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 was brought to my attention the other day that there are some concerns about e-mail addresses published on our college’s web site and the effect it has on spam.  It turns out the filters here run through about 10,000,000 emails a day, about 7% of which are passed on as being actual, legitimate messages.  We are not a huge campus, but I’m going to guess that many of you would see a similar ratio.  Naturally, this has brought up conversation of obfuscating e-mail addresses.  We’ll set aside the “closing the gate after the horse got out” metaphor for now, because techniques can always help prevent spam from hitting new addresses, so at least that way we can lighten the load for our new users.

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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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So last week was probably the first time in six months that I didn’t have a weekly links of the weeks post and I’m going to keep that trend an additional week. Part of being a good blogger is being a good reader and finding out what is going on out in the blogosphere and rest of the web world. This is the 100th post on .eduGuru and I like to think it’s reached a certain level of success and that would have never been possible without others linking to this site and the wondeful community. The Higher Education Blog community has definitely kicked into a higher gear these six months and I’ve found lots of people out there who are also writing great blogs about our niche.  Here are five Higher Education blogs that you have probably never heard of, but are definitely worth checking out.  Some of them are rather new and the content so far is wonderful stop on by and show your support to your fellow Higher Ed Web people. Read the rest of this entry »

In my years that I’ve now spent in higher education, one universal truth I have found is that nothing quite moves a project along like when someone much more important and much less web savvy than you deems an issue worth addressing.  Such was the case only a couple months after I had started at the university, when the Director of Marketing noticed that new information she had put up on the site wasn’t coming up in search results, and the results that were hitting weren’t particularly relevant to the topic in the first place.  Thus, a mission was born, to find a way to make our search better, and to do it NOW.  That’s the other thing about people higher up than you, when they say jump, generally you jump.

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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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