Category: Internet and web

Upcoming: HighEdWeb Arkansas

Update: Tonya Oaks Smith, one of the conference organizers, recently asked speakers to submit video clips about their upcoming topics. She’s posted the submittals on the HighEdWeb Arkansas YouTube site. Enjoy!

Next month, I’ll be heading down to Little Rock to attend a great conference, along with a lot of great higher ed web and marketing folks. The event is HighEdWeb Arkansas, and if you aren’t yet signed up to attend this two-day conference at the end of July, you should register now.

I attended last year, presented on how our campus used blogging to talk about our university’s name change (was back in 2007-2008), and even won the coveted Red Stapler for my efforts. This year I’ll be talking about a topic near and dear to my heart, managing change.

But don’t let that keep you from attending. The lineup of speakers is ah-mazing, a veritable Murderer’s Row of higher ed web luminaries. (I’m especially looking forward to hearing from, and finally meeting, keynote speaker Mark Greenfield, whom I’ve followed on Twitter since my earliest days on that network.) The conference organizers are first-rate pros who are all passionate about putting together a great event, from the programming to the after-hours activities. And many higher ed partners — too many to list here but posted on the conference’s main website — join with the volunteer organizers to help keep the event affordable.

The event is July 26 and 27 in Little Rock. It’s cheap. You should join us. Register today.

Why we do what we do

Lately I’ve been trying to make time to watch more TED talks as a way to glean inspiration or new ideas. I usually find at least one or two valuable takeaways from each 12- to 15-minute talk I view.

But sometimes I see a talk that reminds me of something I thought I already knew, but that in the busyness of life I had somehow forgotten.

That was the case with Life lessons from an ad man, an engaging, entertaining and enlightening TED talk by Rory Sutherland of the Ogilvy Group. (The entire video is embedded at the bottom of this post, and it’s worth the 16 minutes or so of your time to watch it, especially if you’re in the business of managing perceptions.)

Sutherland, an effective ad man, reminded me about why I do what I do in higher education. At the 2:55 mark of his talk, he puts higher ed branding, PR and marketing into perspective:

The point is that education doesn’t actually work by teaching you things. It actually works by giving you the impression that you’ve had a very good education, which gives you an insane sense of unwarranted self-confidence, which then makes you very, very successful in later life. …

But, actually, the point of placebo education is interesting. How many problems of life can be solved actually by tinkering with perception, rather than that tedious, hardworking and messy business of actually trying to change reality?

Sutherland is exaggerating, but he has a point.

Those of us who work in higher ed marketing, PR, branding and communications help people solve problems by tinkering with perception. We really do. The essence of building an institutional brand is to add intangible value to the reality that is a college education. And by doing so, we make the intangible tangible.

Making the intangible tangible. That’s what we do, on our best days. Or as Harry Beckwith said, brand-building, brand-managing and marketing is about Selling the Invisible. By doing so, we add value to that thing we sell: an education.

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Here’s Sutherland’s talk. I encourage you to watch the whole thing.