I’m laying out of the next session. The marketing track was supposed to be about “Maximizing Your Internet Marketing Results” by CUnet. Turns out it’s little more than an infomercial on lead generation. I haven’t the foggiest interest in obscure, third-party lead generation companies (they are always the most car-salesman-like folks at these conferences). The technology track session is about choosing the right CMS. Since WWC has created its own CMS, there was little point in my attending that one. I hope no one really wanted to hear about those topics.

To catch up with yesterday’s sessions, I attended one on Mobile Applications, one on Managing a Redsign, and one on … “Feature Feast.”

Mobile: A Technology Going Nowhere Fast

Webster Lewin, a Mobile Marketing Strategist for the company VML, put on the Mobile Applications session. I sure hope Webster isn’t in charge of hooking new clients for VML, because the message he sent the clearest was: mobile technology is an immature technology, prohibitively expensive, and horribly crippled by a tangle of proprietary barriers. Where once I thought that mobile would the next Big Thing, I now am much more skeptical. If manufacturers, software developers, and service providers can’t work together towards creating a set of standards and working on making the mobile world more accessible to smaller businesses and individuals, it’s not going to go anywhere with anything approaching the speed and saturation of the internet.

Now when I say mobile, I’m not talking about just talking on the phone—that’s already everywhere. Webster broke things into three categories, which are mobile applications (programs), SMS (text messaging, multimedia messages), and the mobile web. In brief, mobile applications are actually programs written to operate on a mobile phone. Mobile applications cannot be created to work on all phones, or even a majority of phones. They have to be written in one of five or six operating systems that these phones run. To make matters worse, different handsets have different capabilities that must be taken into account, and the distribution of these programs is largely up to the abilities and cooperation of the network service providers. The end result, says Webster, is that the “cost of mobile applications can easily reach over $100,000.” Now at this point I stopped and thought, what institution has that kind of money to dump into a kind of experimental, fringe marketing avenue? And why did Stamats invite this guy to talk exactly?

Webster went on to detail SMS-based add campaigns that, while a little cheaper than mobile apps, had even more 3rd party barriers to work through. Basically, it looked to me like the only thing colleges and universities could hope to work with is the mobile internet, which was the area he focused on the least. At least it’s free for developers, doesn’t require you to program for some obscure environment, and is something that all phone providers seem to be supporting more or less.

Redesign and Miscellany

The Managing a Redesign session was not one that I took extensive notes on. The presenter, Cori Merritt with Stamats, went through a set of procedural steps towards a successful redesign. She moved pretty quickly, which was great to listen to but not conducive for note taking, and her system seemed geared towards larger schools. Allot of what she covered dealt with committee-building and the politics of college websites at large universities. It assumed a CMS. A few of the suggestions were good for anyone, such as getting sign-off on a design while it’s still in the draft stage and before the work has been done to convert it to HTML/CSS. She recommended a book that sounded good: Web Redsign 2.0: Workflow that Works by Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler.

The last session of the day was entitled Web Feature Feast by Adam Blyth of Stamats. Adam went through very topically and covered several website features common to college websites while giving examples (mostly of Stamats’ work). Adam, avowedly a Mac user, had problems with the PC hooked to the projector while the internet again flaked out with the result that we missed several examples. On the whole, the session was too topical to be useful. If you’re reading this blog, then you already know more about what Adam presented than the information he provided.

The keynote speaker today was okay, and there was a really great presentation by Peter Waldheim of WOMMA. Stay tuned…

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 12th, 2006 at 9:38 pm and is filed under Higher Education, Marketing. It has been viewed 5702 times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

From ‘A Softer World’

There is an argument made against privacy that says someone who isn’t engaged in criminal behavior has nothing to hide. This method of thinking allowed the US government to slowly sap away our civil liberties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks–many have just accepted that trading privacy for security is acceptable and used the “nothing to hide” argument to rationalize what was, essentially, a decision based on fear. However, limiting the government’s ability to intrude in our private lives is easy compared with attempting to control how personal information spreads on the internet via gossip. Rather than spies or wiretaps, gossip is often gathered by those we trust and spread online by people who don’t understand or appreciate the potential for the damage it can do. In reality, privacy is about much more than concealing wrongdoing.

Internet-based abuse (‘cyberbullying’) and privacy / relationship issues are still massively misunderstood. The complexities of online sociality are probably the biggest ‘generational divide’ between modern teens and adults. To help put it in perspective a bit, here are some numbers…

I HAVE A MYSPACE ACCOUNT!!1!