Abstracts - Monday

Monday, July 26th

9 am - Noon — Pre-Conference Workshops ($250 per)

• Workshop 1: “Mobile” in the Marketing Mix: Crafting a New Communication Strategy—Bob Johnson, Bob Johnson Consulting

Is 2010 the “Year of Mobile Marketing ” that advocates have been predicting since at least 2004?
Join this workshop and explore how mobile marketing can help your school reach enrollment goals. Our review includes how to ensure access to content on your regular website that’s most important for future students (do you really need a special “mobile” version of the site?) to how to communicate with potential students during the enrollment cycle from the time of first interest to the day classes start.
We’ll examine barriers that exist, including technology challenges, the resistance to advertising on personal communication devices, and how analytics data can help you prepare for a mobile future. Examples from mobile marketing adopters are used to help craft a “best of the best” communication strategy.
Get ahead of your competitors. Register for this workshop. Return home ready to engage your team in upgrading your communication strategy.

• Workshop 2: Creating a Comprehensive Social Media Framework - Mark Greenfield, University at Buffalo

Social Media is having a major impact on higher education, presenting new opportunities to connect and build relationships with all constituents. As social media becomes increasingly important, colleges and universities need to plan accordingly to fully leverage the power and potential of these new communication channels and support models.  This workshop will provide a framework for implementing social media from strategic planning to implementation and evaluation.  Topics will include understanding institutional culture, aligning social media strategy with institutional strategy, mitigating risk, policies and guidelines, staffing and resources, organizational models, participation models, and metrics.

•Workshop 3: CMS Project Boot Camp for Marketers - Doug Clark, College Web Solutions

Institution-wide website redesign projects often involve the installation of a content management system. Increasingly, the trend is marketing leading these projects. This session is to help marketing professionals gain a deeper understanding of the CMS-side of these projects. Starting from an evaluation of their website content, attendees will learn how to develop a content management strategy, evaluate and select the right CMS solution for their campus, then finally prepare and manage a CMS implementation. The session will be led by Doug Clark, principle at Collegiate Web Solutions. Doug is a 15-year veteran of Web content management, having architect’ed two CMS solutions and managing CMS implementations for colleges and universities.

•FREE Seminar: Building Your Education Brand Online: Google Tools for the Education Marketer - Katie McGlynn, Google Inc.

Google and other search engines are among the first places where prospective students develop their preferences for colleges and universities. How does your school appear through the lens of the online researcher? This workshop will be a hands-on demonstration of many of the free tools that Google offers to marketers that will help you build positive awareness, generate student leads, and learn more about the behavior of the education seeker online. After this workshop, you’ll be able to make the most of your online advertising by:

• Uncovering efficient ways to promote your school online
• Discovering other places your prospective students research online
• Measuring your web efforts and return on investment

NOTE: We strongly recommend that you bring a laptop for this seminar.

2:15 - 3:15 pm - Opening Keynote: Brand ArchiTECHture — Building Your Brand on the Web and Managing to make it Thrive
  Dr. Terry Flannery
  Executive Director, University Communications and Marketing
  American University, Washington DC

  We’re done arguing about whose job it is to control an organization’s web presence.  If a brand is the sum total of experiences your customers have with your institution, then their digital experiences need to be as well managed as their virtual ones.  The net effect? Marketers have to be more tech savvy and technology experts need to become more brand savvy.  Professionals in both disciplines have been required to blend skills, training and resources to successfully deliver a user experience that meets the needs of our audiences.
      American University completely redesigned its web presence in 2009 through the leadership and partnership of its Marketing and IT units.  With highly distributed publishing and on-going responsibility for shared web governance, American has launched and maintained a distinctive presence in the higher ed sector.  Winning both the eduStyle.net and Web Marketing Association’s awards in 2009 for best higher education web site, the web site is distinctive for its user focus, high level of integration and consistency, and multi-media and Web 2.0 content to authentically convey the AU brand.
      As the site marks its one year anniversary and rolls out new features, Flannery will share operating principles that scale to institutions large and small, for successful delivery of a brand in the digital environment.  Examples from other sectors (Ford, Southwest Airlines) round out lessons learned for setting wild goals, developing loyal partnerships, confronting long-standing obstacles, dealing with compromise, leveraging big moments, keeping momentum and paying close attention to policy and governance as an on-going responsibilities.

3:30 - 4:30 pm:
Marketing Communications:  Measure Twice, Cut Once: 7-Step Plan to Your Measurement Strategy for Online Marketing — Karine Joly, Higher Ed Experts

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, email marketing, web advertising, mobile web and more: so many marketing and communication channels, so little time and money. With tight budgets and an ever increasing portfolio of new electronic tools, measurement isn’t optional anymore, but goes far beyond the creation of a Google Analytics account. Find out how to create and implement a measurement strategy that will inform your decisions and focus your efforts on what works in higher education and for your institution.

