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Boosting the Bottom Line Through Retention

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Posted in Business Development, Communication, Higher Education, Internal Communication, Non-Profit on March 1st, 2009

A New York Times article raised an interesting question. Is the GOP losing a generation?
Americans identifying themselves as Democrats outnumber those who say they are Republicans by 10 percentage points, the largest gap in party identification in 24 years.

I wrote shortly after Obama’s election that he had garnered a 66% share of the 18-29 demographic or about 16 million people. Brand loyalty is created as a result of cognitive elaboration (thinking about it) by an individual. Since 16 million young voters assigned a positive attribute to Obama and ultimately the Democratic Party, chances are good the large majority will live a life loyal to the democratic brand. It is a fundamental principle of positioning.

The challenge before us as communication practitioners is not only gaining market share but also retaining those that are loyal to our brand. Higher education needs to retain the students enrolled. Nonprofit must retain core individuals who are active with time or money. Business must retain clients and key employees.

Higher Education
A top down approach to staff and faculty mentoring of students creates a family environment and identifies potential problems before they arise. International or minority students are an extremely high at risk demographic. Faculty and upper classman who reach out to the new students, prior to arrival, are sure to create a bond. It is this sense of inclusiveness that will tie the student to the university well beyond their four years.

Non-Profit
Shifting money from salaries to other priorities sends managers into a never-ending downward spiral of dealing with frequent turnover. An alternative approach is paying more to gain stability, maturity, and the skill sets to sustain long-term initiatives. Retaining those grass roots organizers and donors will be enhanced as the time manager spent on training and retraining staff can now be devoted to personally strengthening key relationships.

Business
Engaging your new clients is very much like higher education. Your account executive should be communicating with the client between projects and not just during the projects. Personal client engagement by senior executives creates an environment of partnership instead of a vendor status.

Employee retention may not be an issue today, however there is a way to thwart key staff turnover when the economy heats up again. Authentic engagement, mentoring and training by senior management today will pay dividends in the future.

None of us can afford to lose a generation of students, customers or employees. How we manage our human relations with stakeholders will ensure that we don’t fall into a chasm of disconnect and disinterested.

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Life and Higher Education in the Blogosphere

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Posted in Blogging, Higher Education, Recruitment on February 20th, 2009

The Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 57% of American teenagers create content for the Internet-from text to pictures, music and video. says Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the Future in California says “In this new-media culture people no longer passively “consume” media (and thus advertising, its main revenue source) but actively participate in them, which usually means creating content, in whatever form and on whatever scale.

This does not have to mean that “people write their own newspaper”, says Jeremy Zawodny, a prominent blogger and software engineer at Yahoo!, an Internet portal. “It could be as simple as rating the restaurants they went to or the movie they saw,” or as sophisticated as shooting a home video. (Delaney, Hastings, Rainie, & Orville, 2006).

In terms of higher education recruitment, blogging is the new media. It is participatory and it is a new tool that marketers will need to integrate into the marketing mix. With nearly 60% of teenagers creating content and participating in that media, it is easy for a university or a business to create relevant content and function as an active participant in the lives of potential students. The first step in recruitment is relationship building and relevance.

Delaney, Hastings, Rainie, & Orville, conducted an interview with Terry Semel of Yahoo!. He spoke in depth about portals and blogs serving as the new media and communication tool of choice for college age people. For his first few decades in the media industry-at CBS, then Walt Disney, then Warner Brothers, where he was chairman and co-chief executive-Terry Semel felt pretty clear about what media companies were. Then, in 2001, he left Hollywood and went to Silicon Valley as the new boss of Yahoo!, the world’s largest Internet portal. A self-avowed technophobe who barely knew how to use e-mail, Mr. Semel suddenly found himself in “meetings with a bunch of 23-year-olds”. He already had the ambition to turn Yahoo! into the archetypal “21st-century media company”, but suddenly he was no longer so clear about what that meant.

