Articles worth checking out

Posted: May 7th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Ideas, Marketing, Social Media | Tags: , , | No Comments »

I’ve been on the road lately, so I’ve missed a lot of good articles. Time to get caught up on the feed reader:

College Tours are Broken: An article asking you how many 100k products you buy from 20-year olds. It’s an interesting piece that makes you really think about the college tour and how we could improve the process. That said, only the most elite schools are 100k. Most are far less than that, especially when you get down to the discount rate. So I’m not sure we need to do more to turn college into a sales and marketing experience, rather than an investment. Still it’s a thought provoking article. (HT @bradjward)

Telling Your Story and How So Many Miss It
 Gary V talks about PR and “staying on message.”

Can you change everything?: Seth Godin gives you some ideas on how to get out of the business rut you’re in.

How To Win a CASE Gold: An instructive piece from Mark Sheehy @ mstonerblog. Judging CASE this year was a rewarding experience and I can tell you that a lot of what he says is oh-so-true.

Can Billions of Parents Be Wrong?: Perhaps parents’ intense efforts at influencing their children has some informational value about the parental profitability of such behavior.

In front of the classroom…

Posted: April 13th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Higher Ed, Marketing, Web 2.0 | Tags: , , , | No Comments »
A university classroom. (Jones Hall at Princet...
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I taught my first college class on Saturday. I wasn’t worried too much when I agreed to teach ART 265 – The Business of Art (Web Design) because it’d never been taught before, as part of an entirely new program at the community college at which it’s being offered.

The course was envisioned for freelancers who are seeking ways to market themselves on the web. What I ended up with is a majority of the class who are interested in using the web to market existing businesses they own. We’re not talking web businesses, but bricks and mortar businesses that are have a presence on the web.

So the whole thing changed. I could’ve kept the course the way I’ve outlined it, but I’ve decided to adapt it a bit to make it more relevant to everyone. We’ll still cover everything the way it’s written in the syllabus, but the projects I developed will focus more heavily on web marketing concepts than I think I initially imagined.

Because the class meets primarily online (we only have 3 in-class sessions during the 10-week term) I really needed to figure out quickly what we’d do to ensure that no one left the class feeling like they got nothing out of it.

The front of the classroom wasn’t really that big a deal. I mean, I’ve been standing in front of classrooms for a long time now. The audiences are different and writing the syllabus was a new challenge for sure, but…once we got going I found that it wasn’t much different from giving a presentation, really.

It’ll be an interesting experience for sure, going forward. I think had I not had the experience of having taught lots of other things in the past, maybe I’d have been more daunted by all of it. But I’ve taught adult ESL, given tons of workshops and speeches and of course, taught tennis for about a decade now. So while the venue is different, it’s a lot of the same skills and about as fun as I expected it to be, too.

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