Category: higher education

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.

Giving voice to student bloggers

Furman University has been receiving many kudos in higher ed marketing circles for their innovative use of the web. See this summary of Furman’s work, presented at EduWeb 2006, to bring you up to speed.

But what I really love about Furman is their hands-off approach to student bloggers who keep online journals for the school’s Engage Furman admissions site. Consider this post from a former Furman student, who decided to transfer. In an entry sure to make most admissions officers and college presidents squirm, he explains his reasons for posting this news on his journal:

Why did Furman put these freshman journals online? Surely not as another method pro-Furman propaganda, encouraging you to jump on the first flight over here because there is no other college worth going to. That’s for the rest of the site to tell you. No, it’s our job to give you a firsthand experience, to cut through the gleam and glamor you see on the admissions website and give you both the diamonds and the muck hidden underneath. In other words, we have to give you the good, the bad, and the ugly.

How many other schools would have the guts to allow this post to go live? How many would dare to give voice to a student who was leaving? Hats off to Furman for setting the bar high, for keeping it real, and for valuing the authenticity of voice.

Live, from Baltimore! It’s EduWeb 2006!

Several readers of Karine Joly’s Collegewebeditor.com blog are posting updates from EduWeb 2006, a conference being held in Baltimore today and tomorrow. EduWeb is billed as “the only conference that offers attendees a combination of Web development and Web marketing topics presented by some of the top speakers in the country.” (Apparently, according to Joly’s blog, one of those top speakers, keynoter Jeff Kallay, cancelled at the last minute.)

Today’s entry summarizes a presentation by Stacy Roberts Beam of Northwestern University on the subject of project management. Thanks to Rachel Reuben of the State University of New York at New Paltz for the summary.
Joly put out a call for bloggers attending EduWeb to post on her site. She got seven takers. So we should be seeing more activity later tonight and tomorrow.

P.S. – Sorry about the cheesy Saturday Night Live ripoff in the headline. I just couldn’t resist.

Enticing email for AutoPreview surfers

…some pretty big mailers (Target, The Company Store, the DMA and ourselves among them) have blah, please-don’t-open-me AutoPreview copy.

You know the routine. If you’re like 69 percent of Outlook users, you scan through the morning’s email using AutoPreview, deleting all the html-email marketing pitches that show up as a hairline box outline where some image is supposed to be and the text, “”Click here to download images.”

Instead, you click to delete.

Again. And again.

So, what if your prospective students, alumni, potential donors and other potential readers are doing the same thing with your oh-so-important email messages?

The crack research staff at Marketing Sherpa has combed the web looking for good examples of email that just might make it past the Outlook AutoPreview gatekeeper. According to Marketing Sherpa, “some pretty big mailers (Target, The Company Store, the DMA and ourselves among them) have blah, please-don’t-open-me AutoPreview copy.”

But there’s hope. In this article, Marketing Sherpa offers some great tips for more readable email.

Among the tips:
Start with compelling copy. “Instead of beginning the text-version with administrative crud, emailers including JetBlue, Mystery Reader and the Motley Fool launch directly into their content — the letter or article summary that the email is hoping recipients will react to.”

Use CAPS to catch the eye. “The average Outlook in-box screen has five-six emails when viewed in AutoPreview. So, your message is competing with four-five other messages to get the open. Putting all caps in your subject line is a no-no due to spam filter restrictions these days.”

Use text symbols to catch the eye. Adding a row of symbols is another way to catch the eye in a busy in-box.

Bonus: some examples of what and what not to do.