Surely Someone Is Working to Invent Real Life’s Killer App

I’ve talked a lot lately about “being behind the screen” versus being “out and about” with actual people. More and more of us are decamping to some facade that can protect us from the big bad world or allow us to let down our guards in a manner in which we might not otherwise consider.

From Charles Blow’s NY Times visual op-ed blog today, a bunch of graphs that didn’t really offer much in the way of new insights related to online profiles and how men and women lie in them. But one of the comments hit on something I was thinking the other day, but opted not to blog about..until now:

I find it amazing these days that many people seem incapable of meeting people in other ways. Everything goes through a screen. Entertainment, love, family life, politics… We tend to get sucked into these small communities of like-minded people online and forget about creating social networks in our immediate environments, when networks in our immediate environments are actually the ones that can positively change those environments in which we live, rather than just create some cyber-characters floating in space somewhere, devoid of real contact with the real planet and its inhabitants.

I’d been thinking about the idea that people are so caught up in their “inability to meet” [insert here] that they resort to such methods. Not that there is “anything wrong with it.” Perhaps the endless loop of online dating commercial with faux happy people extolling the supreme compatibility of their newly found beau got me thinking, “Have we fallen that far, that fast?”

I mean, online dating provides scores of people who would likely never have the opportunity to meet, a chance to interact, converse and who knows what else? It’s akin to being a wayfaring sailor or explorer of a different era, only the work now requires a credit card, patience and enduring pages of invasive questioning; rather than say, an oxen and some wampum.

It reminds me a lot of developing elaborate web programs aimed at picking off kids from outside a target area in higher ed recruiting. Or creating “social networking” tools for the sake of it, simply because it’s what “all the kids are doing these days.” Older, non-technical savvy folks are usually astounded by the scores of college kids who don’t actively use technology for anything. A few use facebook or myspace to talk to friends, pursue folks of the opposite sex whom they might have met once or had a class with and that’s it. Email? That’s for those lame kids who actually study. [/sarcasm]

Texting has replaced actual conversation and seems that while the premise of my remarks are to relegate the world’s single folks to a lifetime of romantic ludditism, the fact is…I’m just wonder if there aren’t better uses of people’s time? It’s harder for folks in remote places to meet new people, especially in a world where folks don’t feel the need to travel to rural areas as much. But what’s online usually mirrors the same, depressing story that you can find in the real world. Depends on the situation, I guess.

What ties it all together is a need for web applications that actually implore people to meet those around them. It’s out there, mind you, but I’m talking about promoting active conversations that motivate people to do more than just imagine that their situation must be awful because they don’t know anyone like them. The web is still a mess. Most folks can’t work their way around a google search and meanwhile, in web land, we’re musing longingly about the semantic web.

Ordinary people are looking to be heard. In everything that we do. Folks are being ignored, boxed neatly into compartments and readily forgotten until their little clique — that they didn’t realize they were part of, probably — becomes the soup de jour that week. That’s the way things work, I guess.

But only because someone else hasn’t figured out a way around it.

I imagine it’s coming…

Authenticity U.

Jeff Kallay talks about Inauthenticity in campus visits and admissions marketing and he couldn’t be more right.

When will folks in the field start to learn that copycatting what the big or well-heeled schools are doing isn’t going to cut it anymore. Just because you can go to someone else’s web site and steal what they’re doing, slapping your school colours and ‘brand’ on it, doesn’t make it authentically yours.

I’ve been saying this for months now, that no one cares what you think of your institution. They want to hear it from the customers themselves.

Today’s prospective students aren’t cookie cutters. They have more access to information than ever before, they communicate rapidly and one bad experience on a visit, a conversation or a guidebook could not just torpedo your chances with them, but with their friends and family too. And if that’s not enough, mess around with them and choose to ignore their needs while they’re students and they’ll stop giving you money.

Presidential candidates are making unprecedented amounts of money on the internet and we still have schools publishing bulky print materials to the oldsters, because that’s the way they’ve raised money in the past, so why change it now?

You change it now, because you want to raise money from the oldsters of tomorrow. The alumni who will run this country and who will feel less connected, less engaged and more cynical about their college years with debt rising and feeling as their prospects are grimmer than they were when they first started as wide-eyed first year students.

There are always going to be the big donors who make tons who will give to Olde U, because they want to. But what about the folks who enter jobs that don’t make them tons of money. Those liberal arts majors who seem to have a million interests and can’t settle on anything? Yeah, they might be confused now. But tomorrow, they’ll figure it out, create the next Google and old alma mater will be sitting in the dust wondering what happened.

Extreme example? Sure is. But the message remains the same. It’s not rocket science, people know it. It’s hard to institute change in settings where things thrive on remaining the same and even benefit from that familiarity. It’s communicating the simplicity of the authentic experience of your institution that will make your admissions marketing materials and especially the college web site speak to its audience.

Authenticity sells to millennials.