Archive for the ‘Conferences’ Category

The Innovative Educators Conference, which wraps up tomorrow with a presentation by Brian Niles of TargetX fame, has been a great one. Val, Erin and Pam from IE did a great job putting the conference together and keeping everything rolling. The food was the best conference food I’ve had. A night out to the Reds/Dodgers game with all you can eat food and drinks was a nice touch too.

Here are the links I went through for those of you that were in my 2 presentations on Wednesday. Again, if you have any questions, please email me at bradjward(at)gmail(dot)com.

I Can Do THAT With Google?: http://linkbun.ch/gnq

Blogging 201: Taking It To The Next Level: http://linkbun.ch/gnk and http://linkbun.ch/gno

Also, here is the image used during the Social Media Roundtable with Brad and Matt:

(Click Image to Enlarge)

It’s always great to connect with new people. I also got to catch up with Mark, Matt, and Brian and we had several really great conversations about a huge range of topics. I’ve always been big on the value of face time, and this event has not disappointed. I was also able to line up a webinar on this coming Tuesday night with an MBA class at Morehead State University, so it’s time to start on that slide deck.

One month until eduWeb! Who all is going to be there? I’d love to meet more of you.

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It’s Conference Time! Jesse and I both leave the office for the week tomorrow to attend higher ed conferences. Jesse is giving two presentations at the Recruitment Plus User Group Conference in Portland, Maine:

• Going Paperless (Releasing Your Office’s Inner Tree-Hugger) - [Document Imaging]
• Can’t We All Just Get Along? - [RP Interface]

I am giving 2 presentations and co-hosting a roundtable discussion with Matt at the Innovative Educators Conference in Cincinnati, OH:

• I Can Do THAT with Google? - [A Look at Google's many free tools]
• Bloggers 201: Taking It To The Next Level - [Extending the reach/touch of student bloggers]
• Social Media Roundtable with Brad and Matt - [1 hr Q&A session. Can you stump us?]

I am looking forward to meeting up everyone I already know (or feel like I’ve known forever thanks to social media) and meet many new people at the conference. I wish that Matt, Mark, and I weren’t presenting in the same time slot, but look forward to co-speaking with Mark at eduWeb in July and presenting at Stamats in November with Matt, Karlyn, Kyle and several others.

I absolutely love conferences. Yes, they are a great time out of the office, but they are also a time to reconnect and re-energize. A time to hash out new ideas over cocktails, network with others, and share ideas. An opportunity to learn and grow. And isn’t that what higher education is all about?

See you in Cincinnati!
Brad

PS - I haven’t decided if I am going to SlideShare since presentations go so much deeper than a few slides. What are your thoughts? Save it for the conference? I am probably going to uStream the Blogger talk to use as an example of what lifecasting might be like. Maybe Matt and I could uStream our roundtable and take questions from the chat room?!?

Let’s talk a little bit about expectations of an admission website, and the evolving nature of it. I’m going to speak in terms of the Whole Product Concept, which some of you might be familiar with. It looks like this:

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There is one question I typically get when I present a viable option/solution that happens to utilize a 3rd party website/web2.0 tool.
“What do they [the company who's providing the service for free] get out of it?”

It’s a great question, and should definitely be considered. What are we, the University, giving them, the person behind the curtain, in return for their services? What personal information will they collect? What advertisements come along with the product/solution? What if the product later goes to a paid service and all of our data/information that we have built up over the months and years now costs to use?

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I know there’s a ton of Seth Godin lovers out there, so I wanted to post this real quick. He’s doing a conference call on Meatball Sundae for FREE. Considering seats at his events can go for upwards of $2000, this is a pretty sweet deal. The call is on Wednesday, April 9 from 12-1PT (That’s 3-4p for all us east-coasters).

Note: You have to actually own the book to sign up. For $25 you can buy the book and sign up, but you can also get it from Amazon for only $16.29 right here. You’d probably still get it quick enough to register, but no promises.

Enough of me talking, sign up here and listen to the man himself. And if you were wondering… yes, it will blend.

Just in: I’ll be giving two presentations on day 1 of the upcoming conference:
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A group of local Indy bloggers are attempting to put together an Indiana Blog Conference.  Sounds like a great idea, and I would only have to travel 5 miles to get there :)  If anyone in the regional area is interested, sign up now while it is only $49.  If the 200 user mark is reached, then you will get charged for the conference.

