Category: media

#eduweb2008 Buzz, Brands, and Babes

Sexy title.

Sean Carton, CSO from idfive. sean.carton@idfive.com

6 trends of change

  1. The consumer is in the driver’s seat
  2. Everything is digital
  3. Real time now = when I wnat it
  4. Bye, bye centralization
  5. The future is always on (wireless)
  6. Peace out desktop

It should be standard practice to search around for what they’re sayng about you. I think we’ve lucked out here.

Memes – a unit of cultural information. Richard Dawkings The Selfish Gene

Malcolm Gladwell, the Tipping Point- You just need to reach the ten people who will be the ones to make it grow and then it will be viral.

Duncan Watts One-to-one – disagrees with Gladwell.

******Honesty***********************

I was talking about this yesterday. I really think that this web 2.0 movement will force conversation from the marketing speak to honest conversations.

Keep it honest
Multiple channels
Frequent updates

This is more to the point that you can’t always control your message and sometimes you have to let it ride. More passive Marketing.

Helicopter Parents

Presenter: Stephanie Geyer – Noel-Levitz

Parents say the darnedest things. Stephanie had us read various quotes from parents about their involvement in their kid’s college search.

I don’t think this will shock anyone out there: Parents fill out forms for their students and pose as students when they can. I know we see parents on the student chats @ SMC.

Here’s an important piece, “The more parent information the better.”

Some quick numbers:

90% either have or would chat online one on one with a counselor.

87% would or have email a counselor.

Virtual Tour is huge!

Social Networking:

I wonder how many parents are on facebook, etc. I wonder if a Parent social networking site would be useful if it was directed solely at parents.

Recommendations for colleges:
More detail into curriculum requirements
Financial costs/financial aid/percentage of students receiving aid
Application status

Not surprised here. 2 of the top five web content priorities for parents are financial aid related. I worry about this and our site.

Email is not dead for parents!!!! It’s in fact the number one way to connect with parents. That’s a real bad thing for us and our CMS.

Millennials go to College, must read.

To me, parents aren’t going away. Colleges should accept that. You can’t bite the hand that feed you.

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.

Top Ten Things I learned in Media Literacy

10 Things I learned in Media Literacy:

1. Just because they tell you it’s true, doesn’t mean that it is true. This class has definitely reminded me that I have to be a skeptic when looking at any type of media.

2.Lunz scares me. He seemed okay with what he was doing. He didn’t appear to believe that he was misrepresenting information by changing the words politicians use.

3.I was watching the news this morning and saw a clip on U.S. Air. It’s pilots were filing grievances saying that the airline was pressuring them to take on less fuel. The news clip seemed to be very much on the side of the pilots complete with Experts and Plain Clothes interviews. It didn’t quite seem to fit in the local broadcast. I wondered if it was put out by the pilot’s union. Before this class, I wasn’t aware that news broadcasters would do this.

4. How enormous companies like AOL/TimeWarner, Disney, Viacom are. I know they were big, but I wasn’t aware of how diverse their holdings are.

5. Yaks are raised for fiber and meat.

6. The 7 Basic Principles of Media Education and the 29 Persuasive Techniques. Super valuable.

7. The Feed. It’s there and I’m plugged into it to some extent. What does that mean and can I resist the Feed? Should I resist the Feed? These are some new questions that came with this renewed realization that the Feed is all around us.

8. This is big business, man. I can’t find the name of the French consultant that said, “American cheese is dead!” but I was blown away at how much companies will pay to consult with him. I’m very curious to see what his formula is.

9. Political ads are evil. They just prey on emotions. The Bush ads in particular were total fear mongering. How did the dems not beat them?

10. Awareness. It’s important to be aware of the Feed. It’s there. One should always look at whats presented with a critical eye.

Remaining questions?

Is resistance futile? Can you fight the feed? Or, like V’s dad, will we all succumb?

I wonder what critics thought of advertisement back in the 20’s and 30’s. Sure it was factual based, and very different from it is now. All those facts couldn’t be true though. Did Crest really give you the brightest smile? Just a made up example there, but I wonder if people thought critically at those ads.

Where do we go from here? I’m cynical I guess. When Money gets involved with something it immediately becomes corruptible and it’s hard to put right. Clouds TM, school TM, etc. Are these inevitable?

Drew, bring food and project next Friday.

Chapter 4 & "Making Media That Matters….In Minutes"

Really glad we decided to split up the readings. It makes it much more manageable and it makes the wife happier that we can spend time together.

So I’m going to try to read and blog at the same time again. Didn’t really work as well as I had hoped last time, but here goes:

Chapter IV:

  • Right off the bat, that adapted quote from Marx on pg 121 is an important one. The past plays an important role in everything, the media included.
  • There’s a great thesis topic, “The educational value derived from ‘the Flintstones’ and ‘the Jetsons’: Past v. Future”. That’s pretty funny that networks were able to pass those two shows off as educational in order to satisfied the 1990 Children’s Television Act.
  • I wonder if journalists get bored. I wonder if they get stuck in a rut, doing the same thing over and over again. That’s what I didn’t like about journalistic writing. It was like a math formula. I hated the funnel format because I didn’t feel like it gave me enough room to be creative.
  • The Clayman study is intersting. I expected that editors would fight for one of their writer’s stories to hit the front page. That they tend to midly support the stories was suprising.
  • Bennett’s 6 Key Practices (p 133) are very valuable!
  • All of those spin offs of Survivor are lame. Is imitation really more successful than the alternative? Or are they just easier?
  • It’s just occurred to me that they’ve spent a lot of time talking about newspapers here and only a page or two about the Internet. I guess that is because of the age of this text, and we’ve talked about that in class. If newspaper readership is really dwindling, then what structured forms of news media is taking its place?
  • The star is the key. Look at Katie Couric and how the CBS Evening news is doing.

Making Media That Matters…In Minutes

  • A great way to teach kids about media literacy – through hands on experience.
  • I’m sure they love doing these little films.
  • The movie awards nights must be a hit