Central College Web marketing

I feel like I have had enough time to sit down and think about some of the things that I learned and experienced at eduWeb2008 this week. The opportunity to network with everyone that I have been tweeting with already was almost worth the price of admission. Unplugging and meeting people face-to-face to exchange new ideas certainly helped me to renew the passion I have for my job. Sometimes just feeding off of someone else’s passion is all that it takes. It is also nice to see those new faces (or followers) in the industry and how they are driving things forward.

Jacob, Kyle James (courtesy of Michael Fienen)

Karine Joly hit the nail on the head when she said “It’s the community stupid!” in her closing keynote. The community was shining brightly at eduWeb and it was demonstrated by Matt Herzberger’s extensive list of blogs, streaming video and photos from people at the conference. All of these pieces will certainly prove to be valuable as time goes on.

The tool that revolutionized the conference the most was probably twitter. While it probably isn’t the next killer app, the ongoing conversation during presentations, and over the course of the three days we were in Atlantic City,  helped me to develop and expand my own thoughts. It was even a trending topic on search.twitter.com. Unfortunately, for some presenters twitter also demonstrated how quickly an audience can turn on you. Either way I now have an expanded professional network to bounce ideas off of. Mike Richwalsky did bring up an interesting point on how this could present problems for someone putting on a conference. It will be interesting to see how HighEdWebDev is from the virtual side in comparison to eduWeb.

Left to Right: Nick Catto, Kyle James, Brad J Ward and Bryan Adams tweeting during the conference.

Mark Greenfield’s opening keynote set the tone for the conference with his top 10 Web trends. I always enjoying reading Mark’s blog and listening to his presentations. I feel like he is a living legend in the land of higher education Web marketing. His forward thinking always keeps me on my toes, and challenges me to push on the dinosaurs a little harder to make things happen. He also challenged everyone on the idea that “e-mail is dead.” While there is an ongoing debate happening over on our Ning site, I think email will always have it’s place in the interactive marketing mix. The effectiveness of e-mail just might be in decline.

Jacob, Mark Greenfield and Kyle James at eduWeb 2008 (courtesy of Kyle James)

While I have given loads of praise to the awesome presenters of the conference in my daily posts, there are a few things that were problematic. Most of all having a conference in Atlantic City, which is relatively far from a major airport, can only invite major travel headaches.  Lucky for me I could call on family to run me back and forth to Philly unlike others that had to rent a car of take a train. While the location was certainly unique, the glitz and glamor of a casino is one thing I could certainly pass up.

In the end, I think the conference helped renew my motivation for the projects that I am working on right now. In addition to the renewed motivation, it also served as a serious confidence booster since I have more ammunition for all of the battles I have been fighting.

Here are the top five takeaways or ideas from the conference we will try to implement at our institution:

• Cloud computing: Can we move some of our critical functions to the cloud? What about the non-critical functions?
• Blog improvements: None of our bloggers work in the admission office. This would help humanize the bloggers and encourage feedback on the blogs.
• Target ghost applicants: We need to build a relationship with these applicants. Most of them have applied through the Web since it is free at our institution. What other Web services might they be looking for?
• Investigate the SkoolPool application as a one stop shop for social network management. Is it any better than doing this all manually ourselves?
• Improve our email analytical reports so that we can automate and quantify whether or not email is dying for our institution.

The last day of this whirlwind of a conference provided some interesting ideas and insights for me. While a lot of other people are in a hurry to get a conference wrap-up post up, I think I am going to let things soak for a while. Probably the only way to do it since we wrapped everything up with @karinejoly’s phenomenal closing keynote! Below are a few quick highlights from today’s sessions.

I started out with the Keys to Effective Web site Management. Sarah from Santa Clara University gave some interesting insights on managing content from the perspective of a copywriter. Her 80% organization/20% composition idea was especially interesting since we always hear about people having problems lifting a Web site from idea to finished product.

@mmbc (Melissa Cheater) presented on SkoolPool which is a “facebook” application for students and schools. I use quotes around facebook because it appears that they have built the newest release of the product using OpenSocial. If this is the case, it is nice to have a one stop shop for manging your social media networking with prospective students. Will be interested to see how this develops in the future.

The next session was about using new media channels to aquire students. While the presentation wasn’t anything to write home about, it did provide some insight as to how we should go about advertising on the different social networks. One quote that I really liked was “New media is not, was not and never will be supported by advertising.” As a marketer this presents us with a challenge on how to interact with our target audience using the tools that they are already using.

The closing keynote by @karinejoly was probably one of my favorite sessions of the whole conference. She did an outstanding job of presenting on how to “raise and leverage” the different communities that we are starting to interact with. I was looking through my notes that I took of her presentation and it automatically inspires new ideas. Can’t say that I have ever had that happen before.

As I try to absorb everything that I have taken in at the conference, I am trying to get my arms around the great experiences that I had. For starters, staying at the Trump hotel was an experience all in itself. Then I had the chance to meet some really great people in the industry that I have been tweeting with and some that I hadn’t. Exchanging the stories of our frustrations is a great way to reassure me that there is someone else out there in my shoes going through the same thing.

After all of this information soaks, I’ll be posting a Top 5 or Top 10 things to take away from #eduweb2008 make sure to check back.

This year’s conference has proven to be outstanding once again, and we haven’t even eaten lunch yet! Here is a quick re-cap of what has happened this morning and I hope to update this as we go through Day 2. Also, I used twitter names in my post just in case you aren’t following these people yet.