Mr. Semel has spent the past five years educating himself, including the counsel of trusted advisers such as his daughters, aged 24, 19 and 13. “The first does a lot on the internet, the second does everything on the internet, and the third “lives online” and has so many beeping devices that Semel, who has a New York accent and the kind of humor that goes with it, occasionally wonders “whether she is trafficking”. Between them, they have helped him to work a few things out.

The Internet “is a much larger change than the coming of television” in the 20th century, says Semel. In the past, “someone decided that the news goes on at 11 o’clock at night; people like my wife never even saw the news, because she never stayed up that late. We all grew up when somebody else was the programmer; now the user is the programmer.” That is change number one. To Semel, it means that Yahoo! must do more than provide technology. “We decided to open Yahoo! up, so that anybody using their personalized start page MyYahoo!  and can instantly go wherever they want to go,” even if that leads to the web pages of rivals. That credibility, he thinks, will keep users coming back for a “deeper engagement”. As people spend more time on Yahoo!’s pages-news, blogs, e-mail, chat groups, photo and music sites and so on-whether as their final destination or as stops on a journey, Yahoo! can put more and better advertising in front of them.

Change number two, says Semel, is that-unlike in television, say-”you don’t need hits”. Many small audiences are as good for advertisers as few large audiences, and indeed may be better. This has huge implications for content, turning it into one long continuum-from professional to amateur, from blockbuster to subculture niche.

Chris Anderson of Wired magazine calls this stretched statistical distribution “the long tail”. Anderson argues that old-media economics, which are biased toward the hits at the “head” of this distribution, are being replaced by new-media economics, which allow creation and consumption along the entirety of a much longer content tail.

Exchanges become necessary because people need help navigating around this huge continuum of content. In the present century, says Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future (2006), “you get large by allowing the many and small to gather on your lawn. This is the media equivalent of what eBay, a Silicon Valley neighbor to Google and Yahoo!, has done for the trading of secondhand goods among individuals. It is what Wikipedia has achieved as an encyclopedia. It is also very similar to what, say, the New York Stock Exchange does.”

A university or institution needs to become the great lawn to accommodate the giant Frisbee of ideas and conversations to be thrown about by current and potential students.

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I Can See Clearly Now

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Posted in Higher Education, Internal Communication, Leadership, Non-Profit, Recruitment, Vision on November 24th, 2008

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone,
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It’s gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-Shiny day.

This Johnny Nash song (listen here) always picks me up. So when I heard it the other day, I took a timeout from the task at hand. The lyrics got me to thinking about how leadership’s vision can help everyone “see clearly”.

Authors Jim Collins, Peter Drucker and James Burns to name a few, talk much about getting the right people on the bus in the right seats. Jim Collins specifically identifies one key trait that was held by all successful leaders, humility.

One definition of leadership for your consideration is that of Warren Bennis, Ph.D., “Managers are people who do things right, while leaders are people who do the right thing.”

Doing the right thing for our businesses, employees, families and ourselves is not mutually exclusive. In fact, I would suggest that they are inextricably woven together. It defines the overall leadership quality of an individual. When you can achieve that balance in the leadership paradigm you have reached the leadership equivalent of nirvana.

Advancing the right thing requires effective vision and the ability to communicate. Henry Kissinger said, “If you do not know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.” It’s important to note that your vision is not the same as the company’s mission. The vision is where you are going. The mission describes who the organization is and what it does.

Behavioral research scientist and author Burt Nanus suggest that there are four characteristics of effective vision.

Attracts Commitment and Energizes People
People are willing, even eager, to commit to worthwhile projects. An effective vision inspires people by transcending the bottom line.

Creates Meaning for Followers
People look for and find meaning in their work lives. When groups and organizations share a vision, individuals see themselves not just as sales clerks or assembly workers or whatever else their job demands, but as part of a team providing a valuable product or service.

