Category: communication

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.

Blogging tips for business (and higher ed, too)

No one, to my knowledge, has written a manifesto about blogging for higher education, so until they do, Debbie Weil’s Beginner’s Guide to Business Blogging will have to do. Here’s an excerpt:

Why Blog? Isn’t My e-Newsletter Enough?

Unless your e-newsletter or ezine has your customer’s mortgage statement attached to it, you’ll be lucky if your subscribers open it. Between the new federal CAN-Spam legislation, spam filters and actual spam, inbox noise has reached an all-time high. Don’t get me wrong — email is still a viable marketing tool. In fact, email is now in its mature phase as a killer app of online marketing.
But a blog may be the perfect complement to an e-newsletter. Here’s why:
» Since blogs aren’t email, inbox clutter and spam filters are a non-issue. But readers can still subscribe to blogs using an RSS newsreader.
» Blogs, through an easy interface, publish instantly. No formatting, no templates, no fancy coding.
» Search engines love blogs. Each entry on your blog is its own Web page (even if it’s a one-liner). And search engines are drawn to fresh, updated pages. So by virtue of blogging, you can drive traffic to your company or business site — without hiring an expensive SEO (search engine optimization) service.

There’s a lot more good advice for beginning bloggers — and handy reminders for those of us who’ve been doing this for awhile. Link via ChangeThis.