December 2, 2006
Another post from the Why Didn’t I Know About This Sooner Department…
I’ve gotten totally fed up with IE 7 slow load syndrome and frequent crashes and freezes so I’m officially jumping to full-time use of Firefox. I’ve explored Firefox plugins a bit and among other things I’ve discovered these awesome plugins:
Sage — an inline RSS reader and OPML editor. Potentially replaces Google Reader
FireFTP — and inline FTP client. Replaces CoreFTP
Performancing — Using it right now to publish this post to my blog(s). This one is too good to be true.
These plugins and many more are available at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/plugins/
powered by performancing firefox
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November 13, 2006
I’ve started yet another blog. I’m sorry to be bouncing my readers around but this time it’s for real! I’ve started http://www.bobmcpeak.com to support a fledgling consulting business. Check it out!
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Steve Rubel’s latest post on the “the long tail” (and linked Wikipedia article) does a great job of articulating how long-term cumulative returns are where the real ROI can be found for our Web 2.0 initiatives. Steve uses the example of a professional blog but I think it holds true for the stuff we’re doing in higher-ed as well — Podcasts, blogs, MySpace pages, etc. It’s a cumulative market presence that will bear-out over the long-haul. Not a big bang.
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November 10, 2006
Haven’t been blogging much lately. I’ll blame it on the state of complete derrangement (the good kind) I’ve been in since my wife and I viewed Borat a few days ago. I’ve been too busy replaying various scenes from the Odyssey of Borat in my mind to get anything done at all. It’s been an extended inner-meditation on absurdity these last few days. Something about the Allen Keyes scene…
This Salon article sheds a little more light on our Kazahk (sp?) hero. Don’t read it if you haven’t seen the film but plan to: http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2006/11/10/guide_to_borat/
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November 1, 2006
HigherEdJobs.com has just released their latest HE salary research. Of course, the median salary for football offensive coordinators is considerably higher than the median for webmasters, probably as it should be, if revenue is the primary consideration.
This data is both comforting and a bit disturbing. It tells me that I’m right where I think that I should be relative to the national median but it reports that Higher Ed webmaster and marketer salaries grew nationally by only 3.3%, just a tad under the rate of inflation, so in real dollars, we’re all making a little less than we did last year — even though our contributions to recruitment and development are growing each year as we ride the Web 2.0 wave.
Here’s the report: http://www.higheredjobs.com/salary/
Meanwhile, I’m going to practice my play calling: “Red-Right-82!”
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October 24, 2006
A couple of weeks ago Chris Weaver, Franklin and Marshall University’s excellent web manager called me on the phone out of the blue to ask me a few questions about my content management system (we use the same vendor) and about various this-and-that stuff that I’m doing on the Goucher website.The longer we talked, the more it seemed like a good idea to schedule some face time, which we did, and today Chris and a couple of his colleagues trekked down I-83 from Lancaster to meet with me.
After an excellent Thai lunch (thanks to F&M) we retreated to the Active Learning Zone — a wired classroom in our library — to take a closer look at the Goucher website and content management system and to talk shop about higher ed marketing and webmastering. Additionally, I demonstrated several of the after-market mods that I’ve done to our CMS and we talked about how F&M might be able to get more bang for the buck from the product.
I learned as much from Chris and his colleagues as he did from me, especially about the need to manage time and priorities and to learn to say “no” more often to more of the less-mission-critical requests I get. I was struck by palpable esprit de corps between us. Even though Goucher and F&M directly compete for applicants, Chris and I seem to feel like we’re in the same boat. We certainly face many of the same challenges in our day-to-day work as campus webmasters. It’s a terrible predicament to find oneself in. Misery loves company, right? Just kidding…
Today’s meeting raised the possibility of one of us doing some paid consulting for the other. I wonder if this is an accepted practice in Higher-Ed, or is it a conflict of interests? We also agreed that it might be cool to co-host a conference for users of the CMS system that we find ourselves battling with.Anyway, the long and short of it was that it was well worth it to find time to get together and I hope we do it again soon and I’d strongly suggest that other HE webmaster/marketer types invite their nearest geographic rivals to lunch as soon as possible!
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October 19, 2006
I had lunch yesterday with Roberto Noya, VP of Enrollment Management at Goucher. He very graciously invited me to lunch a few weeks back when, at a reception at the president’s house, I half-jokingly told him that I wanted his job. Yesterday, at Michael’s in Timonium, over a delicious crab cake served Baltimore style — on a cracker — Roberto and I finally had a chance to sit down to talk about the art of enrollment management.
Roberto gave me a succinct primer on enrollment management that included a very helpful explanation of the “discount rate.” It turns out that it’s not the same thing as the “discount rate” of financial mathematics, but, rather, it’s a very simple ratio, expressed as a percentage, that describes the amount of tuition that is given back to enrolled prospects in the form of need- and merit-based financial aid. In other words, on average, how much tuition is “discounted”. It turns out that this ratio helps guide and model the entire enrollment cycle.
Of course there are other important factors at play too. It’s a balancing act. A lower discount rate means more revenue for the college — more money for faculty, staff, capital improvements, etc. — but it undoubtedly will result in less economic diversity and a decrease in yield. A higher discount rate can mean more yield, more diversity, but, less revenue, obviously…
Once I got up to speed on the discount rate concept, our conversation meandered into the realm of brand management. Roberto reminded me how important it is that the Goucher brand — and that of any higher-ed institution — must be absolutely meticulously honest and authentic. In fact, the primary message that I took from the whole lunch was that integrity can and should be the fundamental guiding principal in all of our marketing and branding. I know that this goes without saying but it was a bit of a crystalline moment for me. I’ve been swimming in a flood of marketing gurus, data-analysis, etc. — feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all really. Roberto, for the moment at least, has inspired me to reconsider the fundamental act of telling the truth about the institution, and to think about how to do a better job of doing that via new media. Really, it goes without saying that this is the right approach to higher-ed marketing. It’s really about quality — of applicants and of the experience — not quantity. Not “how many kids can we buy this year.” The promise of the Goucher brand is that the experience is deep and honest and integral on a lot of levels — academically, socially, personally, and cooperatively.
To be continued…
October 12, 2006
I have a 6.5 month old son and he’s a Web 2.0 prodigy of sorts. Like all small children he asks a lot of questions. “Daddy, how does electricity work?” “Daddy, what’s vaporware?” This morning he asked a big one:
“Daddy, when is Google rolling out a web browser?”
Good question, son.
October 11, 2006
Yesterday’s Micro Persuasion post reminded me that I need to get IE 7 on my radar screen, like now!
I’d heard-tell that IE 7 had a built in RSS reader, and it does, and it’s really cool, and the fact that 80%+ internet users use IE and therefore will someday soon be using IE 7 means that the RSS tipping point is upon us.
I’ve been a bit of an anti-MS snob over the years, but I have to say that IE 7 is beautiful and the RSS integration is remarkable. I’m working hard to make sure that the Goucher site is heavily seeded with feeds so that 7 won’t starve.
Trouble is, you can’t easily run IE 6 and 7 at the same time. The IE 7 install REPLACES any previous IE instance. This is a problem for me for a lot of reasons. 1) my CMS client requires IE 6. It doesn’t work with 7. Major drag. 2) Got to keep testing my work in IE 6 since, for a while, it will continue to be the browser of choice for most of the world.
So, while some developers are continuing to use IE 6 as their main install, I’ve elected to go ahead and upgrade to 7 and run 6 as a standalone. I found a standalone distribution of IE 6 here: http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/32bit/standalone.
Seems to work. You’re on your own on this one. No guarantees.