I emailed the people running it to see if there could be a place for higher ed blogging, and I figure they are pretty flexible with the schedule.

Hope to see you all there!  I’ll be sure to show you my great city.

Well, it’s back to the daily grind.  I was promptly greeted by cold wind and rain the second I stepped into Indiana.  The 3rd day of the conference was a nice little recap of what all had been discussed, and Steve Kappler’s always interesting look into the data from TeensTalk. (Check out the webinar for the full she-bang.) Here are a few stats that stuck with me from the last day:

• 92% of SOPHOMORES have discussed specific colleges with their parents, and 89% with friends.
• 64% of Juniors still want to receive snail mail from colleges.
• 85% of all traffic is generated from a search engine (and why aren’t you using AdWords?)

In an effort to pull some of my colleagues into the Web 2.0 world, I’ve created a group on Flickr for the Stamats conference. Feel free to post any photos in there from your trip, or start a discussion.  What a great way to get started on learning, just jump right in!

The conference also has me thinking a little more about our intentions with the blog here at SquaredPeg.  I think we will be trying to refine what exactly we want our blog to be (thoughts, how-to’s, etc.), so be prepared for some changes around here.

Back to work now, where things have massively piled up.  The lack of wireless in the conference room kept me out of my email and away from work during the presentations, which was a good thing, but now it’s time to get caught back up.

Nice to meet all of you at the conference!  Leave a comment to say hey and let me know where you are blogging/posting.

It’s a packed house at the Stamats conference, with close to 180 people. That is double last year’s conference attendance. It’s been a good time for sure!

Today we got more into the ‘implementing’ side, whereas yesterday was a little more visionary. There were several solid presentations that really keyed in on some topics that a lot of people were soaking in. We had a GREAT discussion on social networking, and honestly it should have lasted a few more hours. I had so much that I wanted to say, but it wasn’t my presentation and Matt did an awesome job with it. When you only get through 3 PowerPoint slides in 70 minutes, you know the audience is captivated. I think next year it would be awesome to have a 2-3 hour panel with some younger people (or those who ‘get it’) taking questions left and right from the rest of the crowd. Stamats, if you are reading this, count me in.
Today’s big notes: I need to be doing more usability testing, I need to be digging in to my Google Analytics more, I need to be doing more with my AdWords campaigns, I need to be nurturing my blogger/forums/photos community more, and…. I need more time in the day.

I can’t wait to do my first presentation.  I did a lot of presenting at conferences during college but I just haven’t ‘broken in’ to the higher ed circuit yet. I absolutely love public speaking and I am so passionate about my job and higher education, and going to these conference just fires me up. If I can just get some ‘green lights’ at Butler and strike on some of my ideas that haven’t been implemented at other universities, then maybe I can be giving some ‘you should be doing this’ talks by next year
I skipped out on the last 1.5 sessions of the day because the sun finally came out and I needed to charge my phone (no wireless internet= no laptop = iPhone to the rescue). San Diego is beautiful! To check out some pictures that I took, just click the image below to go to my website.

So day 1 is over with, and it was a pretty good start to the conference.  Again, I don’t get nearly as much from the presentations as I do from talking with people, so tonight’s networking reception and the events taking place afterwards were total brain food for me.

We did hear some good presentations today.  Here are a few of my notes/takeaways:

• Don’t just think outside of the box, DO outside of the box.
• More kids are homeschooled (~1.2 million was the stat, I believe), than private/charter schools combined.  I think this could certainly be considered an untapped market for most institutions.
• We need to invest in ideas that will get exposure.
• Become as good at narrowcasting as you are at broadcasting.
• Make the goal engagement, not exposure.

Spent most of the night talking shop with a good mix of crowds.  Special shout outs to Matt and Obie, looking forward to talking to these guys more in the future. As usual, I have so many ideas running through my head, just struggling with getting the buy-in/resources I need to make them a reality.  Just gotta keep trying.

Tomorrow’s schedule looks pretty good as well.  Topics covered will be Video/YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, Brand/Print/Web, Interactive Technology, Keywords/Coding and Analytics/ROI.