This week I attended a demo of Harris Connect’s email marketing tool.  Harris is a popular tool for maintaining alumni communities and the email tool they offer is fairly sophisticated in regards to segmentation your audience to target a message to the audience.  But where it lacks is reporting, leading to what could be statistics that could be characterized as deceiving at best.  Other tools that I’ve demoes in the past are not dissimilar to Harris in this respect.

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Those of you who have kept up with some of Microsoft’s new toys (or who read my Twitter), have undoubtedly heard of a new little Seadragon based photo interface they have been working on in conjunction with the University of Washington called Photosynth.  This new spatial photo organization system sent the tech word abuzz when news, video, and a tech demo began passing back and forth across sites like Digg and Slashdot.

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In her guest post yesterday, Rachel Reuben argued that higher education hadn’t quite found a use for Twitter yet.  I’ve long argued that higher ed should be paying less attention to what other colleges are doing and more attention to what other industries are up to. While it may be true that few colleges out there are effectively utilizing Twitter, if they looked outside of its walls they would find many example of other industries utilizing it to effectively market to and communicate with their audiences.  

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The following is a guest post by Rachel Reuben the Director of Web Communication & Strategic Projects in the Office of Public Affairs at State University of New York at New Paltz.  Rachel was kind enough to share her recent completed report.  You can contact Rachel through email (rachel.reuben at gmail dot com) or connect through twitter.

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It’s been a while since I have recommended a book, but the last few books I’ve completed just haven’t passed the test and quite honestly have been rather disappointing, until I started reading Buzzmarketing!  This book essentially says throw your traditional marketing out the window.  Yes it’s one of those complete change of mindset type books and I really enjoyed the experience.

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The question I hear novice email marketers asking more than any other is “what is the best day to send email?” It’s the wrong question to ask. Here is the example I use when I give talks on this subject: Let’s say, for arguments sake, that I think the best day to send email is Sunday and I say so in blogs and at conferences. Now you’ve got a group of people, presumably competing with each other on some level since they are going to the same conferences and reading the same blogs, who are all going to start sending email on Sunday and it instantly becomes the worst day for them to send.

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Today I presented an “Introduction to Social Networks” at the Spartanburg Chamber of Commerce.  The presentation was designed more towards local businesses, but all the examples I used were specifically Wofford’s Social Network campaigns.  We did record the presentation, but the audio came out as nothing so it’s not worth even sharing online.  Despite that I think there are some important takeaways that anyone can learn from.  I’ll try and outline some of the important notes from my slides (linked below).

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A few weeks ago, Kyle was caught off guard when asked about subject lines at eduWeb. I don’t fault him. Subject lines are tricky - you’re got a minimal amount of characters to convince someone that your email deserves their attention.

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Now that my presentation is through here are some goodies for anyone that missed the presentation along with some additional data.  This presentation was definitely a good learning experience for myself as it’s really the first time I’ve given a presentation in the hour long format.    It’s a tough balance not getting too technical while also keeping the marketing message in mind.  Next time I’ll know to slow down a little bit and more elaborate on some points.  If you attended I’d love to hear any feedback positive or negative.  I can’t learn from what I could do better if I don’t know.  Feel free to drop a comment or contact me directly.

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Over on FJ’s Higher Education Photography for Recruitment Blog he just made an excellent post about Missed Opportunity for Higher Ed.  I wasn’t even half way through his short but valuable post before light bulbs started going off in my head.  (Hey FJ thanks for the mention and hopefully this post will help fulfill some of this indepth SEO you claim I have)  Picture to the right was take from FJ’s blog and if your college is interested in Higher Education Photography Wofford hasn’t used FJ, but I’ve heard nothing but great things from lots of credible sources.

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