Category: Friday Five

Friday Five: Best of 2012 edition

Here we are on the final Friday of 2012. Many of us in the higher ed community are on break or are trying to catch up on work that has piled up since the start of the semester. A lot of us are ignoring our digital devices to spend more time with family and friends. And many of us, with the aid of media retrospectives and end-of-year lists (like this beaut), are looking back on 2012 and pondering its significance.

Being a lover of lists (as evidenced by the 16 Friday Five posts I created so far in 2012*) I thought I might share one of my own. So, here are my picks for:

Five of the best things I read, saw, received or did related to higher ed marketing in 2012

  1. The best new higher ed blog of 2012 award goes to HigherEdSolo, a collaborative effort by Tonya Oaks Smith (@marleysmom) and Ron Bronson (@ronbronson). Tonya and Ron started this blog last June with the idea of filling a niche in the higher ed marketing/PR discussion. HigherEdSolo focuses on what it’s like to be a one-person shop. It’s turned into a great  resource for those who may feel like they’re flying solo, because Ron and Tonya do a great job of connecting them with the larger higher ed marketing community.
  2. The best blog post about higher ed by a non-higher ed blogger in 2012 award goes to Dylan Wilbanks’ June 24 post, Why do we keep wishing death on higher ed? In this post, Dylan (@dylanw), who used to work in the higher ed web realm, summarizes much of the angst we’ve read about higher ed over the past year (the affordability issue, the MOOC invasion, disruption and the like) and ponders whether higher education has the will to change, or even recognizes the need for change. It’s a worthwhile read that should have gotten more attention last summer.
  3. The best professional development idea I stole in 2012 was the idea for something I implemented last summer under the title “TED Tuesdays.” Between last spring’s commencement and last fall’s first day of classes, I and the other communications staff at our university would meet for 30 minutes every Tuesday (or most Tuesdays) to watch a TED talk and discuss its significance. I stole the idea from Wayne State University’s Nick Denardis (@nickdenardis), who happened to mention on Twitter last spring how their communications team gets together every week to get inspired by a TED clip. I blogged about some of my favorite TED talks from last summer’s experiment. I’m planning to run the experiment again this coming summer.
  4. The best higher ed marriage of 2012 goes to … no, not Will and Kate. It goes to HigherEdLive and EDUniverse, who merged back in November. Congratulations to the happy couple — and to the many higher ed professionals who will benefit from this joining of forces.
  5. The best office product of 2012 has to be the Swingline Red Stapler I received last July from the HighEdWeb Arkansas conference. Every year, the conference organizers present the best speaker from the previous year’s conference, as determined by evaluations, with the coveted Red Stapler Award. This is apparently a common practice at other HighEdWeb conferences, regionally and nationally. It was quite an honor to be recognized last July for the presentation I delivered at HEWebAR in July 2011. But it almost didn’t happen, as the coveted office product disappeared the night before it was to be presented. Read all about it in The #hewebar Red Stapler Caper.

All in all, 2012 was a great year for me in many ways, personally and professionally. I hope your 2012 was wonderful as well. Here’s to an even better 2013!

P.S. – While I’m in the year-end list-making mood, I’ll soon be posting my annual selection of “best albums of the year” on the Higher Ed Music Critics blog. You’ll find similar lists from other music lovers in the higher ed world, as well as our collective’s consensus picks for 2012’s 50 best albums.

* Technically, I only wrote 15 Friday Fives in 2012 (up until this one). But I posted 16, because one was a reprise of an earlier post.

Friday Five: 1,000 posts and advice to a #highered newbie

A word-picture of all the "Friday Five" posts on this blog (via wordle.net).
A word-picture of all the “Friday Five” posts on this blog (via wordle.net).

Note: Technically, this Friday Five post is showing up on a Thursday. But I wanted to squeeze this post in before this Friday, just in case, you know, that whole Mayan doomsday thing is for real. – AC

Ladies and gentlemen, today’s post marks a milestone for this blog.

Today …. *drumroll* …. marks the publication of my 1,000th entry on Higher Ed Marketing.

That’s 1,000 posts over seven years, one month and 11 days.

I launched Higher Ed Marketing on Nov. 10, 2005, with an inauspicious observation about the rising cost of a degree from one of the nation’s most prestigious public universities. There weren’t many higher ed bloggers in those days. But the subject of that post — the rising cost of a college degree — has continued to provide fodder for higher ed bloggers and commentators in the ensuing 85 months, and that trend is likely to continue.

Last month, soon after I hit “publish” on the 999th entry, I mentioned on Twitter that my next post (this one) would be the 1,000th. Some of my higher ed pals, who share my appreciation of music, suggested that I mark the occasion by rocking out or blathering about the only band that matters. But there’s another space for those discussions — my side project, the collaborative Higher Ed Music Critics blog. (Watch for our collective’s annual “year’s best albums” listing soon.)