Design & Development: CSS for Mobile Devices & Using CSS to Present Content to iPhone—Justin Gatewood, Victor Valley Community College District

This session will give an overview of several of the generally acceptable uses of CSS for presenting content to mobile devices, how these uses affect each other, some best practices on their implementation and then wraps it all up with a “how-to” session for setting up and optimizing a web page for presentation to the iPhone’s screen.

Guest Track: The Best (and the Worst!) of Both Worlds Creating a Great Online Magazine: Making it Compelling— Brenda Foster, Partner, GCF

100 College Online Magazines: Issues and Answers Ever wonder how your online magazine compares to others? Are you interested in ways to make your magazine more compelling? This year’s 100 College Website Survey conducted an in-depth analysis of 100 online magazines. This seminar will provide the results of the survey, discuss the different kinds of online magazines, and reveal the do’s and don’ts and best practices for creating and launching a great online publication for both agencies and institutions. Benefits of Participating
• Review the results of GCF’s 100 college online magazine survey.
• Learn which elements, from design to technology, are most important and which colleges are using them to their advantage.
• Discover what’s in and what’s out in navigation and design.
• Examine common mistakes to avoid and best features to employ.
• Discuss the different kinds of online magazines and define the risks and benefits of an online vs printed publication.

Guest Track: Beyond the Buzz Terms: Defining Your College Brand Managing the Power of Your Brand on the Web and Beyond— Marilyn Kail, Assistant VP for Marketing Communications, Carnegie Mellon

Today, marketers can’t always control their brand presence on the web. In this case study, featuring the Randy Pausch story, you’ll hear how to manage your brand presence on the “wild west of the web,” and strategies for leveraging success across multiple communication channels.

4:45 - 5:45 pm:
Marketing Communications: Wrangling the Octopus: Managing Your Social Media Ecosystem—  Aaron Rester, Manager of Electronic Communications, Univ. of Chicago Law School

Remember the good old days, when colleges’ electronic communications initiatives consisted primarily of maintaining “a website?” With the rise of the social web, however, the model has changed: we’ve gone from maintaining a single site to maintaining a presence on half a dozen or more different sites, all the while keeping an eye out for the arrival of the next “big thing.” Yesterday’s “webmaster” has become today “social media octopus wrangler.” Staying on top of all these responsibilities requires both planning and the creative use of technology. I will draw on my own experience as Manager of Electronic Communications at the University of Chicago Law School to show how a tiny staff is able to keep tabs on an extensive social media ecosystem, and use it to maintain contact with multiple constituencies.

Design & Development: Using Personalization within Web Content Management— Piero Tintori, CEO, TerminalFour

Combining Web Content Management System and modern Personalization features can help convert anonymous potential students to your website to actual inquiries and build a more focused website experience.  This vendor neutral presentation will focus on the different ways of personalizing content including geographic, behavioral, action based and registration based but in particular, based on a number of case studies, what works and what doesn’t.

Guest Track: The Best (and the Worst!) of Both Worlds A Tale of Two Vendors: Successful Web Redesign Against All Odds, Deb Dudley, Director of Marketing and Communications, SUNY Potsdam

The State University of New York at Potsdam (http://www.potsdam.edu

) launched an award winning Web site in the Fall of 2008.  The project included everything from internal political battles, dismantling longstanding committees, challenges to academic freedoms, rewriting campus policies, creative funding negotiations, and functional and disfunctional vendor relationships all within the boundaries of New York State regulations processes.  Lessons learned from two years of transforming an aging institutional Web site will be shared and discussed in a brief presentation followed by a question and answer session.

Guest Track: Beyond the Buzz Terms: Defining Your College Brand The ABCs of Underdog Branding - Abu Noaman, CEO, Elliance

The ABCs of Underdog Branding Appalachia. Business. Culinary. What could three very different higher education branding challenges have in common? Each school is a decided underdog in its respective market. Elliance will cover the ABCs of Underdog Branding. Why positioning is key. How to tap the school’s essential strengths. Articulating brand pillars as story. Case studies from Appalachian Bible College, Graziadio School of Business/Pepperdine University, and Lexington College (4-year BA Culinary School in Chicago) will punctuate the presentation. Learn how one of the country’s smallest and more remote Bible colleges, Appalachian Bible College in Bradley, West Virginia, applied the enrollment marketing lessons of schools from larger markets (LA, Chicago) to drive demand and envision a long-range enrollment future.