Category: marketing

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.

Friday Five: Summer reading edition

Inspired by this list of 11 marketing books for summer reading, I thought I’d share what’s on my marketing-related reading list for the summer:

A few of the books on my summer reading list.

Likeonomics: The Unexpected Truth Behind Earning Trust, Influencing Behavior, and Inspiring Action, by Rohit Bhargava. I’m about two-thirds through this book about the importance of building trust in our marketing. Look for my review of this book soon.

Happy Customers Everywhere: How Your Business Can Profit from the Insights of Positive Psychology, by Bernd Schmitt, a business prof at Columbia University. I’ve been getting more interested in positive psychology movement since watching Shawn Achor’s TED talk, The Happy Secret to Better Work (highly recommended). In Happy Customers Everywhere, Schmitt talks about the latest positive psychology research and how it can help organizations build stronger connections with their constituents.

What Chinese Want: Culture, Communism and China’s Modern Consumer, by Tom Doctoroff. Now that the campus where I work has started building a new university in China, I thought it was high time for me to start learning more about this powerful player on the global scene. This book looks like a promising introduction to modern China and its marketplace.

Empathetic Marketing: How to Satisfy the 6 Core Emotional Needs of Your Customers, by Mark Ingwer. More psychological insight for marketing.

18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done, by Peter Bregman. This one comes highly recommended by Karine Joly, one of the most productive bloggers I know. Read her 1-1-1 review of this book.

I hope I get through all of these over the summer. Maybe I should read that productivity book, 18 Minutes, first.

What’s on your list? What are your recommend summer reads for marketers? (Or if you’re tired of marketing books, you might want to take a cue from Dave Van de Walle and take a break from marketing books this summer.)

Flickr photo: Beach Reading by aafromaa.