design – Page 18 – Andy writes!

Getting ready for Day 2 of the three-day CASE Communications, Marketing and Technology Conference in San Diego. In a previous post, I mentioned that today would be my “sponge day” — my chance to site back and absorb a lot of stuff, since I wouldn’t be presenting — but plans have changed. The student panel we were to have fell through, so instead all of the breakout sessions will be repeated during that time. Which is a good alternative, as it gives attendees to attend all three sessions if they wish. (Or, as will likely happen tomorrow, a chance to blow off early from the conference and spend some time exploring San Diego.) So, it’s turned into a working day again, but that’s cool.

Day 1 take-aways

Opening keynote: “What You Need to Know About Today’s College-Bound Teens” (Fritz McDonald, creative director, Stamats). This was a thorough review of conclusions drawn from Stamats’ 2007 TeensTALK study on the attitudes, lifestyles, trends, etc., of this market segment. McDonald covered a lot of territory here, much of familiar to anyone in college/university marketing — about what millennials expect from their college experience, their life aspirations, etc. For the admissions folks at the conference, it was probably just a rehash. But I thought it gave us a good starting point for our discussions about technology and marketing, since college-bound teens have never known a world without so much of our technology (and so much marketing). But what stood out to me most were these tidbits:

High school sophomores are already preparing for college — and in a pretty sophisticated way. For instance, 47 percent say they’ve already decided where they’re going for college. So if we’re trying to recruit high school juniors and seniors, nearly half of them have already made up their minds. We need to make contact with them much earlier than we have in the past.
The campus visit is crucial — but they don’t really want to spend a lot of time with the admissions staff. Let them meet and talk to students. Also: don’t oversell. These kids have grown up saturated with marketing messages, and their crap detectors are pretty sensitive. Let the experience of the campus visit sell the place for you.
Word of mouth rules. Teens still rely on word-of-mouth recommendations from family members, peers, teachers, etc.
Online, it’s all about search and social networks. But we already knew that, right?

“Building Online Communities” (Tim O’Keeffe, Colgate University). No report. Paul and I missed this one as we were working with the IT guy to get Internet access for our breakout room. I’m hoping one of the other presenters will send me a report to post here. (Or any other conference-goer who would like to post a blog here, email me at andrew DOT careaga AT gmail DOT com.)

“Exploration of the Uses (and Misuses) of Flash in Higher Ed” (Casey Paquet, Eckerd College). Entertaining but with some substance. Paquet presented some examples of Flash campaigns, some pros and cons of Flash, and some alternatives. Paquet brings an interesting perspective, having worked in PR and web development as a freelancer and in the gaming industry. His point that higher ed is always about six years behind the curve in terms of PR, marketing and web development is spot-on, but I think he’s being generous. Some of us are more like eight to 10 years behind the curve.

Some of the examples of Flash usage in higher education that Paquet shared (view and decide for yourself whether they work or not):

Eckerd’s holiday e-card, a clever JibJabish approach featuring the college president and the web dudes (Paquet and his two colleagues).

Ben and John, from Franklin & Marshall College.

Kettering’s clever stick-figure School Daze series.

William Woods College’s Got Duck? campaign.

Paquet ended with a list of good and bad uses of flash.

First, the positives. Flash is good for:

multimedia content (such as YouTube, flash-based video)
entertaining people
building a mini-site
appealing to emotion

Flash is not so good for:

core navigation — not only is it “a pain in the butt to maintain” but it is rife with accessibility and usability challenges
displaying important information
building an entire site

And now…breakfast.

Decided to take the day off to decompress from a couple of stressful weeks (while campus is quiet for spring break). And also, to try to get some writing done, because it seems I get more writing done at home than at the office. But guess what? Not a bit of writing yet. Too busy trying to keep the RSS feeds pruned, and straightening up the blogroll. (Thanks, debunkd., for the motivation.) Now, if I could just get motivated to finish off my story for the summer issue of Missouri S&T Magazine.

Anyway, on to the musings. And these may have to keep you for a while, as I’m going afk from Wednesday afternoon until the weekend. So, if you don’t hear from me until next week, that’s why.

Social networks: a business model? Not so much. Lots of bloggers are talking about this Economist article about the business value of social networks. (Hat tip to Buzz Canuck, who breaks down the main points of the Economist article — namely, that the social network is a bad business model.) Conversation Agent also offers commentary, and a clip from Jerry Maguire.
The Economist argues that “it is entirely conceivable that social networking, like web-mail, will never make oodles of money,” but says social networking’s true value because may lie in “its enormous utility.”

Social networking has made explicit the connections between people, so that a thriving ecosystem of small programs can exploit this “social graph” to enable friends to interact via games, greetings, video clips and so on.

If only the myriad networks would tear down their “walled gardens” and open up to the rest of the interconnected world.

The problem with today’s social networks is that they are often closed to the outside web. … [T]hey are reluctant to become equally open towards their users, because the networks’ lofty valuations depend on maximising their page views—so they maintain a tight grip on their users’ information, to ensure that they keep coming back. As a result, avid internet users often maintain separate accounts on several social networks, instant-messaging services, photo-sharing and blogging sites, and usually cannot even send simple messages from one to the other. They must invite the same friends to each service separately. It is a drag.

Surely some enterprising entrepreneur will find a solution. SocialThing, perhaps?
Free and legal news photos for bloggers. GigaOM reports that San Francisco-based PicApp is making copyright news photos available free of charge to bloggers.

The photos are displayed in a flash media file and can be embedded on any web page, just like YouTube. PicApp makes money off contextual advertising it embeds in the photos, and in turn shares it with the photo agencies. The new service is a sign of how tough things are in the stock photography business, where new and low cost competitors are emerging thick and fast, and challenging the old dogs like Getty Images.
The United States of Google. BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis examines how an open-source mindset, a philosophy of transparency, and a better understanding of empowerment and interconnectedness could improve government. For example:

Government officials and agencies should blog. This ethic of openness should go beyond official documents and files. Openness should be part of the work habit of government officials and conversation with constituents should be an ethic of government. The open blog is merely a tool and a symbol for this — and a more efficient tool, I’ll add, than individual letters and phone calls.
The future of marketing and advertising — a good (and funny) slide presentation by Paul Isakson, via the Marketing and Strategy Innovation Blog.
Simplicity. Via Eliacin Rosario-Cruz via Twitter.
Moving toward two-way marketing. This piece in The Buzz Bin talks about how listening, customer feedback, etc., have become more important in traditional marketing.
State of the news media: gloomy. Still. PRWeek summarizes the Project for Excellence in Journalism‘s 2008 report on the news business.
Be like the Internet (Slideshare). Slides from a SXSW presentation by Lane Becker and Thor Muller of Get Satisfaction, all about business success in the Internet age. Via Communication Nation.
Three Internet careers that soon won’t exist. Interesting thought piece from Steve Rubel.
Of course, now it’s only 29 years and 50 weeks before the Internet ends. Because I’m two weeks late in posting this.

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Now playing: Michael Franti & Spearhead (Yell Fire!) – I Know I’m Not Alone
via FoxyTunes