Vision Establishes a Standard of Excellence
Most people want to do a good job. A shared commitment to excellence provides a standard for measuring performance. Establishing a standard of excellence, helps followers identify expectations and provides a model for the distinctive competence of a group or organization.

Bridges the Present and the Future
By bridging the present and future, an effective vision transcends the status quo by linking what is happening now with what should happen in the future. This is why many are calling Barack Obama a transformational politician. His rhetoric has consistently linked the present with the future.

As James Collins and Jerry Porras explain in their book, Built to Last, organizations with a well-articulated vision that permeates the company are most likely to prosper and have long-term success. And isn’t that what we all want?

Look all around, there’s nothin’ but blue skies
Look straight ahead, nothin’ but blue skies

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Lessons Learned From Political Campaigns

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Posted in Branding, Communication, Design/Identity, Generational Marketing, Higher Education, Marketing, Relationship Marketing, Social Media on November 10th, 2008

Like him or not, Barack Obama’s improbable campaign that led to a 53% winning margin of victory can teach us plenty about strategic marketing. Obama was named the Marketer of the Year by Advertising Age magazine.

He won 66% of the 18-29 year-old demographic, 52% of those 30-44 and 50% of those 45-64. Capturing this much market share across such a large swath of demographics would be any marketers dream.

On the Facebook social networking site, the Obama-McCain divide was evident among those who maintain a profile on the site. By the end of the presidential race, about 2.4 million users had signed up as supporters of Mr. Obama – the most of any Facebook page – compared to roughly 624,000 who were fans of Mr. McCain.

A 66% share of the 18-29 demographic equates to 16 million people, give or take a hundred thousand. Brand loyalty is created as a result of what Richard Petty and John Cacioppo call the elaboration likelihood model or cognitive elaboration. Cognitive elaboration is when consumers think about a brand and assign positive or negative attributes. Since 16 million young voters assigned a positive attribute to Obama and ultimately the Democratic Party, chances are good the large majority will live a life loyal to the democratic brand. It is a fundamental principle of positioning.

POSITIONING

In the seminal work on marketing, Positioning: The Battle for your Mind, Al Ries and Jack Trout advance the concept that the easiest way of getting into someone’s mind is to be first. It is very easy to remember who is first, and much more difficult to remember who is second. Even if the second entrant offers a better product, the first mover has a large advantage that can make up for other shortcomings.

EMOTIONALISM

Emotionalism is another key characteristics we marketers hope to elicit from the buyers of our products. Emotional as opposed to functional attachment makes it very difficult for competing brands to change our opinion and buying habits. The first time voters in this historic election will, on every presidential election, experience an emotional connection to their newfound political brand.

HOW DID OBAMA SUCCEED?
He had a marketing strategy and he understood the dynamics of communication. According to Ries, Obama reminded us all of the some very fundamental practices that are often ignored or misunderstood.

Simplicity.
About 70% of the population thinks the country is going in the wrong direction, hence Obama’s focus on the word “change.” Why didn’t talented politicians like Ms. Clinton and John Edwards consider using this concept?

Based on my (Ries) experience, in the boardrooms of corporate America “change” is an idea that is too simple to sell. Corporate executives are looking for advertising concepts that are “clever.” For all the money being spent, corporate executives want something they couldn’t have thought of themselves. Hopefully, something exceedingly clever.

Here is a sampling of slogans from a recent issue of Business Week:

  • Darden School of Business: “High touch. High tone. High energy.”
  • Salesforce.com: “Your future is looking up.”
  • Zurich: “Because change happenz.”
  • CDW: “The right technology. Right away.”
  • Hitachi: “Inspire the next.”
  • NEC: “Empowered by innovation.”
  • SKF: “The power of knowledge engineering.”

Some of these slogans might be clever, some might be inspiring and some might be descriptive of the company’s product line, but none will ever drive the company’s business in the way that “change” drove the Obama campaign. They’re not simple enough.

