Tag: conferences

On presentations, accolades and nametags: an update from CASE District VI

I’ve been in Denver since Sunday at the CASE District VI “Great Adventure” Conference, where I presented back-to-back sessions (Monday) titled “Crisis Communications in a Networked World” and “Communicating Change, Inside and Out.”

It seems that both sessions were well received,. No rotten tomatoes, anyway. But I wish I hadn’t tried to cram so much into the crisis communications presentation. I wanted to talk share some info about monitoring and measuring your online reputation, but that ought to be a session in and of itself. (And it will be in a couple of upcoming conferences. Watch this blog for details.) People don’t realize just how many online tools are available for monitoring image, brand and reputation online. Nor do they realize how easy to use many of them are. And that they’re free. Anyway, trying to share all that info in a 45-50 minute presentation was like turning on the fire hose. I’ll post both presentations via Slideshare later in the week, and I’ll link to them from here.

As great as it was to present again in my home district, the high point of the conference was last night’s awards ceremony. Our university won a grand total of 13 awards for communications, marketing, PR, design, alumni relations, development, etc. — the most we’ve ever won. Included in that list is the coveted Sweepstakes Award for overall excellence in institutional advancement, a designation we also won last year. It’s a shame more members of our communications team and our overall university advancement team weren’t on hand to share in the excitement. Only four of us from Missouri S&T made the trek to Denver this year, two of us as presenters. But we will celebrate appropriately back home. I consider myself very fortunate to work with so many talented and hard-working people.

Two other highlights: a good friend of mine, John Amato, won the district’s distinguished service award this year (well-deserved, John!), and I thoroughly enjoyed Sunday evening’s opening keynote by Scott, the nametag guy, who also happens to be quite a blogger. Too bad I couldn’t have met him before we launched our hello campaign to introduce people to our university’s new name.

After the institute: tech-savvier communicators

The Academic Impressions conference on tech-savvy communications wrapped up this afternoon. As higher ed conferences go, this was a small and intensive meeting in which we tried to compress a lot of information about the social web into a short amount of time and also give participants a practical plan to take away from the event. I think we met our objectives.

The two-day program was actually an “institute,” and more interactive than many larger conferences I’ve attended. And even though the group was small, it was also one of the most diverse I’ve seen in terms of the types of institutions the people represented. There was a head of school from a private high school and his assistant, a couple of folks from the IT department of a public research university, marketing and PR folks from community colleges, public and private schools, and a pre-college school district in Canada. We even had someone who works in the real estate development business in attendance. This made for a broad array of perspectives on how best to incorporate online methods into various institutions’ overall communications strategies. Some left the conference with plans to better monitor their online reputation. Others plan to incorporate RSS, podcasting, online video and blogging. A few participants plan examine whether a social networking site might help them reach younger alumni or prospective students. I’m pretty sure all of them will start surfing Technorati regularly to see who’s saying what about their organizations.

All in all, I believe each of us (including me) left the meeting with ideas that will help us become more tech savvy in how we use social networking/web 2.0 tools. That’s what we hoped to accomplish, so good for us.

But can you believe I forgot to share these book recommendations? D’oh! But that’s OK. Now I have an excuse to follow up with participants. I’ll send them a link to that post.