Abstracts - Wednesday

Wednesday, July 28th

8:30 - 9:30 am -
Marketing Communications:  Wish You Were Here: Experiments on Telling Your Campus Story from Abroad—Kirsten McKinney, Web & Graphic Coordinator, University of Richmond
  Your students are traveling for study and research but all you ever get is a lousy t-shirt - or if you’re lucky, a postcard.  Have you ever thought that maybe you should go along for the ride? This travelogue style session will share lessons on capturing the student study abroad experience using video, blogs, social networking sites, and hardworking staff. Explore ways you can adapt the - embedded reporter - approach for your institution and share the story of your student’s experiences.

Design & Development: Managing Higher Education Web Development: Traps and Tips—Ryan Dellolio, Web Developer, The George Washington University
  Higher education web development usually means higher impact, higher reward, higher cause, and higher stability—but oftentimes also means higher stress, higher volume, higher expectations and higher bureaucracy.  This presentation will share, through anecdotal evidence and researched/lived best practices: 6 “traps” (common mistakes to be aware of in higher education web development, things to avoid) and 6 “tips” (advice and ways to be successful in higher education web development, from experience).  TRAPS include: 
• Thinking “The web is a marketing tool”
• Feeling pressure to move everything in house
• Fearing bureaucracy
• Seizing all control
• thinking: “We know who we’re building for” (internal vs. external)
• The enterprise trap (not embracing open source)

TIPS include:
• empower your constituency
• Do more than build websites
• Break the waterfall —be agile
• Your competitors are not always who you think they are
• Lose control
• Document, document, document

The presentation will close with a discussion of innovation in the higher education web arena “maximizing the privilege of working on the web” and the university environment.  Having been in web/IT consulting for many years and having transitioned full-time to becoming lead web developer and web solutions strategist at The George Washington University’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, supporting the web needs of 400 faculty, 100 staff and 3000 students has been no small task and one at which my team has excelled.  I am a soon to be Ph.D. candidate — and my research background has brought an additional, solutions-based angle to common problems that face higher education web developers, including myself.  This presentation will be applicable to all who work in the field and I hope to spark additional discussion— a higher education web developer’s job is never done.

Guest Track: The Best and Worst of Both Worlds Panel Discussion Title TBD— Deb Dudley, SUNY Potsdam, Ann Marie Vargas, Rollins College and Lucy Boudet, Valencia Community College — Moderator: Sean Carton, Chief Strategy Officer, idfive

Guest Track: Beyond the Buzz Terms: Defining Your College Brand The Real U: Building Brands that Resonate with Students, Faculty, Staff & Donors— Rob Moore, Managing Partner, Lipman Hearne
  Based on the first CASE book on higher ed branding (published in March 2010)—The Real U: Building Brands that Resonate with Students, Faculty, Staff, and Donors—this presentation will cover all the factors necessary for a college or university to understand their brand, assess where it is relative to competitors, and get a head start on developing compelling creative that will motivate the market to act.  Illustrated by case studies of successful higher ed branding projects,  the presentation will be both a “how to” and a “what works”—helping participants get a strong start on launching a branding initiative on their own campus or refining and improving an existing initiative.

9:45 - 10:45 am:
Marketing Communications: Social Networkers Still Love Email: So Does Higher Ed— DJ Waldow, Director of Community, Blue Sky Factory
  Universities have a potential audience of thousands at their fingertips.  The hardest part is finding the best way to reach that audience, from getting their attention to encouraging them to take action.  Enter email and social media.  When used effectively together, email and social media can extend your reach, grow your audience, and pinpoint influential brand ambassadors. Students, prospective students, alumni — audience members of all ages - are using their social network of choice whether it’s email, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or LinkedIn. How exactly can higher education marketers make the most of these channels?  It all starts with community, content, and a killer campaign strategy.  Attendees will learn:
• Why email marketing is relevant to higher ed institutions and why it’s considered the digital glue of social media
• How to integrate email & social media (the tactical, low-hanging fruit)
• Strategies for using email & social media as complementary channels
• How to optimize content to encourage sharing
• Strategies for effectively building an online community using email and social media
• Ways to incorporate email & social into your communication strategy with real world higher ed examples

Design & Development: Using a CMS System to Help Manage Your Brand— Kevin Knutson, Manager, Web Systems & Design, University of St. Thomas
  Managing the brand of a college or university across multiple communication channels—web sites, social media, e-mail communications, video and print—is a challenge in its own right.  If you are considering a move to a new web content management system or already have one in place, you may be able to leverage its power to help achieve success. 
Whether you have rock-solid brand architecture or are in desperate need of one, this session will examine how implementing the right content management system with careful planning can help you through the transition. It will also discuss the challenges of migrating from one CMS to another.
We will explore how you can use the strengths of templates to manage client expectations, deliver a consistent service level across your organization, and keep your most important and visible communication channels aligned.