Instead, I thought I’d follow the suggestion of Janese Silvey, who suggested in a tweet:

How about advice for people who are getting ready to enter the field ;-) What you wish someone had told you.

Janese has an ulterior motive. Currently a higher ed reporter, she’s about to jump ship and go to work in higher education.

So, to Janese I say, “Welcome.” Higher ed is a great gig. It sounds cliche, but higher education really is about making a positive impact on the world. And as part of a higher ed communications, PR or marketing team, you’ll be contributing to the greater good of the world. Also, exceptional journalists like Janese often make great higher ed PR and marketing types, because 1.) they can write, 2.) they know how to crank out content on deadline, and 3.) their BS detectors are usually very sharp.

The key, once you enter the realm of higher ed, is to not let the system wear you down so that your writing becomes more fatuous and bureaucratic, your adherence to deadlines slips and your BS detectors become dulled by the sheer volume of BS you’re exposed to.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. On to the advice for people who are entering the field of higher ed PR and marketing today.

1. Remember that good writing matters. One of the biggest challenges for communications people in higher education is the tendency to have to deal with verbose, cluttered, unclear, cliche-riddled writing. You’ll probably be working with an admissions chief who wants to cram every possible benefit about your school into a marketing piece, or an administrator who insists on a 2-to-1 adjective-to-noun ratio. You’ll have to fight against the incursion of “world-class” or “best-in-class” faculty or facilities (never “buildings” or “labs”) into your prose. You’ll have to wage war against “innovative” and other meaningless modifiers that will water down your writing. Strive for clarity. Always. But realize you might lose a few battles along the way.

2. Ignore meaningless comparisons. The academy is obsessed with rankings — and not just those found in national news publications. It’s easy to get caught up in the arm’s race of rankings and comparisons. Sometimes, there’s nothing you can do about it. But one thing you can do is not get caught up in comparisons that affect your day-to-day work. I’m talking about comparing your ad budget, size of staff, workload, salary, reporting structure, etc., to those of others in the business. You should have known what you were getting into when you signed on for the gig. And if you spend too much time thinking about other schools, departments, professionals, and how they have more resources than you, pretty soon you’ll start focusing inequities among institutions and individuals. From there, it’s easy to start thinking that the institution owes you something more than you’re getting. (Trust me. I’ve fallen down this rabbit hole before.) But in reality, you signed up for the gig. No one forced you to take this job, right? Life isn’t fair, and that’s that.

But I don’t advocate ignoring comparisons altogether — only the meaningless or fruitless ones. Sometimes they’re not so meaningless. If the powers that be pay attention to national rankings and surveys, or reputable publications, such as the Chronicle of Higher Education, you can and sometimes should use their reports and data to help your cause for more staffing, better pay or a bigger budget.

3. Be data-driven. Yeah, I know that “data-driven” is one of those cliches I warned against in point 1, above. (But I also said you wouldn’t win every battle in the war against obfuscation. Sometimes you have to use the terms that have currency.) What I mean by this is to embrace the world of analytics and data in order to make decisions that are based on facts and research. Too often in higher education, we continue to rely on assumption or instinct. You’re likely to sit in on meetings in which administrators claim that “everybody else is doing” whatever might be in vogue these days, or that “we’re the best-kept secret” in higher education. (God, how I loathe the term “best-kept secret.”) But as my friend and fellow blogger Tim Nekritz recently pointed out, the era of data-driven decision-making is here — or soon should be, if we could get academic leaders to pay more attention to data and research and worry less about what the campus across the state is doing that we aren’t. If you focus on data and research to guide your planning and decision-making, you will be better able to focus on getting stuff done rather than chasing the latest bright, shiny object (as another fellow higher ed blogger, Michael Stoner, puts it).

4. Build networks. Not just social networks, although Twitter has been a terrific way for me to connect with other higher ed folks across the globe. And by connecting to others in higher ed via Twitter — like the aforementioned Tim Nekritz (@TimNekritz) and Michael Stoner (@mstonerblog), you’ll learn a lot. Plus, it’s great fun when you make a connection with Twitter pals in real life. You feel like you already know them. But don’t ignore flesh-and-blood contacts. Build networks on your campus, too — with co-workers, faculty and staff, alumni. And most importantly, with students.

5. Share. Your talents. Your expertise. Your time. Give back. Get involved with the higher ed world’s professional organizations, such as CASE, UCDA or HighEdWeb, and volunteer to help with conference planning, logistics, registration, etc. You’ll get to meet some great people and you’ll find it all very rewarding.

Those are my five top pieces of advice. I’ll probably think of some other things after I post this. In the meantime, maybe some readers will share their advice in the comments.