The Social Web in the Edu Marketing Mix
July 21, 2007 – 10:40 amI am looking forward to my talk this upcoming Tuesday at the edu Web Conference. I will be giving a presentation titled, “From inbox to iPod: Meshing Today’s Social Media Elements into the Marketing Strategy.”
I mentioned this talk in a post back in April, and wrote a post to begin focusing my thinking. It turns out, while I will mention the various marketing 2.0 spokes, I think I will take a slightly different approach to the talk.
In thinking about the audience, educators, and in looking at the overall conference schedule, there seems to be a couple of sessions focused around “social media.” There are presentations on RSS marketing and social bookmarking, email marketing, podcasting, and video, etc
Having the “shell” of my presentation outlined, I think I am going to take more of a real life approach. Meaning, I think even though I am not a prospective student, I am definitely entrenched in a variety of applications and online services that the prospective student is using, both undergraduate and graduate.
So when educators and the folks that market their institutions hear about, RSS, blogs, social networks, flickr’s, twitters, facebook’s, myspace, pownce, etc what does it really mean? Do they “get it”? And when I say “get it” I say it from the marketing perspective. Meaning since the prospective student (among many others), is spending more and more time online and entrenched in social sites and services, how does a educational institution adapt their marketing messages to get to the places where their target ears and eyeballs are?
The question I also have, is how can you adapt your messaging unless you truly understand or at least grasp the basics of the various mediums that we are all talking about? So, as a part of my talk, I am going to do a real life display of my own social universe, as well as a prospective students social universe and give the audience a real life view of how their target audience (both undergraduate, graduate, and continuing ed), are using the web. Visual aids for sure 
It would only then be appropriate to explain some tactical ways that an educational institution can embrace this landscape, in regards to getting their message out and appealing to prospective students. The line here can be a fine one, and since there is no “set” way of doing things, I will push again for experimentation and continuous tweaking of the efforts.
I would love to hear how folks are using social media elements in edu marketing and any successes they have had.
See you this week if your in Baltimore and attending the conference. Blue Sky Factory will also be exhibiting and doing demos of Publicaster, so stop on by and say hello.
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