I have a hunch that no one potentially knows more about “learning styles” than a good marketeer. Emphasis on good. And that education could get a whole lot more sophisticated in this area if it was to look into contemporary marketing ideas and practices.
Cathy Sierra planted that seed in my head back in Feb 2007 with her post Marketing should be education, education should be marketing. Ever since then I’ve been on the look out for a good marketeer who is ready or willing to talk about education. Next week I’m meeting with a marketing researcher which I hope will lead me to something interesting in terms of what marketing and education speak could do for one another.
Otago Polytechnic spends pretty big on its marketing and brand development.. some of it is great, some of its real bad, some of it has a lot more potential than key people realise. A lot of the problems in that marketing and branding exercise is touched on in this presentation called The Brand Gap: How to bridge the distance between business strategy and design. (Thanks for pointing it out Peter).
As with most of these things, different people will interpret it differently, and we will probably never make the time to stop and talk about the many discussion points worth having out of this slide show.. worse, I doubt the people that call the shots on marketing and branding in my neck of the woods will ever look at this presentation, let alone discuss it here. I think it would be a valuable ideas exercise to try and relate the points in these slides to the concerns branding and marketing a public educational institution…
Another thing on many people’s minds, and that some how relates to this post is Scott Leslie’s post about sharing, where he details the differences between individuals networking online, and institutions.. doing.. what is it they do again?
I reckon the subtitles in your post Scott, are the bones down for a swarvo slide presentation like that brand one above… if it wasn’t for your non-commercial restriction, I’d do it for ya 😉
- We grow our network by sharing, they start their network by setting up initial agreements
- We share what we share, they want to share what they often don’t have (or even really want)
- We share with people, they share with “Institutions”
- We develop multiple (informal) channels while they focus on a single official mechanism
- What to do if you are stuck having to facilitate sharing amongst a large group of institutions?
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November 16, 2008 at 7:53 am
Sarah Stewart
I read this post the other day after seeing that it had been nominated for a edublog award. It answers the people who question sharing, blogging and networking.
November 16, 2008 at 8:19 am
Scott Leslie
Leigh, my apologies for the NC clause, that’s actually an artefact of the theme I forgot to remove. There is also a By-SA license on there just to confuse people 😉 I will remove the NC clause as I actually don’t have a problem with sharing and people using it for commercial ends (though to be honest google-ad-rebloggers kind of get my goat).
Speaking of marketing, I came across this article yesterday (http://herd.typepad.com/files/bentleyearlsadmap.pdf) that seemed pretty relevant, especially in regards to authentic/networked learning.
December 3, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Sarah Gauthier
Remember Marshall McLuhan? The medium is the message. At times, we need to use the right medium to get to the right people.
Would you please send me the the Brand Gap Slide Show, it didn’t want to share with me.
Sarah
December 9, 2008 at 8:55 am
simonfj
Can I have a stab at the last question? Rule no1 in my head is focussing on developing “the market”. It’s one full of (subject matter) groups of global interest that stand. or span, national institutions.
So the question “What to do if you are stuck having to facilitate sharing amongst a large group of National institutions?” should be “What to do if you are stuck having to facilitate sharing amongst a large cross-institutional global community?” How to give them an identity – a persistant identifier – so their I and C don’t get buried in an institution’s domain, as is the habit? ( E$.g https://www.govdex.gov.au/user/index.do), or remain scattered throughout cyberspace, on some fashionable web 2.0 tool.
We aren’t ever trying to facilitate between “a large number of (national) institutions”. We will be trying to facilitate on behalf of a small group (of interest) from inside them, and hopefully, a larger group on the outside. Their preferred infrastructure and tools might even look the same. http://www.surffoundation.nl/smartsite.dws?fs=&ch=ENG&id=13479
The main challenge is to come up with a way of saying, “if you’re interested in finding the global community (in an .edu space) who research into subject xxx, this is where you might find them, in each country. One thing which will tend to lead a commercial marketer astray here is believing a memorable domain name (le brand) is going to be of any use.
What is required, if you’re thinking “public utility”, is the ‘buy in’ of national librarians: preferably ones who can intuit how linking together classified (by subject) nodes, using all kinds and combinations of communication tools, could help global communities standardize and systemize on the common stuff (i.e. NREN) network protocols). That’s after they track down their global peers of course.
December 9, 2008 at 9:25 am
leighblackall
That’s a powerful answer Simon!
Inspiring people to track down their international peers is a big challenge for me 😦 How sad it is that I struggle to even get to first base! I really need some marketing training.
Developing “my” market is right.. getting the people I work with connected internationally, will (I’m betting) develop them and their desires to a point where my services could be of more use.
But, if my market remain only interested in their local (largely face to face) networks, and same practices as always.. then I’m kind of left sitting here wondering.
The opportunities to develop the “market” come unpredictably.. for example.. a teacher (lets call them client for fun) come to me and say they want to put instructional videos online for their “clients”. I say “OK, how about we use Youtube, Blip, and Archive to do that?”.. they say, “ummm, I dunno.. I’ll have to check with my boss”.. then they come back and say, “my boss didn’t really have an answer, so I better put it on Blackboard”!!