I had breakfast and attended a topic table on student blogging which proved to be quite interesting. @bradjward was there as well as other people in various different positions at different institutions as other schools. It provided some unique perspective on different kinds of blogs.

The Noel-Leveitz seminar on parents and their roles in the admissions process proved to be quite interesting. It is too bad the delivery of the information wasn’t better, but the data presented was awesome. I can already see some things that we could be doing for our parents.

@mikeRichwalksy presented on cloud computing which was absolutely outstanding. This might address some of the problems that we have as a small institution with dealing with bandwidth and storage. I won’t get into the details right now, but his presentation will be posted online and you can check it out.

@brianwmniles presented on recruiting 2.1 which was a sequel to recruiting 2.0 that he gave at last year’s conference. I am still trying to take in all of the ridiculously awesome morsels of information that he used in his presentation. I’ll post more on this later, but here is one awesome piece of information from his presentation: “Showcase what makes you truly different; Quality is not a differentiater.” An interesting quote considering we spend a lot of time focusing on our competitors in Iowa.

The afternoon presentations were a little less fruitful than the morning presentations but I pulled a few things out that will be useful.

I stared out with @jameskm03’s presentation on e-mail marketing. Nothing to ground breaking, but it was nice the reassure me that we are doing things right. There are a few minor tweaks that we can make to provide a little more value to our users.

I followed Kyle up with a seminar on High Schools students that tell us what they thing about our Web sites. The presentation was given by someone from Royall and Co. Unfortunately the presentation was geared toward CEOs and top level management instead of people that are on the front lines. What makes it even more unfortunate was the fact that they had really good information but they didn’t do a good job of presenting it.

I was planning on finishing up the day with a session on information architecture, but it was canceled and so I ended up at a seminar talking about the multi-channel recruitment process that Wilmington University uses. It was provided some interesting insights from a commuter college perspective. They are using Ning which is an intersting idea that we have been tossing around for a student portal.

That’s all for Day 2 of the conference. Make sure to check back tommorrow for Day 3’s sessions.

Mark Greenfield presented the opening keynote for eduWeb2008. Here are a few notes from his presentation. His full presentation is at http://markgr.com/presentations/eduweb2008

Mark opened his presentation with an interesting idea of re-thinking the way we look at the Web. Two people might see the same thing in a different light.

top 10 web trends (this list is in reverse order):

1. The end of print
   • Kindle and how it might transform student text books
   • Editor of NY times says there will not be a print version of the newspaper
2. The World Network
   • Web 2.0 connects people Web 3.0 will connect people and things.
   • Using loopt to locate people using a cell phone
   • MIT and iFind that shows your friends are in relationship to you
   • eSuds Find out the status of laundry machines before you
3. Virtual Reality
   • Second Life (not that great)
   • Club Penguin (virtual world for elementary students)
4. E-mail is soo dead
   • Hi-jacked by the forces of evil
   • Used for things it was never intended for
   • Teens are using email less and less (facebook, AIM, SMS)
5. The read/write web
   • Anybody with a browser can write to a Web site
   • Average person can now make a blog, Web site or a wiki
   • The people formerly know as the audience. From monolog to dialog. Audience based navigation compared to community based.
6. Information overload
   • User generated content is mostly white noise. Importance of information literacy.
   • Findability vs. usability
   • aideRSS to filter RSS feeds for importance.
   • Fine line between crowds and ignorance of the masses
7. Redefining time
   • Students expect things to happen right now.
   • Expectations of a disaster for Univ. of Buffalo. Crafting a message in an emergency can sometimes delay an actual decision.
   • twitter: asynchronous or synchronous? Both.
   • qik: cell phone live web video broadcast.
8. The end of walled gardens.
   • The web site is no longer the only place to get information (RSS, iTunes, etc.)
   • The conversation has left the blogosphere.
   • Time to think not about your Web site but your overall Web presence.
9. (Idea of) Community
   • The Web is a global community of conversation.
   • Humans are pack animals
   • Book: the clutrain manidesto
   • Social networking is a feature not a destination. - Chris Anderson
   • Ning is taking over some of the things that blackboard provided.
10. Mobile
    • People never part with their cell phone.
    • People don’t adopt mobile devices they marry them.
    • Most important part of mobile is 24/7 connectivity.
    • Form factor is a challenge, but is being addressed with laser keyboards, projectors.

Strategies for dealing with top 10.

• Focus on the relationships. “I want a blog. Why?”
• Book: groundswell. (People Objectives Strategy Technology (POST))

The Seven things to do in the age of internet

1. Be first (if you aren’t going to be first you “damn well” better be the best.)
2. Keep it moving
3. Use an authentic voice. Real people provide real content.
4. Tell the truth.
5. Build a community.
6. Cede control.
7. Believe again.

CMO - The chief marketing officer. Should change to community management officer. CMO needs to represent the community first and the institution second.

The one most important skill you need to have as a Web person is adaptability to change.

I’m gearing up for the eduWeb conference in Atlantic City next week. I decided that I will be posting notes on this blog, and via twitter to keep track of all of the different things going on. Live-blogging a conference is always handy as it is easy to keep track of all of the little snippets on information that you pickup.

Not only will I be blogging, but the higher ed community of Web people will also be making posts all over the web. Checkout a couple of these great sources of information from the conference:

• All twitter posts
• Flickr photo group
• All of the blogHighEd members

Make sure to post your comments if you have questions on my posts. Discussion is always nice…