Check out pix from the event!  That’s Leigh Perry, conference co-chair and Anne Marie Michel, presenter,  with the macow.

Check out Currentslatest edition–virtual community and alumni relations?!  gee what a topic…somebody ought’a talk about it…

Peugeot  introduced its latest model–the biggest thing to happen with it in a decade–with a multimedia campaign, relying heavily on WAP and SMS. Results?  50% of those who interacted with it ordered a test drive.  1 in 5 visited the WAP site, according to the story @ moblie marketing magazine.  The folks at Peugeot say that in TV only campaigns the time from launch to decision to visit showroom can be 3 months.  In this effort it took 20 minutes.

Sure a buying a new car isn’t the same thing as investing in an education…among other things the car’s usually much cheaper…but can we ignore this trend?

This got me curious about what various instituions are currently offering in terms of features on their sites, so I’ve launched a survey: Admissions Site Survey. Click over and take it! I’ll update this site with general results, and email greater detail to all who take part in it.

Neilsen reported in August that 5 of the top 10 fastest growing web sites consisted of user generated content: ImageShack, Heavy.com, Flickr, MySpace and Wkipedia all ranked in the top 10 with increases in unique audiences from July 2005 to July 2006 ranging from 181% to 233%.  The folks @ Neilsen choose not to count Partypoker as a user generated content; I think one might argue that it is.  If so, then 6 out of the top 10 would be UGC sites.

Interestingly we’re also reading stories of wide spread flight from the giant sites.  Print and TV media (in case you’ve missed them) have been gleeful in reports of users who report being frustrated with the mass market sites such as MySpace. 

This comes as no surprise to Web 2.0 folks such as Ellyssa Kroski who blogged back in April her expectation that with time people would grow tired of the giant communities and look for small groups that offered some filter on the noise of “online friends.” When you consider it, this trend differs little from community life in the non-virtual world.  While some people are drawn to the whirl of the big city, others seek out the order of the suburbs or quiet of rural life—others choose to spend their weekdays in the city and then retreat to quieter realms on weekend. As social networking becoming a more ubiquitous part of online life, we can expect many users to seek communities of Goldilocks just right proportions—enough people I am interested in networking with and not too many. 

Higher Education web communities possess the potential of offering just the sort of place many people are likely to seek—large enough to provide variety for both personal and professional interests, while not encompassing the globe.  It’ll be interesting to see how things go.

Lost alumni.  Despite all the advances in automatic address correction etc, none of us likes to see those return to sender piles following a big mailing.  Not only does each represent a little bit of extra postage cost, each also represents lost opportunity to tell our story, as well as additional labor and cost as the each piece works its way into whatever lost alumni processing  your office might follow.

Identifying class influencers.  Who is the best person(s) to sign those invite letters to reunion or annual fund solicitation letters?  Sure the president of the graduating class of 1994 is still active on the alumni board, but how many people in her class still think of her as a friend 16 years out?

Solicitors Who would make best solicitors of whom in the Campaign?  Bob and Ted both offer to solicit
Alice.  Who’s the more appropriate, or might the best person be Betty?

Interests Just what sorts of things do our leading prospects care about—on campus or in the world?  Sure he was in a fraternity when an undergraduate, but how much time and money are you prepared to spend to figure out that this real love was, and continues to be the library?

Social Networking empowers our alumni to answer all four questions for us. When we provide them the place and the means to keep contact information up to date, list their friends and business contacts and indicate or discuss their areas of interest or concern,  we’re letting them do much of our grunt work…..and maybe, just maybe they’ll thank us for it!

• Front page–Verizon and YouTube in talks to offer YouTube content on phones and TV.
• More on Google selling newspaper ads.
• XBox to offer TV shows and movies.

Not enough time right at the moment for reflection, but worth calling your attention to this morning.

Friday’s NYT Escapes section Nov 3,2006,  features a resort in the virtual world of Secondlife.  There’s a little humor/irony that this feature should hit the same week that the latest fall in print newspaper readership was announced.  Did I mention that Reuters has opened a bureau in SecondLife?

Which will happen first: Starbucks on the corner starts taking
Linden dollars for that latte or  we find a “Save the Pixel” movement in SecondLife?