Consistency.
What’s wrong with 90% of all advertising? Companies try to “communicate” when they should be trying to “position.”  Mr. Obama’s objective was not to communicate the fact that he was an agent of change. In today’s environment, every politician running for the country’s highest office was presenting him or herself as an agent of change. What Mr. Obama actually did was to repeat the “change” message over and over again, so that potential voters identified Mr. Obama with the concept. In other words, he owns the “change” idea in voters’ minds.

Relevance.
“If you’re losing the battle, shift the battlefield” is an old military axiom that applies equally as well to marketing. By his relentless focus on change, Mr. Obama shifted the political battlefield. He forced his opponents to devote much of their campaign time discussing changes they proposed for the country. And how their changes would differ from the changes that he proposed.

All the talk about “change” distracted both Ms. Clinton and Mr. McCain from talking about their strengths: their track records, their experience and their relationships with world leaders.

Barack Obama, a young, black man with a different sounding name, competed and won, against a war hero who had a 26-year track record. I doubt that your brand has as many obstacles. It’s about positioning. In a down economy, the buyer must have total clarity of what your brand delivers.

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Lessons Learned From Non-Profits

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Posted in Business Development, Communication, Higher Education, Non-Profit on October 13th, 2008

Wall Street’s historic march toward market realignment has created some unique bedfellows. Politicians aside, it would serve for-profit enterprise well to take a close look at the strategies successful non-profits employ.

To succeed, non-profits face the challenge of trying to educate, motivate and mobilize a public that is over stimulated with advertising messages, stressed out, and even apathetic. They are successful by ensuring that their communication cuts through the clutter instead of adding to it.

They do this by getting the right message, in the right medium, delivered by the right messengers, to the right audience.

Cutting Through the Clutter
Vikki Spruill of SeaWeb, an advocate for healthy oceans, says “We don’t pay enough attention to who the ultimate audience is. We don’t assess where they are on a certain issue so that we can be more sophisticated in our messages to them.”

Sound familiar? It’s about the end user, not you. Make sure that you’re selling solutions not products. You’ll cut through the clutter of buy me advertising.

The Right Message
The state of Texas had a serious litter problem that was costing taxpayers big money. The culprits?  Men, 15-24 years old, who were indifferent to messages about scenic beauty and oblivious to the costs of cleaning up the roadsides. “We realized our audience was 15-24 year old males and that ‘crying Indians’ were not going to appeal to them” according to Judy Trabuls, at the advertising firm of GSD&M.

Key audience characteristics were macho behavior and something deep in the heart of every Texan, state pride. Don’t Mess With Texas became the compelling message resulting in a 76% decline in highway litter.

The Right Medium
I was in a meeting the other day and discussing communication. The subject revolved around twenty-somethings. They don’t use email for daily communication, they text. Email for them is reserved for formal dialogue. Whether it’s direct mail, television, texting or social networks its imperative to understand how your target seeks information and where they process it.

The Right Messenger
Nancy Reagan embarked on one of the most ambitious and costly public service campaigns in American history – Just Say No to drugs. Unfortunately, young people just said no to Nancy. She was the wrong messenger.

Now fast forward to truth.com, the anti-smoking coalition. Their messengers are trolls, fairies and some other characters that I can’t even describe. The point is, they are using the right messengers to deliver the message about the dangers of smoking to kids.

The Right Audience
In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer gets Marge a bowling ball for her birthday that has the name ‘Homer’ engraved on it. This is a prime example of what many organizations try to do in the communication processes. They try to give bowling balls to people who don’t bowl. It wastes time and money. Do your research before you start the communication process. Make sure that you have the right person and then give them a bowling ball if that’s what they want.

Before your next communication campaign is launched make sure you’re asking the right questions about message, media, messenger and audience.  If you do these things first, you’ll certainly lessen the chances of throwing a gutter ball.

