Random thoughts from my first trip to the eduWeb conference:
- First, I’d like to thank Shelley Wetzel for the invitation to speak at the conference. Kudos to Shelley and her staff for the time and effort it takes to run the conference.
- For those of you interested, Matt Herzberger has done an amazing job of collecting all of the web resources related to the conference. See All of eduWeb 2008. (Thanks Matt, and sorry you couldn’t make it this year.)
- As I have said before, I have recently seen the light regarding Twitter. This was the first conference I’ve attended that provided a real-time commentary on the proceedings via Twitter. It takes the idea of live-blogging to a whole new level. The level of activity was so high that #eduweb2008 showed up as a trending topic on search.twitter.com Many people who couldn’t attend said that following the conference on Twitter and watching the ustream channel was almost as good as being there.
- My keynote speech generated considerable buzz both online and offline with the segment on the future of e-mail getting the most attention. For the record, I don’t believe e-mail is dead. I do believe that e-mail is broken. I’ll be writing about this more in the coming weeks. My goal is to think strategically about how e-mail fits into the myriad of communication channels now at our disposal.
- The “Join the Conversation” workshop on social media I taught with Brad Ward was well received. I enjoy teaching workshops because the additional time allows me to go into greater detail. I look forward to working with Brad on future endeavors. In fact, we’ll be heading to a conference out west together in a couple of weeks.
- I had numerous conversations with several people from the United Kingdom. It was great to get their perspective on the web and interesting to see the differences in how social media usage differs across the Atlantic.
- I found Karine Joly’s closing keynote to be a wonderful conclusion to the conference. In addition to the references to Marshall Mcluhan, I particularly liked her idea about “Build it (with them), and they will come”. Well done Karine!
- Much of the talk of the conference was around social media. I am a big fan of social media, but I am starting to get concerned that too much attention is going to the social web and some of the basic building blocks of good, effective web design and development are being ignored. Usability, accessibility, information architecture, web standards, etc. still matter. Let’s not lose site of that.
- Finally, the main thing on my mind as I drove home was that the higher education web profession has a bright future. I had the chance to meet and interact with many of the new faces in our profession and was thoroughly impressed. These young guns bring passion, excitement, optimism and talent that will help move college web sites forward.
Mark, I have to ask: you call yourself a very influential person in higher education and yet you make a pronouncement in a keynote address in front of a roomful of people that were there to learn from you that you didn’t actually believe was true. Why would you pronounce that “Email is dead” when you don’t believe it? People could have heard that and said “well, this really important keynote speaker says its dead, so I’m not even going to bother with it anymore.” And now you’re saying you think it’s “broken”, but that’s a VERY different statement. I know that you told Kyle that you did it to “start a controversy” but do you ACTUALLY think that’s a responsible thing to do?
Karlyn – My goal was not to “start a controversy” but to start a discussion. E-mail has been a very important communications channel in higher ed, but from my personal experience on my campus it is starting to lose it’s effectiveness. For example, a growing number of current undergraduate students on my campus don’t open e-mail coming from the university. Because of this we are using additional communication channels to reach these students.
My approach is to determine the problem we are trying to solve, then choose the best communications channel(s) to solve the problem, then finally measure the success and make changes as needed. Thinking strategically and measuring ROI are steps that too many people skip.
Alright, I’ll put aside for a moment what Kyle told me you said to him after your presentation. I wasn’t there and he may have exaggerated. But still, Mark. I don’t doubt the perceived ineffectiveness of inter-campus emails (mostly because colleges have ridiculously lofty expectations when it comes to current student’s interest in emails they didn’t opt into that come directly from the administration) but do you really contend that email, as a marketing tool for external audiences, is ineffective? eduWeb does, after all, focus mostly on external marketing. I’ll agree that many people skip the ROI step, but I don’t so I can say that based on my experience, I’ve seen 33% of an enrolled class apply directly because they received an email asking them to and ROI on fundraising emails consistently over 10,000%. We also know from stats from Pew that the percentage of Internet users that read email on a daily basis is 60%, which is as high as its ever been and use of email dwarfs other activities that schools are pouring thousands of dollars into (watching online video).
And I’ll say it again – a pronunciation that email is dead to a crowd that you are an influencer for when you’ve just admitted in your own blog that you don’t think it is was probably misleading at best and downright irresponsible at worst.
Mark,
Do you know if there is one site that has all of the power points and notes from all of the edu web presntations?
Terry –
I believe that the conference organizers are trying to gather all of the presentations and link to them from the conference web site:
http://www.eduwebconference.com/