comments, such as, "In2Books is a shining example of what thoughtful educators can do with best-practice methods without a whole lot of funds." Not to mention the article also referenced the site's reception of one of ComputED Learning Center's 2009 Annual Best Educational Software Awards (BESSIE) for Best Internet Communication Web site in the Multi-Level category, too! So this rich collection of evidence and statistics really does accentuate and draw attention to the digital tool and sparks curiosity for users to see what all the hype is about, making it a good source for reviewing the tool.
So in closing...: Let's face it. When asked to think critically about something, we're not looking to be fed all the feel-good fluff of greatness of the thing, person or subject we are reviewing; we're really just looking for a little dirt, some nugget of hard news to give people a "true" look at something. In light of this, internal marketing articles can be a nuisance and cloud our objective vision. But internal marketing is part and parcel to making a product or site known, and I think internal marketing news items are important resources for reviewing any digital tool. They serve as valuable access points to information about and, consequently, awareness of new technologies for a broad scope of potential users and supporters, as well as providing foundational legitimacy useful for building up a site's reputation and status in the Web 2.0 world.
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