Category: communication

Friday Five: higher ed’s future, web buzzwords, the blogging boom, and garage rock

Five things on my mind this Friday:

  1. What’s really going to happen with the recommendations put forth in the Commission on the Future of Higher Education’s final draft (pdf)? The report calls for “a broad shake-up” (as The New York Times put it) of the U.S. higher ed system. But the report is a far cry from Chairman Charles Miller’s desire for a “punchy report that would rattle academia with warnings of crisis”; a number of educational groups are criticizing the report; and the lone dissenter on the 19-member panel, American Council of Education President David Ward, is getting considerable mileage out of his contention that the report is one-sided. At least one blogger — ePluribus Media — suggests the report is “just what the Chair (read: Secretary) ordered.” If you don’t have time to read the full report, read the Times article, and maybe take a gander at ePluribus Media’s commentary about the report.
  2. Web what-dot-evah. Morgan Davis’ erelevant blog is brand new, but he’s off to a great start. His recent post, Buzzword 2.0, takes a lot of us to task for tossing “web 2.0” around in conversations and on our blogs (guilty). His advice: “let’s work on using alternative words and phrases to describe the concepts that we mean by web 2.0.”
  3. 50 million blogs, 18.6 posts per second. Just a few of the fun facts Dave Sifri, the founder of Technorati, shares in his latest state of the blogosphere report. With lots and lots of colorful charts.
  4. Speaking of buzzwords … Here’s a new one for you: clique-through. According to this blog review of a presentation on marketing with social media, it means: “The degree to which an exclusive group hears and accepts your idea. Cliques are built upon norms and group culture. To be accepted means to be built into that culture. To be effective, focus on the clique, not the wide audience.” You heard it here first.
  5. Now playing: Runaway Bombshell, by the Fondas. Great Detroit garage rock for a Friday morning’s blog reading.

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Web 2.0 on the agenda for CASE conference

As co-chair for next month’s CASE Annual Conference for Senior Communications and Marketing Professionals, I’m thrilled with the lineup of web 2.0 topics on the agenda.

Those of us who do PR and marketing for colleges and universities need to pay more attention to how web 2.0 is changing the nature of our jobs. So I’m glad to see CASE (that’s the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education) taking web 2.0 issues seriously.

My co-chair (Lynette Brown-Sow of the Community College of Philadelphia) and I have worked hard to recruit some of the top experts in online communication and marketing for this conference. The faculty for the three-day session (Sept. 13-15 in Philadelphia) include:

  • Karine Joly of the popular blog on marketing, PR and the web, collegewebeditor.com. Karine is also a web editor for a liberal arts school on the East Coast and writes for University Business magazine. She’s taken time out of her busy schedule to do a couple of sessions during the conference.
  • Joe Hice, associate vice president of marketing and public relations for the University of Florida. Joe and his staff at Florida are doing some creative things with marketing and the web, and he brings a corporate marketing background to the job. He’ll be co-presenting with Karine Joly on some web 2.0 stuff and also sharing some marketing lessons from the corporate world.
  • A couple of real live bloggers from the Philly area: Daniel Rubin, a Philadelphia Inquirer journalist-turned-blogger who writes about pop culture, politics, technology and anything with a Philadelphia connection in his Blinq blog, and Dave Ralis, another refugee from journalism who blogs about sports for Phillyburbs.com, contributes to the community blog PhillyFuture, and occasionally posts at his personal blog. I’ll be joining these two guys for a fun panel discussion about the morphing of blogging and journalism.

Those are just a few of the folks who will be presenting. We’ve also got great speakers on marketing (such as Larry Lauer of Texas Christian University), crisis communications and the Solutions for Our Future initiative to promote the value of higher education.

This promises to be a terrific conference, with lots of time for discussion, interaction and learning from each other as well as from our presenters. If you haven’t already signed up, you should do so now. Or if you have any questions about the conference or any of the sessions, feel free to email me: andrew DOT careaga AT gmail DOT com.