marketing – Page 149 – Andrew Careaga

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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via FoxyTunes

It’s been more than a month since I claimed I was “working on” a review of the book University Marketing Mistakes: 50 Pitfalls to Avoid, by Roy D. Adler (a marketing prof at Pepperdine) and Thomas J. Hayes (same, from Xavier) and published earlier this year by CASE. (Adler and Hayes kindly responded to a Friday Five Q&A request last month.) It’s also been more than a month since I finished reading the book, so I guess I’d better get to that review before the lessons from this nifty little book start to fade from memory.

The review, like the book, is going to be succinct and to the point.

University Marketing Mistakes is a dandy little book for several reasons.

It’s a quick read, only 127 pages in all. You could finish it on a two-hour flight.
It’s loaded with excellent advice based on real-world examples from the world of academia. Many of the examples hit close to home. For example, there’s the story of the president of a university in our state and with nearly identical enrollment who is bent on moving his institution into the upper echelons (Case 2.4: Next, World Domination!). While reading it, I could have sworn the authors had been reading our strategic plan. But then I remembered we have a chancellor instead of a president, and that we’re a public university, not a private college like the one Adler and Hayes describe.
It over-delivers. The subtitle promises you “50 pitfalls,” but the authors give you 53.
The examples will make you chortle, if not laugh out loud, because they are universal truths exposed. Who among us hasn’t heard our institution described as “the best-kept secret” in the realm of education? (Can there really be more than one best-kept secret? Maybe our trustees and administrators call our institutions “well-kept secrets,” instead.) Who in higher ed hasn’t naively offered up a proposal to address a campus marketing issue without understanding the political terrain? What communications staffer hasn’t argued with their admissions staff about the need to emphasize benefits (what prospective students will get) instead of features (what we offer)?
You’ll actually pick up some useful ideas for your own marketing efforts. (At least I did.) That in itself should make the book worth reading.

So, there you have it. A short, glowing review about a short, useful book. If any readers of this blog who have also read the book would like to share their thoughts, please do so in the comments section below.

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Now playing: Basia Bulat – I Was A Daughter
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Category: marketing

Book review: ‘University Marketing Mistakes’