Category: communication

Friday five: #highered roundup + weekend playlist

A quick Friday Five on the eve of Memorial Day weekend. While I’ve been tied up with sending out mass notification alerts and compiling after-action reports, many other higher ed bloggers have been cranking out some worthwhile stuff. Here are five that have caught my eye recently.

1. Patrick Powers on What higher ed could learn from Silicon Valley. “Imagine if higher education could operate with the same aggressive energy.”

2. Andy Shaindlin asks, How should a university build its “leadership brand”? Andy talks about SUNY’s “superbrand” (the term I use in my comment) and asks, “Does a large, decentralized public university system need to engage a ‘brand design agency’ to craft a ‘clear and unified vision and voice to inspire its students, faculty and region’?” It’s an important question, and not just for large, decentralized systems.

3. Karine Joly offers the chance to win 2 scholarships to a great higher ed web conference: Higher Ed Web Arkansas, or HeWebAr for short. If you’re looking for some good professional development this summer but don’t have the budget, you should take advantage of this opportunity. (Note: I’ll be attending this event. If that isn’t enough to pique your interest, consider the impressive lineup of other speakers, including keynoter Georgy Cohen.)

4. Meet Content on using infographics for clear communication. “Quality design can make information more meaningful by helping people understand it more easily, more quickly and perhaps more deeply. If you think about it, infographics are a kind of markup language for content.”

5. Higher Ed Live on summer travel plans. Everybody’s favorite video show isn’t going to be showing reruns this summer.

Bonus link: A little Memorial Day playlist to get you in the mood for summer. Enjoy.

Content vs. communication

With Monday’s public launch of Meet Content, a website devoted to all things related to content in higher ed web marketing, I thought it might be appropriate to revisit a post from earlier in the year that suggests content is not as important as some of us might think.

Back in January, Jae Kim wrote a post called It’s Not About Content; It’s All About Communication that attracted some attention on Social Media Today. Citing the success of Facebook, the failure of MySpace and a couple of studies that contradict the idea that “content is king,” Kim states that “enabling communication is really the key to harness the explosive network effect of social network.”

“Contrary to popular belief,” he writes, “they all talk about [how] content, as we know them, is not the king.”

My take on this is that it’s misleading to discuss content vs. communication. The two are so interwoven in any marketing effort that they cannot be separated. As one of the commenters on the Social Media Today post points out, “[W]ithout content of some shape or form, there is no communication. It’s just the content of the communication isn’t always consumable.”

It’s the second part of that comment that really matters to us, I think. Is our content worth consuming?

Whatever we’re putting out there — words, images, sounds — we’re asking people to invest their time. There’s a trade-off involved. Are we giving them something of value in exchange for their time?

If the content doesn’t offer something of value, then there is no need for the communication.

Am I right?