Others go ahead and put the videos on Youtube.. and get a bit of exposure to their international peers, but not a lot. My market develops in spits and spurts and I have to get better at recognising the micro opportunities. Trouble is I’m a big picture guy..
I guess it relates to the zone of proximal development idea by Mr V. Of course that’s the case. But what I want to find out is if marketeers have some tools or methods to help negotiate that zone better with people.
February 8, 2009 at 1:26 pm
simonfj
Hi Leigh,
Really sorry I haven’t been back before this. My hols last a little longer than most (this one has been going for 9 years). I’ll disagree with you that the opportunities to develop markets come unpredictably. They are usually pretty obvious. The main thing here is having a theory of what may be happening in a social space (what trend is going on), and understanding what business you are in.
Let me just suggest that you are NOT in the education business. You are in the (interactive) MEDIA business. The big problem for anyone thinking in the institutional space these days is that they are usually thinking from the perspective of only national, if not only local, and usually broadcast (i.e from inside an intitution’s “web site”). Whereas, the main change bought on by Tim Berners lee’s invention is to force everyone to take a global view of things, where “things” are invariably limited to one (subject specific) group(s) at any one time.
If you accept that we are attempting to invent networks which support the interactive media of global groups, and some of their media may be plugged into a National broadcast station’s transmitter from time to time, then you’ll understand the main problem for all these groups is that we are yet to agree upon a directory by which they might find one another.
At the same time – and this is the effect of our view that the Web is the most important aspect of the Internet – we are yet to get the asynchonous hubs to align with a relevant Real Time Network. Remember, (and I’m being black and white here) telcos only market to either (global) institutions or (local) private individuals. Not one, apart from Skype (and its lesser peers), is offering the same low cost product to both. And Skype is a closed network.
(Real) Markets are made, true. Marketing is as much about devising new products as it is about making old ones attractive. And brands are important. But the most pervasive social changes come about in the public space. So if you’re a big picture guy (and thank you, I think you are) let’s give some consideration to how (Nationally funded) public networks and public libraries might align to create new (Globally funded) UNIversity (including tech colleges, and schools).
Don’t get disillusioned about “inspiring people to track down their global peers”. The bright ones (about 5%) will (want to) do this and the sheep will follow (as is usual). Perhaps we should try to discuss this at http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ocwcforum/
Of course it would be nicer to take a more professional design approach to making the (new) institution sustainable up front. http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/
February 8, 2009 at 3:24 pm
leighblackall
Hi Simon, as a matter of fact I do have an idea on how to get nationally funded public networks, libraries and archives to align better with international trends and better serve their local needs while being open to new opportunities internationally.
AT the moment, NZ cultural agencies like the education sector, libraries and archives are allowing NZ artifacts to pour off our shores and into the coffers of popular net services like Facebook and Youtube. Sure, they try to set up their own websites that replicate the services of those pop media in/outlets and they try to make their services more relevant and accessible (and some of them are doing a pretty good job, but they are all missing some key things, and not putting them together to service a new market.
Break their problem down:
1. They want to make their services more relevant and accessible to the NZ public (including NZ over seas, and some might even extend this as you suggest to include all people everywhere).
2. They have a problem in that most NZrs are drawn to use popular media like Facebook and Youtube, and that large amounts of NZ contemporary culture is not being captured and stored in NZ.
Now, there is a complimentary problem in NZ.. the issue of bandwidth. We spend enormous amounts of money to send and receive data from international servers. Some ISPs are caching that data locally, but the savings are not passed down to the end user.
This is where the cultural agencies can step in and offer something great to people in NZ.
They need to position themselves between the popular media and the people who use it. Take a look at TubeMogal. One of a growing number of web services that will take your video and distribute it across a great number of popular media in/outlets in one hit. This is great for people who are really trying to use this media to make their mark. Imagine such a thing in our cultural agencies, where they take your media and distribute it across the popular media, AS WELL as into lesser known but equally important local outlets like the National Archives. Imagine if the National Archives took a view of their work like Achive.org and generously stored and served endless media to everyone, but with a special interest in NZ media. And imagine if they could do all that in partnership with ISPs so that when a user does upload a music video to Youtube as well as the Archive, the next time a NZ user requests that same media to be served, the NZ ISPs step in and serve it from local servers and pass that data saving onto that user. We might see affordable Internet in this country while at the same time working smarter at capturing NZ cultural artifacts on their way out the door to Facebook.
I realise the ISP service is problematic, but I included it here for the full picture.
A smarter and more targeted system of ad placement could help pay for this set up. Where as GoogleAds are sometimes nonspecific and uninteresting, this localisaton could afford more targeted and user generated advertising to compliment the effort, and include more generous revenue sharing.
Last year I was sharing this idea in more detail to a Telecom market researcher. He seemed turned on to the idea but had his doubts about the telco being anywhere near the headspace to bring all this together. So I better post the thinking to my blog now, if only to claim first dibs on the idea and hope that someone will contact me to discuss the details of how I think this would be possible to do…
Thanks for reminding me.
March 7, 2009 at 8:53 pm
How Telecom and the NZ Archives could save NZ online culture « Learn Online
[…] together to talk about the idea, but never had the opportunity to even bring it up. It is only a recent discussion with Simon on my blog that has prompted me to post the general bones of the idea […]