Guest Track: The Best and Worst of Both Worlds The Collaborator’s Winning Playbook— Andres Zapata, SVP Strategy, Partner, idFive
1. Why Collaborate? - Speed to market - Economies - Increased Capacity - Consensus building - Build deeper relationships - Leveraging the best resources for given tasks
2. Drawbacks of Collaboration? - If unmanaged, inefficiencies and redundancy - Relying on other organizations to hit your deadlines - Consistency and keeping the thread
3. Approaching Collaboration Projects - Iron Clad Project Management - Kick-off meeting - face to face, all team members must attend; start building relationships - Clear communications plan: Set tone of collegial, non-competitive, collaborative and positive experience - Single point of contact for each major project resource entity - Use technology to centralize documentation, timeline, discussion and deliverables - Weekly (sometimes 2x/week) status meetings, and follow up status reports and meeting notes - Identify and manage/mitigate project risk - Project wrap-up meeting; in person

Guest Track: Beyond the Buzz Terms: Defining Your College Brand People vs. Web: People Win! Truly Standing Out on the Social Web— Howard Kang, Ignition Officer, BlueFuego
  This presentation builds on Deborah Powsner’s track of “Defining Your College Brand.” The focus is on helping institutions establish a strong position offline and online, remembering human principles. The presentation will help institutions leverage the web effectively to achieve their branding goals. “The Internet has not changed human nature, nor does people’s buying psychology change simply because they are reading your message online instead of offline.” Robert W. Bly
  Human nature is perpetual. In most respects it is the same today as in the time of Caesar. So the principles of psychology are fixed and enduring. You will never need to unlearn what you learn about them. “Scientific Advertising—Hopkins

11 am - Noon:
Marketing Communications: Making Better Decisions with Web Analytics— Rick Allen, Babson College
  We all know web analytics is important to track website performance. But, how do we move beyond “tracking” to making informed decisions? In order to find answers, gain analytics insights, we need to ask the right questions. Data alone is meaningless. It only counts if it affects decision making. In this session, learn to pair key metrics with meaningful questions including: How do we decide what content to publish on our website? How do we decide if our web content is effective? How do we prioritize web projects? Attendees will receive a detailed handout with answers to critical questions, which they can apply to their institution’s web strategy measurement goals.

Design & Development: MashED Up: Mashups and Higher Education— -Doug Gapinski, mStoner
  With the proliferation of gigantic media repositories such as Flickr and Youtube, social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook, and new ideas about open source data, mashups that allow people to repurpose data on one site for use it somewhere else are becoming more and more common. We’ll look at several examples of what mashups are used for, including changing context of data, resurfacing content, visualization, way finding, entertainment, and more. We’ll even look at how some institutions are using mashups to support their brands. Specific examples will be shown inside and outside of higher education, and we will touch briefly on a couple of common tools for creating mashups.

Guest Track: The Best and Worst of Both Worlds Redesigning Group Therapy— Amy Stevens, Web Communications Manager, MCLA
Redesigning a website can be an emotional rollercoaster, for the project manager, the outside consultants and the internal design group.  In this session, we’ll talk about successfully navigating this process and subtle ways to get buy in when the mission isn’t clear and the parties aren’t on the same page.

Guest Track: Beyond the Buzz Terms: Defining Your College Brand Is Your Institution’s Brand a Celebrity?-— Damien Navarro, Earth Bound Media Group
  Branded entertainment is one of the most effective ways to achieve brand awareness and audience engagement, especially when your audience has a shorter attention span as well as more competition for their attention. By making your brand a celebrity, you can cut through the clutter to reach a dedicated audience and develop a relationship to enhance and support your other online and offline marketing and public relations efforts thus increasing enrollment, brand awareness and market share. In this presentation you will learn:
1. What branded entertainment is
2. How and where branded entertainment is used
3. How organizations are achieving success through branded entertainment
4. How you can develop your own branded entertainment campaigns to make your brand a celebrity

Noon - 1:15 pm: Closing Keynote Speaker TBA