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Going Green Builds Brand Value & Profits

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Posted in Business Development, Communication, Green/Sustainability, Higher Education, Leadership on August 4th, 2008

If you’re like most, you want to be environmentally responsible. However, being green or sustainable from a marketing position presents a myriad of challenges. First and foremost, there are virtually no standards for determining what constitutes a green product or company. Even the terms green, sustainable and eco-friendly cause confusion.

The lack of standards hasn’t deterred the movement to be viewed as eco responsible. Eighty-six percent of the companies on the Standard and Poors 100 Index have corporate sustainability websites, compared to 58 percent in 2005.

Green Targeting
Porter Novelli, a global public relations firm, is attempting to determine green consumer characteristics. Based on their research of 12,000 adults, consumers can be divided into five shades of green ranging from non-green (16%) to dark green (7%).

The telling component of the research is a small group (4%) that is labeled as Greenfluencers. This small group is directly responsible for driving trends and shaping purchasing decisions in the mass market.

Consumer Marketers
The Greenfluencers group is accessible, active and communicative. They will become brand ambassadors, proselytizing the green attributes of a given brand through their social networks. Look for marketers to extend or revitalize an aging brand into new markets solely because of the adoption by Greenfluencers.

Business-to-Business Marketers
Green positioning can be the deciding factor in a winning proposal. Take the construction industry for an example. According to the McGraw Hill 2008 Construction Outlook, building types that are most likely to adhere to green practices are publicly-owned structures, such as schools and public administration buildings.

Factor in private facilities such as hospitals or a retail chain that use green practices for reasons relating to social responsibility, lower cost over the long run and positive visibility within the community.

By green targeting these segments, the modular builder has at least one clear or green advantage over the traditional construction competitor.

Non-profits should take heed as well. Green targeting should be an essential tool in the development officer’s arsenal.

Committing to green is a strategic business decision. Define your goals and objectives. Engage your employees. Authenticity in sustainable practices and communication is paramount. Green is part of the new American consciousness. Be part of it. You’ll improve the planet and your bottom line.

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University Admissions and Recruitment Blogs

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Posted in Blogging, Higher Education, Recruitment, Social Media on April 28th, 2008

The proliferation of blogs in academia should send a clear signal to recruitment and retention professionals in higher education. YouTube.com launched a “private” channel dedicated to college videos indexed by institutions. Want to see the highlights of last weekend’s game (or last night’s party)? It’s easier than ever to share videos with friends at your college on YouTube-join up and add videos to the pool. You can also start or join groups within your college, to hook up with others who have the same interests.

More than sixty institutions are already listed in the index and any university can suggest theirs. It’s very easy to set one up. An edu email address is required to sign up, check out and upload videos. This new service seems to have the flavor of a “facebooked” YouTube.

If you think that this is just a passing fad, check out the number of visitors each day at YouTube.com. This video blog has become such a player in the field of public persuasion that the Republican National Committee was exposed for trying to discredit the Al Gore movie An Inconvenient Truth by posing as a student that lampooned the film.

Andrew Careaga, Director of Communications at the University of Missouri-Rolla, is the co-chair of the CASE Annual Conference for Senior Communications and Marketing Professionals. Andrew has also been blogging at Higher Ed Marketing since November 2005. In a Q & A with Higher Ed Marketing, he comments on the evolution of blogs as a recruitment tool.

Like any communications revolution – the printing press, broadcast, and so on – the Internet revolution is disrupting conventional approaches to communication, and community. Consider how the printing press gave rise to books and pamphlets, which disrupted the oral tradition of passing along knowledge from generation to generation, and which gave rise to universities, which became a new form of community that disrupted traditional life in the village, and you get some idea of the power of media to alter communities. Imagine how empowering it must have been for the student to have a book full of ideas to read. Imagine how disruptive that must have been to European society. No wonder they called that era the Enlightenment.

