I’m laying out of the lunch session on podcasting to charge some batteries (literally and figuratively) and because I don’t think that medium is appropriate for Warren Wilson at this time. While the camera phone and PDA are getting juiced up, I’m going to give you a quick report on the beginning of the conference and the keynote speaker.

The main conference got underway today with a medium-sized hall filled with attendees from school’s from as far off as Sydney, Australia. As the microphone was passed around for each person to give a brief introduction, I noticed a few trends. Just as in similar gatherings in the past, there are a lot more women and later-middle-age folks than tend to attend the strictly technical con’s. I’m not sure if this is just because colleges are doing a good job of egalitarian hiring in their techy positions or because lots of non-technical staff were present. As people talked about their institutions in the introductions, it was obvious that many schools were only just now realizing that the web has importance. One school said that last year they were allotting only 5% of their recruitment budget to their website despite having 85% of their leads generated there. Others were avowedly print-centric or were just trying to wrest their site from the IT department. Of those school’s that were more with-the-times, the question of “what’s your CMS?” was just as common as “what’s your sign?” at a new age gathering. All of these schools seemed to be in the midst of some sort of apocalyptic redesign. (Am I the only one who loves redesigns?)

The keynote today was delivered by Blake Ross, co-creator of Firefox. Blake is young, which was commented on in scandalous tones by several of the older women sitting near me. He’s in his early twenties and on leave from completing his undergraduate degree at Stanford, but it was clear from his presentation that his experience of marketing and nonprofit management was deep.

Blake’s presentation was mostly a case study of the development of Firefox’s brand message and marketing efforts. There wasn’t very many parallels drawn between higher education and Firefox—he was leaving that largely up to us. Blake related some of the barriers Firefox faced initially, such as trying to reach an older demographic when their main user base was a bunch of college kids. He likened this to college’s marketing to parents as well as prospectives. Firefox’s solution was to make the college kids their ambassadors.

Blake’s main message and the real success story for Firefox seemed to be the use of the web to catalyze a group of volunteers into an organized and powerful team of advocates and supporters. He described the building of several grassroots advertising campaigns that used a worldwide network of volunteers as a base. What helped to keep the volunteers active and involved was a constant sense of ownership and representation in the organization and the product. When Firefox asked for user-submitted materials for publication as part of a campaign, they did not seek to censor it and allowed the criticisms to stand with the praise. Their success was in creating such a strong brand identity and message that the community easily adopted it and supported and submitted material that was largely on-message, and the honesty of publishing criticisms only helped to bolster the strength of the brand (after all, they had a great product and nothing to hide and their messaging conveyed that).

To apply this to higher ed marketing, I imagine that Blake would applaud those schools who use uncensored student blogs and forums as a way to encourage students to participate and take ownership in the brand. He criticized those college’s that limit their advertising to the same, old glossy viewbooks where there is always a group of happy students in the quad and a belltower. What he says is provocative but definitely challenging when applied in a higher ed context. There would be great power in a student body that took real ownership in their school’s brand and discussed and promoted it through their own media, but achieving such a goal would require a difficult and campus-wide campaign, not to mention a pervasive brand message that had an honest resonance. I know Warren Wilson isn’t quite ready to take that jump yet.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 at 8:37 pm and is filed under Branding, Marketing. It has been viewed 2192 times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

[…] The best way for me to innovate and enjoy what I do is to go native. Time to slip into the digital tribe and move among its peoples—virtual, 3D hands brushing in the darkness of social networked second lives, a million onymous youth dancing hyper-textualy into the night, the thrumming of drum and bass shared via mapped music genomes, and the twinkling glow of liquid-crystal-pixels offering up the entire geo-positioned world like an altar to a social, multi-cultural, semantic, hive-minded, Mercurial GOD.

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ - Blog of Danah Boyd. A PhD student studying privacy and the internet.
http://greenteaicecream.co.uk/ - “Social Value and the Social Web”
http://www.fastcompany.com/ - Interesting blog associated with Fast Company magazine.

I am taking a hiatus for the remainder of the summer to finish some hulking, be-fanged programming projects. Once those are complete, I am going to “take off the training wheels” on erelevant–redesign and revision it around a broader central theme. It will be less personal, less inflammatory and more topical and content-oriented. […]

When Time magazine named “You” as its person of the year in 2006, it was a ham-handed attempt to salute “user-generated content” as the driving force behind Web 2.0. Last year MySpace and YouTube commanded $580 million and $1.6 billion, respectively, because regular folks participate in the grand techno-democratic experiment, baring their souls to the […]