AMA 2010: A Different Kind of Presentation- Stamats Higher Education Marketing Blog

Oct 29th 10 Posted by Fritz McDonald in Conferences, Featured Articles

AMA 2010: A Different Kind of Presentation

I’ve been doing so many conferences this year that my eyes are blurry. In about a week, however, I’ll be doing something genuinely different at this year’s American Marketing Association Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education—and I wanted to tell you about it in this space. First, I’m collaborating with two people I consider important thought leaders in interactive marketing for colleges and universities: Michael Stoner, president and partner in the firm that bears his name and one of the most respected web and technology thinkers in our world; and Rachel Reuben, associate vice president for marketing communications at Ithaca College and a pioneer in bringing social media to higher education—I’m honored to be working with them.

What we are doing that is different is running a highly interactive, audience-participation-driven session on the most crucial issues/challenges you’re facing today. Here’s the program description:

Need a moment? It’s not easy, fast, or cheap to make choices when technology is constantly evolving. There’s a staggering array of tools to use, trends to follow, and people urging you to do more. Still, achieving an excellent online presence isn’t a nice-to-have in 2010: it’s a necessity. Building a cohesive, broad-reaching, and successful Internet brand is a marriage of art, artifice, technology, and culture—and a challenge for everybody. In this session, we’ll encourage you to take a deep breath and join a conversation. We’ll pinpoint fundamental questions you should ask, look at what works (and what doesn’t) and explore some significant trends. What you’ll get out of it: a team of multiple, complementary, and overlapping perspectives and the opportunity to articulate your challenges and success stories.

Instead of a typical PowerPoint presentation, we’re going to have a dialogue with our audience. To make this work, we need your help. We’re asking key questions about the biggest challenges in developing an online presence that will create the foundation for our AMA session—essentially, they will start the conversation with our audience. We know that there are probably more questions out there, but to draw on what the larger higher ed community is thinking, we’re asking you to share your thoughts, tips, reactions, etc. to the following questions:

What are the primary challenges/issues that are top of mind for people focusing on their institution’s online presence (websites, social media, etc.)?
What are fundamental questions you should be asking about your institution’s online presence in 2010–2011?
What have we learned that works—and doesn’t work?
Are there significant trends that marketers should be paying attention to?

This is going to be a groundbreaking session. I’m really looking forward to working with Michael and Rachel on it, but we can’t do it without your help. So take a minute and let us know what you’re thinking. (You can find a somewhat similar post at: http://www.mstonerblog.com/.) The session will run on November 10, 2010.

Photo By: The Vancouver Chess League

Eric Dieterle

Best practices for cross-campus collaboration. As you note, there are so many tools and so many rapid changes — and on most campuses, so many silos. Not to be idealistic, but what if the top content creators, and IT wonks, and designers, and social media players, and PR pros could forget about their reporting lines, put their minds together, and say to the rest of campus, “follow us”?
http://twitter.com/zachwoodward Zach Woodward

Fritz,
http://twitter.com/zachwoodward Zach Woodward

Fritz,
Good on you for ditching the traditional powerpoint lecture and instead opening up a dialogue with the attendees. I agree there is a big list of tools out there, and that having a social presence today is a must. I’d like to share my thoughts on some of the issues and challenges I ran across when implementing social media strategy across Acadia University this past year.

The primary challenge faced initially was due in part by the amount of stakeholders potentially affected by social media implementation. Essentially everyone will be affected, but in some cases certain departments wanted nothing to do with social. This hardship made it difficult to push social integration across the entire university and the number one challenge in my opinion was getting the entire school to embrace the opportunities social media provides. I’d start much like we did at Acadia by working with the recruitment officer to engage the community and bring in some tangibles (increase in enrolment, grants, donations, alumni involvement, etc) the rest of the school can relate to. When the rest of the university noticed the positive results described above they will begin to take notice.

A second challenge I’d like to identify is social media redundancy. I’d imagine there are probably a lot of redundant Facebook fan/like pages floating around that can be merged into official university pages. This can be done by contacting Facebook directly and is how we solved the redundancy issue at Acadia. In terms of asking questions about the institutions social presence it might be wise to initiate some tutorials with specific faculty (we started with marketing professors). We took time to try out different platforms and discuss the benefits of bringing social media into the classroom.

I’ll admit at first the mistake I made was being too aggressive with the professors in terms of how and why they should start embracing social media. I had to take a step back and really ensure they understood the benefits of social. Going forward we made sure the marketing faculty recognized why as students we felt social was important. In addition it was stressed that engaging with your community can be, and is, being used to not only foster relationships with students, colleagues, and friends, but also to share knowledge and highlight student achievements we might never of had the opportunity to connect with had we not picked up the social phone and joined the conversation.

Cheers,
Zach Woodward, Radian6
@zachwoodward
Fritz Mcdonald

Zach–this is a tremendous post–thank you! I love hearing what's actually happening out there in detail…and you've done a fine job of providing it. You've done some really good work at Acadia and I will definitely share it at AMA. I really like the tutorials idea–that's a fresh and personal way to influence faculty members as opposed to trying to convert them as a whole. This way, they see your passion and knowledge up close, first, even if on occasion you need to rein it in a bit.Overall, it sounds like you faced the biggest challenge of implementing social media on a college campus–internal resistance–by getting your institutional community to focus on goals and knowledge. Isn't it funny how social media isn't really about the technology or the tools but the people involved? Very nice work and thanks so much for sharing!
Fritz Mcdonald

Good thinking, Eric, but I expect no less from you. Collaboration means compromise for many people, and for too many that's a dirty word. But giving something up for collective improvement has to make things better, doesn't it?
http://twitter.com/zachwoodward Zach Woodward

Thanks for the kind words, Fritz. Let me know how everything goes at AMA. I know the session is on Nov 10 so I really wanted to make sure I reached out far enough in advance.

I can be reached at zach.woodward@radian6.com should you ever want to chat further.