Now, think about how the advent of the Internet has also created a different kind of community – a virtual community that is unbound by time or geographic space – and opened up new and disruptive communications opportunities. I’m trying not to get too metaphysical here, but technological change has an enormous impact on communications. For people in the PR and marketing business, the social networking capabilities engendered by the Internet means users – that is, anyone online – can easily create, edit and disseminate information that can easily be found.

This means that we’re no longer in control of the message. I’m not sure we ever were, but these days it’s easier than ever for a student, graduate, professor or staff member to spread a message about our campus via a blog, a video on YouTube, or a message on MySpace or Facebook. We need to be aware that these new media tools – blogs, social networking sites, etc. – affect how people share information and ideas, form community, and express themselves.

Anyone in the business of marketing and communication should learn as much as possible about these tools. We’re communications professionals, right? Then we need to understand the media being used to share and spread information, and we need to learn how to use these tools to become part of the online discussion.

I often go back to something Dan Forbush (founder of ProfNet, now part of PR Newswire) told some of us at a conference back in the mid-90s, when the Internet was young. He said something along the lines of, “We’re in the middle of a revolution, and in a revolution, kings lose their heads. Therefore, think like a peasant.” Thinking like a peasant doesn’t always come naturally for those of us who have been trained in traditional methods of PR and marketing. But we need to learn some new communications skills.”

The University of Pennsylvania’s College of Arts and Sciences has instituted a requirement that every student will be a blogger. This is the first step in a relationship management program that will enable students and institution to become familiar with each other. The current requirement is not meant at this time for the blogs to be available for public consumption. Only the student, academic advisor and authorized administrators will have access.

Commenting on this program on the website insidehighered.com, dean of College of Arts and Sciences Dennis Deturck said, “We’re trying to give the adviser some context, so the relationship doesn’t start as ‘who the hell are you?”

Hayling Price, a Penn rising sophomore and undergraduate assembly representative who didn’t participate in the pilot program, said he would find keeping an academic journal useful. “I was lucky enough to have an adviser who had a common interest with me, so we had a good rapport,” Price said. “But that isn’t the norm – most people have less to talk about with their advisers, so this would help”(insidehieghered.com, 2006).

The advantage to the University is that trends relative to student needs or operational issues can be addressed prior to further recruitment of students. The blog also gives the university a point of differentiation when recruiting students. There are some issues with this approach as the public does not have access and the blogs are not editable. This could force students to be very selective in what they record. Robert O’Toole, Arts Faculty E-learning Advisor at the University of Warwick says, “So a student makes a mistake, and then must post a comment or a follow up entry to correct the mistake. OK, that forces them to reflect upon the mistake and the reasons for making the mistake. That’s a pretty extreme form of reflective thinking. Is anyone that disciplined? Is anyone comfortable with behaving in that way? Would we want all of our mistakes to be recorded permanently? Would anyone then ever take risks with what they write? Would anyone ever write anything worthwhile?

Bernard Lane says in his article Blog on and Start the Debate for Australian Higher Education, “My conjecture is that they will find that this approach makes their students very uncomfortable about the technology. They certainly will not get good quality, engaged and involved blogging.”

The University of Sydney is paying 10 students to blog about their college experience. “We got hundreds of applications, it was a massive recruitment task,” Joanna Cohen, Sydney’s marketing information manager says. Bernard Lane reports that Cohen is “blog mistress” of Sydney Life. She reviews all the entries before publishing. The bloggers put a personal spin on campus life for curious, even apprehensive school-leavers. Like most blogs it has regular, journal-like entries with a comment thread. But the home page banner carries the university shield.

“I think it’s working because I don’t domesticate it too much,” says Cohen, who was fascinated by blogs before she came up with this official use for them. At Sydney Life, she doesn’t see a lot of room for posts about dating or wild nights. She says subjects more suited to the readers include how to make friends in first year, insider tips for enrollment day, study and procrastination, as well as immersion in campus clubs and societies (Australian Higher Education, 2006).

