Category: marketing

New higher ed blog: The Old College Try

Just discovered a new higher ed marketing blog, The Old College Try, that’s worth a visit. (Thanks to CollegeWebEditor‘s Karine Joly for the intro, via a recent “three questions for…” conversation with TOCT’s creator, Deanna Woolf.)

The blog’s been around since July, and I spent some time surfing its contents this morning. Woolf writes with a witty, engaging style, addressing issues like the lack of paid celebrity spokespeople for colleges and universities (“We can dream of the day when radio spots are read by Pierce Bronson instead of the local station’s go-to regular”), marketing safety on our campuses (“To me, it’s hard to ‘market’ a safe campus by citing great crime stats, the night watch/escort service, or the emergency phones every 100 feet. … People are going assess how safe they feel when they visit your campus and see it with their own two eyes”), or a different angle on college football photos (“[Y]ou could capture a cool photo of a pre-game tailgate party that would be perfect for the student activities brochure you do later in the year. … Or what about the president horking down a hotdog? What a great shot for an off-the-wall university magazine piece on her or him.”) Horking down? Not sure if that’s a typo or not, but it does conjure up an interesting image.

Friday Five: August odds and sods

It’s been awhile, and lots of starred links cluttering my Google Reader as the new semester cranks up. Time to share a link or five.

  • Me? Working at a KFC and listening to Frampton Comes Alive. And what were you doing when you were 17? Chances are, nothing much compared to these young “accidental” entrepreneurs making waves on the Internet. Of course, we didn’t have the Internet back then. If it had existed, I probably would’ve been spending all my free time downloading “Do You Feel Like We Do?”
  • Time offers its picks for the 50 best websites of 2007, by category (arts and leisure, audio and video, news and information, etc.). Something I stumbled upon (yes, that site makes the top of the social network category) at Micro Persuasion about three weeks ago.
  • Best spam ever? Charlie Melichar over at Intermedia thinks so. Because it’s all about getting personal. Sorta.
  • Where are they going, where have they been? PR blogger and educator Robert French prepares for the fall semester by assessing where past student-bloggers have ended up.
  • Why higher ed marketers should pay attention to social networks. Ninety-six percent of U.S. students ages 9 to 17 who have internet access use social-networking technology to connect with their peers, and one of their most common topics of discussion is education, according to a new survey. Enough said, says Charlie at Intermedia. Amen, says I.