Two conferences in Boston

CASE Communications Marketing and Technology Conference
(April 15–16 Boston, Mass)

Speakers include:

• J. Todd Bennett Managing Partner decimal152
• Mark Greenfield Director of Web Services University at Buffalo
• Karlyn Morissette Web Producer Dartmouth College
• Luke Robinson Web Manager Calvin College
• Peter Holloran & Josanne DeNatale Cognitive Marketing Inc.
• Sree Sreenivasan Dean of Student Affairs  Columbia University Journalism School

Technology is dramatically altering how higher education professionals—and a multitude of others—communicate about our institutions. This conference offers best practices for managing online reputations while detailing concrete steps to engage prospective students and maintain strong ties with alumni.

Benefits of Attending

• Learn how to develop and implement a strategy for Web and electronic communications.
• Decide how the Web and new media fits into your overall communications plan.
• Find out how to engage your target audiences using social networking tools.
• Get all the tips, tricks and pitfalls of a Web redesign project.

Who Should Attend

Associate vice presidents, directors and other positions that deal with strategy and implementation in the following areas:

• Web communications
• Marketing
• Admissions
• Electronic communications
• Public relations
• Alumni relations
• Advancement

The American Marketing Association Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education: 2009
(11/15/2009   – 11/18/2009  in Boston MA)

The call for papers is now out and are due by April 3.

In 2008, over 550 leaders in higher education marketing joined together at the AMA Annual Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education. Join us in 2009 as we continue the tradition with provocative keynote speakers and in-depth discussions on cutting edge approaches to marketing in higher education. This year’s topics will include:

• Building strong college and university brands
• Using new technology effectively
• New methods of marketing and measurement
• Long term strategic planning
• Internal marketing buy-in
• Skill building/professional growth sessions

In addition to inspiring general discussions, intense advanced learning sessions and skill building activities, the program also includes more than 30 marketing presentations and case studies in four traditional tracks including: Measurement, Strategic Planning, Execution and Technology. Each session offers a unique opportunity for higher educations marketers to learn from what others are doing in the field.

Don’t miss this highly interactive, thought provoking, skill building and energizing event

Social media isn’t a cure-all

I loved reading this post from Ron Bronson about using 2.0 wisely in communicating your message:

Most view their web sites as a tool to recruit new students and perhaps to reach out to alumni and the public at large. What they’ve not be able to understand, is how to communicate to these very different audiences using all of the mediums at their disposal, without compromising their message.

The web is nimble and other mediums are not. The web is immediate, it’s fast and yet, if you’re not clear about who you’re trying to reach and target the message to that audience, it can be even more ineffective than anything else you do (print, radio, TV, etc.) and it’ll reach them and turn them off faster than ever.

Ten Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers

From TechCrunch, here’s an article by guest author Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg and the cofounder of Revision3 and Pownce. Kevin, who has over 88,000 followers on Twitter (making him the second most followed after President Obama), also “bloggs” at kevinrose.com. He is an investor in Twitter.

Here’s the short hand version of the whole article:

1. Explain to your visitors what retweeting is
2. Fill out your bio
3. “Link it up” – Put links to your Twitter profile everywhere
4. Tweet about your passions in life and #hash tag them.
5. Bring your twitter account into the physical world (business cards, email signature, powerpoint slides)
6. Take pictures.
7. Start a contest.
8. Follow the top twitter users and watch what they tweet
9. Reply to/get involved in #hash tag memes.
10. Track your results.

BTW, webpub is now on Twitter. Follow “us” at mitwebpub.

Create your own social network sites

Ning (http://www.ning.com/)

Ning is great for those without alot of technical knowledge and who don’t want to host anything on their own hardware. It takes seconds to set up a site (I made one here for fun http://mitwebpub.ning.com/) and you can choose from a number of design templates available.

What makes your own social network on Ning special? It’s yours. Your brand and visual design. Your choice of public or private. Your very own members.

Free features include inserting your own brand, member management, your choice of custom text and widgets, rss feeds in and out, discussion forum, video feature and branded video players, chat room, facebook integration, groups, member blogs, and an events calendar.

Premium services are for fee, and include things like controlling ads, removing the Ning promotion, transferring your own domain name, more storage and more bandwidth.

Elgg (http://www.elgg.org/)

Elgg is an open, flexible social networking engine, designed to run at the heart of any socially-aware application. Building on Elgg is easy, and because the engine handles common web application and social functionality for you, you can concentrate on developing your idea.

Elgg is open source. That means, when you use Elgg, you have the benefit of being part of a large developer community, with the security and stability that hundreds of eyes can provide. It’s also headed and used by Curverider and its partners, so you can be assured that it’s in commercial use and will cope with the demands of a popular application. 

It runs on Apache, PHP and MySQL – the same open source platform that the majority of web applications are written in. Elgg is compatible with enterprise technologies like the Zend Platform and any server environment that can run the Apache web server.

We believe in an open, distributed, social web. As a result, Elgg supports technologies like OpenDD, OpenID and OpenSocial, and we are directly involved in community efforts to push the envelope when it comes to data portability, federation and the user experience. Elgg is a great way to future-proof your social applications.

Elgg was founded by Ben Werdmuller and David Tosh, and has been powering networks since 2004.

Digg.com Nearly Explodes Over Movie Codes

Did you hear what happened on digg.com yesterday? When some of its users posted a 16-digit hexadecimal number that is used to lock up HD-DVD movies, Digg removed their posts and terminated their accounts. That’s when the action really started happening…from Boing Boing:

The AACS Licensing Authority, which controls the anti-copying technology underlying HD-DVD, sent out hundreds of legal threats to sites that had posted the key, including Digg. It appears that Digg took a pro-active stance and began to seek out new examples of the key and delete them immediately, instead of waiting for notice from the AACS-LA. It’s likely that their lawyers advised them to take this course of action, since the penalties for posting “circumvention devices” can be stiff.

Digg’s users revolted at this stricture, and saw to it that every single item on the front page of Digg contained the forbidden number. Users accused Digg of taking money from the HD-DVD manufacturers (Digg ran an ad campaign from the company in the late summer of 2006), and complained about the site’s deletion of user accounts.

At 9PM last night, Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder, posted about this on the Digg blog, and said that he would no longer take material down, even though it could very well cost him the site. It’s a brave stance, and it seems to have quieted the Digg users’ protests.

The drama continues…as of this evening, there are 723,000 pages out there on the net with the number on them. So what to make of all this…”Are social networking sites doomed to failure?” asks Cognitive Daily. What’s your take on it?

(Thanks to Michael Dutton of IS&T’s Usability Group for this post idea!)