An excerpt from one of the Sydney Life blogs reads, “As most of you readers could relate, one of the perpetual struggles in the life of the average uni student is learning the art of time management. For many, uni consists of a lot more than just lectures and tutes. A vast majority of us work casual jobs in our spare time (for everything from HECS and rent to groceries and a bit of extra pocket money), do cocurricular things like sports and music, and around this have to find time to fit in family, relationships and friends. And that’s just the beginning…”

The freedom to express and have a conversation with prospective students is the first step toward developing a university brand with personality and human characteristics. Tracking comments and feedback to a blog is a simple task. Essentially, the university is using students as recruiters. There is no doubt this offers a great cost-perrecruit advantage compared to other necessary recruiting tactics like fairs, direct mail and open houses.

On the website beingedu.com, Emily Chang addresses the operational cost in her article How Much Does a College or University Blog Really Cost? “While blogging has been accepted and advanced in industry by major technology movers several years ago, (Google Buys Pyra: Blogging Goes Big-Time in 2002), higher education has been slow to adopt the paradigm of publishing daily, timely personal voices for marketing reasons. Bloated price quotes from consultants don’t help the situation.

Consider the usual audience. Blogs used in higher education for undergraduate or graduate recruitment are targeting a web-savvy market of high schoolers and undergraduates. From thirteen-year olds to thirty-something’s, blogs are as normal as IM.

The popular blog community Livejournal has more than 7 million users with over 10,000 posts per hour. Another social blog space, MySpace, has over 12 million users. Blogs used for recruitment need to allow freedom for students to tell their own stories beyond the usual “I love this school” or “orientation was fun” rhetoric. I’m certainly not advocating unmediated blogging on a public site, but there needs to be freedom to the writer’s voice. Schools that don’t take the conceptual leap are simply creating diaryversions of testimonials and not really exploring the full potential of blogs” (Chang,
2006).

From an academic perspective, blogs are being explored in e-learning settings as well as in real classrooms. While some in higher education are still learning about blogs, the offspring of the self-publishing blog movement and the iPod revolution has already been born in the podcast.

At Marymount Manhattan College, Professor David Gilbert has launched a class project called Art Mobs in which his Organizational Communication students produce (unofficial) audio guides for MoMA, and make them available as podcasts. The site is a hosted at Typepad blog site.

“Maybe if we demystify the price of implementing the “latest” technology, we’ll give our communications teams, administrators, marketing directors, IT department, admissions directors, and faculty the chance to strategically think through the implications and to explore what’s already possible” says Professor David Gilbert.

At Oregon State University the recruitment and admissions department is promoting the addition of international bloggers to their website, thus expanding their recruitment level to new continents. Dan Karleen talks about blogging in academia on the website syndicateblog.Petersons.com. He says, “They realized the growing need to communicate with an international audience in a similar way they were reaching a domestic audience. For those of you who are skeptical about admissions blogging, you should spend a few minutes talking with Blake” (Referencing Blake Vawter, Assistant Director of Admissions at Oregon State University).

“It will be interesting to see how they blend the domestic and international aspects on a single blog. They’re using WordPress, which means it’s very easy to provide a separate RSS feed for all posts in a specific category, e.g. International Students. I bet we’ll see them do this.”

In the article License to Recruit? Admissions-sponsored Student Blogging Can Get
Real Results for Your Institution author Karine Joly (2006) speaks about the number of universities that are already implementing blogs as a recruitment tool. Should you launch your own student blogs to support your recruiting efforts? How can you ensure these blogs about college life will end up generating more applications as well as bigger and better classes of freshmen? Beyond the media hype, can these interactive diaries translate to better yields?

Joly says “Consider why they can help attract the best prospective students and persuade them to attend your school. Everything comes down to the Holy Grail of authenticity-or at least a perception of authenticity.

