Happy Monday, folks. Start your week off right — watch this 4-minute video by Steven Johnson, the author of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (release date: Oct. 5), as he talks (and draws) about creativity and connectivity. Watch, enjoy and learn.
Thanks to Lifehacker for the link.
There’s a strong contingent of Glee fans among the higher ed marketing community. Just scan the #glee hashtag on Twitter any given Tuesday night, and you’re likely to see many familiar names commenting about the show and its characters.
Modern Family also has a strong following among higher ed marketers. On Twitter, the most visible and adamant of those fans has to be Todd Sanders, who once credited the show and its Twitter-savvy cast for making the Internet cool again.
Me? I’m a fan of both shows, even though I think the canceled Better Off Ted was smarter and funnier than both Glee and Modern Family combined. (Check the promo video from last year to see what you missed.) But that show is toast, and life, and television, goes on.
There is one other sitcom, which also survived its first season — along with Glee and Modern Family — to re-emerge for season two. And it’s a show anyone in higher ed should watch, at least occasionally.
That show is Community. It’s pretty funny but also insightful in the way satires should be.
Community made its season debut last night with Betty White as the guest star. (I’ll never listen to Toto’s “Africa” the same way again.) The show is centered on the antics of an ensemble cast of archetypal Breakfast Club-style losers who attend Greendale Community College (yes, the school has its own faux website). In many episodes, the college is more of a backdrop for the characters than an integral part of the overall story lines. But as far as I know, it’s the only prime-time show right now that includes higher education as a major element.
It isn’t the most flattering portrayal of our business. The dean is a wimpy bureaucrat afraid to make a decision. The main professor — Senor Chang, the Spanish instructor — is the nastiest stereotype since Professor Kingsfield of The Paper Chase, only funnier. One of the minor characters has sideburns shaped like stars. Still, Community should matter to higher ed marketers. Here are five reasons why:
1. They’re talking about us. Community is perhaps the most accessible portrayal of higher education the average American gets during the week. Prime-time television may not be the 800-pound gorilla it once was, but it is still influential, even among the most tech-savvy. We ought to pay attention to what might be influencing the views of the viewing public. (But we shouldn’t take it too seriously. It’s a comedy, after all.)
2. Community colleges matter. For many Americans, community college is the access point to higher education and the portal to a degree. For those without the finances, test scores or other means to enter a four-year college or university, community college is the ticket to a better life. Moreover, President Obama’s plan to dramatically increase the number of Americans with a college degree by 2020 will rely heavily on the involvement of community colleges as a pipeline to those degrees. This, according to news reports about an upcoming community college summit to be hosted by Jill Biden, the vice president’s wife who also has taught in community colleges. (See also this July 2009 Slate article about how Obama wants to leverage community colleges to achieve his goal.)
True, Community serves up a distorted view of higher education. But…
3. Community holds up a mirror to our flaws. Greendale’s spineless leader, Dean Pelton, represents what we loathe the most about higher education administration and administrators. The dean is afraid to make a decision and obsessed with political correctness. (His campaign to create a new non-offensive mascot resulted in the creation of the androgynous “GCC Human.”) Greendale’s campus, classes, teachers and programming scream mediocrity. Even though the dean’s and the school’s qualities are exaggerated, Community reminds us that sometimes people perceive those qualities at some level in all of us and in our institutions.
4. It’s cited in an important book. Community made its way into the pages of Anya Kamenetz’s book about the future of higher education, DIY U (reviewed here last spring). On page 16, in a section about how community colleges must constantly “battle stigma and invisibility,” Kamenetz underscores that point by writing, “In the fall of 2009, a sitcom titled Community, featuring Chevy Chase, premiered on NBC, illustrating all of the worst perceptions about community colleges.”
5. It stars Chevy Chase. Chase plays Pierce. It’s not his best work. Then again, Community is not Caddyshack. Still, it’s better than Spies Like Us. And Pierce’s quips are now archived on Twitter via an account his roommate Troy set up (@oldwhitemansays). (P.S. to Todd Sanders: the cast members also tweet, just like Modern Family‘s.)
Have a good weekend.
Fellow bloggers, it’s that time of year again: time for the folks at Technorati (remember them?) to conduct their annual State of the Blogosphere survey. So if you want your voice to be heard, click that link and participate.
There are customer-service and PR lessons aplenty to be learned from Price Chopper’s bone-headed actions targeting a customer who complained about the company in a Twitter post. Price Chopper’s reaction to the negative tweet — contacting the customer’s supervisor and other execs at this customer’s workplace — should serve as a cautionary tale for anyone in the marketing and PR biz.
But this incident also should serve as a reminder to any of us who use social media to include some sort of “all opinions are my own” disclaimer in our social media profiles. Especially if we also mention our employers in those profiles.
I incorporate a fairly standard disclaimer on this blog, on my Twitter profile (shown above), and on my Facebook profile. How about you?
Have you ever made one of those serendipitous discoveries on the web that just leaves you dumbstruck?
I’m not talking about finding some intentionally viral campaign cooked up by a marketing firm or big corporation, nor something created by people who get paid to put interesting content out there. I’m talking about something created by one person with a passion and desire to share simply because she wants to.
I made such a discovery on Saturday, when I stumbled upon a marvelously obsessive web project: Liz’s 1,001 Albums. Day by day for more than a year, Liz has been listening to and writing about each of the 1,001 albums listed in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. (Thanks to my Twitter pal Jason Rollins, aka @webslung, for pointing me to Liz’s blog on day 388 of her quest, in which Liz reviewed Peter Gabriel 1.)
I am in awe of this project for a number of reasons, but mainly because:
1. It involves music
2. It involves lists
3. It is obsessive
4. It is ambitious
5. It is a long-term project
I love music and lists, and I can be obsessive about some things, but when it comes to the ambitious and long-term aspects of projects, I wilt. I admire Liz’s ability to stick with this so far. (And I could benefit from applying some of Liz’s goal-setting advice to many aspects of my life.)
Liz began this project because “I know nothing about music.” Or so she claimed, way back in August 2009. That claim won’t hold up any longer, though. She’s plowed through many classics and a multitude of genres in her quest to absorb all 1,001 must-hear albums.
What I really love about Liz’s project, though, is that she is learning and exploring, and sharing her discoveries along the way. Her entries are not the prose of some music critic wannabe. She admits her lack of knowledge and approaches her subject with a joy and an innocence that music snobs (guilty!) are incapable of. It’s beautiful. Reading her entries about albums of my youth — the first Talking Heads release, say, or her latest entry, Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell — reminds me of what it was like to discover new music and listen, really listen, to an album from the opening track to the end.
Liz’s 1,001 Albums is an audiophile’s version of Julie & Julia. I hope they make a movie about it, too.