First day a geek camp

Run down of last night’s events:

After the second session, a quick beer at the cocktail hour and up to the room to cleanup and recharge.

I stopped by the Bloghighered.org meet up. Chatted with Brad Ward and Mark G. for a bit.

Hit the Deck for a quick bite to eat and then played craps in the casino for a couple of hours. First time for me and ended up $70. It was tough to find a good table but just as I was about to call it a night down $20, I decided to try a table where a guy was on a roll.

Looking forward to today. So often at these things, you only get one or two sessions a day that sound interesting. In fact, I can’t decide which 5 o’clock session to go to. I guess I’ve got plenty of time to figure it out.

Faculty Marketers by Dr. Greg Williams

It makes sense for both sides, administration and faculty. He’s presenting from the point of view of a graduate administrator/faculty needing to grow enrollment. I can see a lot of some parallels b/n his program and ours.

aside: (this may be a stretch for me, but I might be able to pass some of this along to our Dir. grad programs)

Going back to Mark Greenfield’s presentation: Forget about the technology. Go over your goals and answer the question: what are you looking to accomplish?

LOL!!! He’s talking about Open Houses for a Graduate Program and he’s got a huge chocolate chip cookie on the screen. This totally reminds of our Open Houses. He has a great point. What’s in it for me? Besides the free cookies.

another aside: This will be a real test for me and my understanding of Twitter. I just downloaded TwitKit (or something like that). I can see how it can be a great tool here, but I agree with Mark G. that h.s. kids are using it. I can see them not getting the point. Loopt on the other hand….

It sounds like they totally blew up their old program, changing course titles, changing curriculum, inquiry management and put a lot of their services on line. I have no idea how he got all of this done in one year…

I really need to blow up the grad site. It’s awful. There’s too much stuff and it’s all buried.

Google Adwords is number one referrer. It sounds like it has a lot of useful data that you can extract from it.

iTunes University: This would work for both the undergrad and graduate schools. I wonder if h.s. kids would look it up? I think adults might. Guess we could link it to the website, but that’s just more clutter.

YouTube: YES! Such an easy technology and ads another dimension to the website. That silly little YouTube account (SMCBloggers) has had over 1500 views in 3 months.

Ahhh, I see. It took him four years to go through this redesign. I wonder how much it cost.

Definitely focused on the career opportunities that would come out of the degree. It’s be really easy to do that with the Education program since VT pay schedule is based on education level.

All done. Foooood…..

Live from eduweb2008

So it’s begun.

I’m at the third annual eduweb conference in Atlantic City, NJ. I’m going to try to post here as much as I can through out the week.

Right now, I’m in the opening speaker’s presentation: Mark Greenfield from the University of Buffalo. This is the second time I’ve heard him speak. The man loves his Slingbox and his Sabres.

Mark’s top 10 Web Trends:

10. The end of print – see Kindle

9. World network (web3.0) Loopt – a social compass that the new iphone has. There’s not much that Vermont is missing, but the fact that Vermont doesn’t have the iphone is ridiculous.

8. Virtual Reality – Club penguin, webkins, second life, second life teen. Not sure about this one.

7. Email is dead. I totally by into this. Email is ridiculous. Completely annoying and people don’t know how to use it appropriately. Facebook is becoming this way too.

6. Read/write web. I like his idea of striking out the word “audience” and using “community” when talking about for whom content is directed.

5. Information overload. Too many people out there and it hard to separate the chafe from shaft. (I think that’s the saying)

4. Redefining Time. Stuff has to happen much quicker than before. Qik.com going to have to check that site out. Live video streaming through your cell phone.

3. The end of the walled garden. The conversation has left the blogosphere. I was talking about this in my final presentation last Friday. Blogs have become one-way conversations. This is why we need to use all of the different social networking media out there. (Flickr, YoutTube, etc.) Ping.fm (need to check this out as well)

2. Cluetrain Manifesto! Must read according to Mark. Chris Andersen (wrote The Long Tail) says that social networking sites should be a component not a destination. In otherwords, he’s an advocate for niche social networking. I this has some value. We certainly use it with accepted students. I wonder about this though. I wonder though…. Who has the time? (cuwebd.ning.com)

1. Mobile. This is where we get killed in Vermont!!!!! Push the damn AT&T deal through!!!!!

Strategies to deadl with these trends:

Focus on the relationships, not the technology. Yes, exactly!!! What is our goal? Why do we want to have a presence in a place like Facebook?

Read Groundswell, The Revolution Will not be Televised

1. Be first.
2. Refresh. Keep it moving. Update daily.
3. Be authentic.
4. Be honest. Love the marketing jargon.
5. Community!!! Build it.
6. You can’t control it. You must cede control. Understand that if you let them in, they’ll poke around in places you don’t want them. (see what happened when I got off of the Facebook group)
7. The world is flat. Connections can be made that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. There’s a lot of wonder that can happen, but there’s a lot to be skeptic.

CMO
Chief Marketing Officer. Now we need a Chief Community Officer. Someone to advocate for the Community first and the Organization second. This is a tough one for educational institutions I’m sure. It goes back to #6. I’ve been thinking about this the last couple of weeks. It’s almost like passive marketing. I want to explore this more in the future. I think there’s a lot there.