Month: September 2007

New higher ed blog: The Old College Try

Just discovered a new higher ed marketing blog, The Old College Try, that’s worth a visit. (Thanks to CollegeWebEditor‘s Karine Joly for the intro, via a recent “three questions for…” conversation with TOCT’s creator, Deanna Woolf.)

The blog’s been around since July, and I spent some time surfing its contents this morning. Woolf writes with a witty, engaging style, addressing issues like the lack of paid celebrity spokespeople for colleges and universities (“We can dream of the day when radio spots are read by Pierce Bronson instead of the local station’s go-to regular”), marketing safety on our campuses (“To me, it’s hard to ‘market’ a safe campus by citing great crime stats, the night watch/escort service, or the emergency phones every 100 feet. … People are going assess how safe they feel when they visit your campus and see it with their own two eyes”), or a different angle on college football photos (“[Y]ou could capture a cool photo of a pre-game tailgate party that would be perfect for the student activities brochure you do later in the year. … Or what about the president horking down a hotdog? What a great shot for an off-the-wall university magazine piece on her or him.”) Horking down? Not sure if that’s a typo or not, but it does conjure up an interesting image.

Labor Day productivity tips

labor_day.gifIt’s official. Summer’s over, kids. Yeah, school’s been back in session for a week or two, but it’s a long haul from here to Thanksgiving. Lots of work ahead of us all. Maybe we could use some tips for being more productive. Here are a few I’ve culled from the RSS feeds.

  • Let’s start with three brilliant reads (all PDFs) brought to us by ChangeThis:
  • Before your start working on that next PowerPoint presentation, check out these clear and to-the-point PowerPoint tips. This is a summary by Garr Reynolds (of Presentation Zen fame) of a new book, Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations, by Stephen Kosslyn, a Harvard cognitive neuroscientist. Kosslyn “aligns his list of presentation and PowerPoint ‘do’s & don’ts’ with sound psychological principles,” Reynolds writes. But the Harvard scientist’s pedigree offers a voice of authority that may help communicators change an organization’s prevailing PowerPoint culture. “It’s one thing when a designer [or you, to your boss] says the current methods are flawed, but it is quite another when a cognitive neuroscientist says so.” Reynolds’ post offers a thorough summary of Kosslyn’s ideas, with pictures.
  • Plans? Who needs a plan? What you need are skills and a problem. “Take a look at the biographies of great people. None of them actually planned to accomplish what they did accomplish. Their ‘life plans’ are something authors and historians (and sometimes they themselves) construe from the crooked path their life actually was.” Via Signal vs. Noise (link).
  • Five resources for creating and managing your brand, via Chris Brown’s Branding and Marketing blog, which is a pretty neat resource of its own.
  • How to get out of bed earlier. I swear, I’m going to try this one first thing tomorrow. Via LifeHacker.
  • And to wrap it all up in a nice, neat package, some nuggets from Seth Godin‘s Labor Day post.

    Today, working hard is about taking apparent risk. Not a crazy risk like betting the entire company on an untested product. No, an apparent risk: something that the competition (and your coworkers) believe is unsafe but that you realize is far more conservative than sticking with the status quo. …

    Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you’d rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And, after you’ve done that, to do it again the next day.

    The big insight: The riskier your (smart) coworker’s hard work appears to be, the safer it really is. It’s the people having difficult conversations, inventing remarkable products, and pushing the envelope (and, perhaps, still going home at 5 PM) who are building a recession-proof future for themselves.

    So tomorrow, when you go to work, really sweat. Your time is worth the effort.