Aug 5th 10 Posted by Fritz McDonald in Digital, Featured Articles

What Conferences Teach Me

I’ve been on the road these past few weeks living and learning in conference time. In addition to Stamats’ own SIM and SIM Grad conferences, I’ve put time into EduComm, SUNY CUAD, CMC, ACT, EduWeb and other well-known higher ed gatherings and as is always the case, learned an awful lot from my audiences and fellow participants. Conferences like these are a good way to put my ear to the ground and find out what’s really happening at colleges and universities across the country—their challenges, their hopes, their frustrations and best of all, their triumphs. I spoke on creative marketing, applying social media to various audiences from transfer to graduate students, and marketing in general and came away with a host of insights, chief among them:

• In-house creative and marketing teams are doing better work than they’ve ever done but are still losing political battles that keep them from doing the truly edgy and distinctive creative executions they know they can do.
• There are more and more people working at colleges and universities who know more and more about social media and are doing interesting things with it, such as one audience member who talked about using LinkedIn as a way to search for graduate students (try the groups).
• If you haven’t seen the new George Washington University School of Journalism site, go there now: http://www.siwjournalism.org. It may be the first fully integrated social media web site.
• Integrated marketing and social media sound great in theory—in practice, most of us are just trying to figure out how we can use Facebook to our advantage.
• Many are relieved to hear that integrated marketing is still more than viable—because many are still trying to bring their campus to believe in the concept.
• Several graduate recruiters are finding success by focusing on ways to collaborate better with their colleagues and other departments.
• Many graduate recruiters are being asked to contribute a lot more to their institution’s financial well-being with a lot less than their undergraduate counterparts.
• It’s amazing how many people are willing to work with little to no resources because they believe in their institutions…how many people, in other words, who are driven more by mission than by money…amazing and heartening.
• No matter how tight budgets get, people still want, need, and believe in the power of research to build a marketing platform on.
• Blue Fuego gave my favorite presentation at EduWeb: social media is about people and how they behave.
• In interviewing a panel of high school students about social media, we were all surprised to find that all of them favored talking to people over the phone or in-person—direct human contact, in other words.
• The 2nd biggest takeaway from the session with high school students: while social media is important, other more traditional channels such as print collateral are still working.
• The biggest takeaway from the session with high school students: they favor your website as a source of accurate information over your Facebook page.
• Live, face-to-face conferences are still more fun and rewarding than their technological counterparts.
• Everyone feels alone and isolated until they come to a conference and discover that they are not really as alone as they think they are.

What conference lessons have you learned lately?

Photo by jcf