Whether you call them Millenials or NetGeners, today’s prospective students just don’t buy marketing messages delivered on glossy brochures. They’ve spent their teen years watching all sorts of reality TV shows and fallen in love with their “transparency.”

They rely on their peers’ opinions and recommendations on music, movies, and education. And, according to the report “Teen Content Creators and Consumers” (Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2005), 38 percent of all teens who are online say they read blogs.”

Dan Crouch, Web Services Manager and Enrollment Manager at Oregon State University says, “There are already many student blogs at OSU and we wanted a different message to be conveyed about our expertise in Admissions and what sets OSU apart from other institutions. Hence why we consider our blog a business blog.

As for the success of our blog, we’ve been thrilled with the results. Our audience isn’t limited to just prospective students either. It’s used as a tool to educate others on campus as well as other peers in the Admissions community about what we’re doing as a department. And one of the best side benefits has been the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) employed on the blog and our visibility on search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc… So much so that we’ve gone a step further and deployed a web marketing campaign with a leading SEO/SEM firm out of Portland.

Our pilot project has yielded very impressive results, especially when compared to more traditional (and expensive) media like radio and television advertising. Plus results are easily tracked, making a good argument for future funding.”

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Are There Qualitatively Different Types of Leadership?

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Posted in Higher Education, Leadership on April 13th, 2008

Before one can argue for or against qualitatively differing types of leadership, a hierarchy of leaders needs to be defined. Stanford professor and author Jim Collins suggest in his book Good to Great that there are five levels of leaders.

The level one leader is “highly capable individuals that make productive contributions through talent, knowledge, skills and good work habits” (Collins, 2001, p20).

The level two leaders encompass the level one leader attributes plus, they are a contributing team member and they work effectively with others.

The level three leader is a competent manager who is capable of organizing resources and teams in the achievement of a set goal.

The level four leaders according to Collins (2001), “is an effective leader that catalyzes commitment to and vigorous pursuit of a clear and compelling vision, stimulating higher performance standards.

Level five leaders are the executives who build enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will” (p. 20).

Therefore it stands to reason that yes there are some qualitative traits that are exemplified by leaders of various strata. Working with the definition of the above five levels of leadership, a shared quality may be that of a transformational leader who is passionate. “Transformational leaders are passionately committed to their work” (Hackman & Johnson, 2004, p. 109).

As the authors note their passion for producing at a high level can be seen in the individual and the level one leader is “able to encourage others” (Hackman & Johnson, 2004, p.109).  Jim Collins identified a key finding about successful companies. That key finding is companies that were passionate about what they made or offered were led by a person who instilled that passion among the followers.

A second leadership trait that is part of the leaders core is the ability to empower. “Transformational leaders know how to give power away and how to make others feel powerful” (Hackman & Johnson, 2004, p 106).  One could argue that a transactional leader does not behave this way, which is true.

However, when using the Good to Great model, transactional behavior is not a leadership quality but a managerial quality.

There are however, unique qualities to the level five leader that they are either born with or through role modeling come to possess. And all leaders regardless of situation or genetics do not possess this important duality of leadership attributes.

That duality as Collins (2001) notes, is “modest and willful, humble and fearless” (p. 22). Harry Truman said, “You can accomplish anything in life if you don’t care who gets the credit”. This is an instilled quality of self-awareness that all leaders are not born with or capable of developing. The very nature of our individual uniqueness is reason enough to support the fact that all human are not pre-ordained to possess this duality of personality.

Secondly, life experience is the great teacher. Failed attempts mold leaders in different ways. If the leader “fails forward” (Hackman, 2004, p. 349) then they are laying the foundation for becoming a level five leader. Not all leaders fail forward and thus they do not reap the full benefit of their mistakes.

The number of failures and the depth to which they failed can be qualitatively measured and serve as a distinction between level five leaders.

There are core qualitative attributes that leaders share. However, as one climbs the leadership hierarchy there are a number of leadership attributes that better defines the quality level of the leader regardless of situations or contexts.

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