higher ed | Higher Ed Solo

Is There a Bias for Content at Conferences?

By: @marleysmom

01-05-2013

At Work, Conferences, Motivation, People

A couple of weeks ago, I presented a workshop on being more human in social media at the Minnewebcon conference.

For those who don’t know, I think Minnewebcon is one of the most interesting combinations of tech and marketing and communication because it brings together business and higher education. Both types of organizations can learn from one another, and it certainly helps us in higher ed know what folks who may have more access to resources and talent.

That’s not the main point to this post, though.

At Minnewebcon, I noticed that the rooms for content-based sessions were consistently filled, whereas the tech-focused rooms often had seats to spare. Which led me to wonder – do more marketing/communication/strategy/content folks come to conferences? Or just the conferences I attend because I’m a mostly-content-focused person?

But the fact is, many of us who are Armies of One have both technical and content skills. So why don’t we choose the tech tracks at conferences? Why aren’t there more higher education conferences that have stronger offerings focused on technology and physical innovation?

The same thing seems to happen at HighEdWeb each year. Or maybe that’s just my perception. As a member of the board for the Higher Education Web Professionals organization, I know we’re making a concerted effort to include more and stronger technical offerings at our annual and regional conferences. It’s a difficult proposition, though.

I’d love to hear your feedback on this idea – especially from folks who code, and sit in the tech rooms, and go to tech conferences. Does my perception ring true? Or do we need to work on the technical offerings so that more solo practitioner types can understand and apply the information in sessions?

Is it simply a chicken and egg question? Will more technical people come to conferences if there is a better balance of sessions? Do we need to have more events focused strictly on technology for higher education?

I don’t have the answers, but I know some people who plan some conferences. Your input could help us make the time in sessions more productive for all of us.

Reflecting on Leadership

By: ronbronson

23-04-2013

At Work, People

I’ve been building things my whole life. I know developer nerds have a knack of citing all of the random programs they’ve built over the years. For me, that’s organizations.

Back when I was about 14, I took a summer off from tennis. You see, baseball is my first love in terms of sports. But I just never played it. Well, one summer I called the newspaper and had them print an article mentioning a new baseball league would be starting in the town next door.

I’m not quite sure how I thought this whole thing would work, I just assumed I could put a team together and that it’d all evolve. Schedules and even a sponsor for the team was secured. The fun began when parents from as far as 20 minutes away were bringing their kids to this thing. I’m not quite sure I understand why, either. There was no other team. I didn’t have coaches. Just lots of enthusiasm. We had some practices. We did end up playing a few games. The one time someone got hurt, it was me. (I was covering home plate. The ball went under my glove. Oops.)

Eventually the whole thing dissolved as these things tend to do. Still, I had won the admiration of a few of the parents for having the moxie to put something like that together in the first place. I recalled hearing my dad on the phone, talking to one of his friends about it. They were used to my schemes. But he said “when I saw that he’d managed to get a sponsor to print them jerseys, well..then I thought, he might be serious.”

In retrospect, it wasn’t that complicated. My hometown didn’t have a baseball league. So I made one.

My whole life has sort of been like this. I’m generally down to be a loyal foot solider. I want to follow inspiring people who get stuff done. Sometimes, it works great and we accomplish awesome things. For instance, this blog was one of those ideas. Tonya and I didn’t really know each other well before we had the month-long email conversation that resulted in this end result. She saw something I posted on my person blog, a conversation happened and the end result is what you see here. But it doesn’t always work that way. There’s a particular kind of burden that comes with always starting your own stuff. For starters, it takes identifying the right talent.

In the years since I started my little baseball league, there have probably been close to 100 or so things I’ve put together with varying degrees of success. Most of those situations were areas where I thought someone else would have thought of it already or come along with a better idea. In many cases, they had. But more often than not, it was simply not on the radar for one reason or another.

I’ve learned a lot along the way by simply not being content to let problems exist and being willing to step up when it’s necessary. The end result has been a lot of years of making awesome things happen and finding myself meeting with great people. Often, the first step is putting yourself out there.

Finding the Resources When You’re Solo

By: @marleysmom

15-03-2013

At Work, Interviews, Tools, Vendors

Sometimes technology just gets in your way – at least it did when I sat down and tried to record an interview with mStoner’s Director of Marketing, Mallory Wood. I tried to make it work, but eventually, I tired of trying to match video and spotty audio together like puzzle pieces. Instead, here’s a post about our conversation…

Mallory Wood works as director of marketing for mStoner, a marketing and communications agency that works with higher education institutions – about 250 all told over the company’s history. Some of these institutions are large, with grand teams, but a lot of them are smaller, Mallory said, with small teams or solo practitioners in charge of various pieces of the communication puzzle.

“We do web design, content strategy, print; we’re a full service agency,” she added. “We can take a project from strategy to completion or do a part of that.”

mStoner works with a mix of small and large teams, but Mallory said those who work for the company get extra satisfaction from helping out armies of one.

“It is exactly when the army of one is overwhelmed with developing content and strategy or saying to themselves, ‘I have suddenly gotten social media thrown onto my plate… and I’m in the middle of developing content for print and the web and I don’t know what to do. I’m not trained in this; I don’t have a good strategy,” she said. “That’s when they might send me an email or pick up the phone and say, ‘Mallory, how can mStoner help us?’”

We discussed challenges that the solo practitioner faces every day – as a vendor sees them. Mallory listed a few that we can all agree with – time and knowledge.

“There are a lot of limitations – the biggest is time,” she said. “There are only so many hours in the day. Yes, we hustle and get it done. But at some point you have to maintain a work-life balance. Knowledge is another limitation. There are lots of resources out there that can help with that.”

And although the company makes its bread and butter advising clients, mStoner provides a wealth of free resources for the higher education community. Mallory helps out with a number of those resources:

EDUniverse – A hub for content and information that was launched in 2012 to serve as an open community for higher education. Of EDUniverse, Mallory said:

We saw that a lot of new bloggers coming into the higher ed space. All of a sudden, you have all these blogs and content, and they’re all great. We wanted EDUniverse to act as a hub for all the information that pulls together the best ideas on the web in higher ed. We merged last year with Higher Ed Live and hope to merge the two sites completely by the end of the year.

Webinars – mStoner has definitely rolled out the free webinar resources in the past year and a half, and the company has no plans to change that in 2013, Mallory said. Watch the company’s blog or get on its email list for more information.

mStoner has a dedication to providing free resources and thought leadership for those colleagues who work with higher education. We’ve made a commitment to truly just offering content – just information. We don’t do a hard sell or cold call after the webinar. In 2013, we’re planning on offering 20 or more webinars – some on content strategy from different angles,on responsive web design, SEO and analytics, etc.

Social Works – mStoner’s first book features case studies on social media projects in higher education. Mallory said the company plans to extend the book’s reach by offering a series of webinars on some of the case studies. Those will be available to folks who buy the book.

Is There a Bias for Content at Conferences?

Reflecting on Leadership

Finding the Resources When You’re Solo

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