Communication Council Round-up

Such a good Communication Council this month! Very exciting things are happening and it's looking like some major problems are on the verge of being solved. But first, my favorite announcement:

Bodyworlds will be here in Salt Lake City starting September 19. Dee Brewer from HSC gave a little presentation about it and asked that those interested, particularly those in the Humanities contact him about possible partnerships and special events (lectures, receptions, and other creative type events). I personally think this is going to be huge, and we should do all we can to be involved.

Next up, New Media and the University (part two). People from UCOMM, OIT and Media Solutions all attended interesting conferences on New Media and presented how they might apply to the University.

Mindy Tueller from the Office of Information Technology presented on how college-bound teens use technology to find out about schools. She has a collection of powerpoint presentations from the various workshops she attended and she is more than happy to share them with us. One takeway point she mentioned was "Don't send it, let them come you." For the first one, she said an easy way to do this is to blog, blog, blog. If the information is published, then people will find it! She then went on to show and tell about OIT bloggin initiative. They currently have in place a robust, but currently underutilized blogging tool. It's built on the Wordpress code so it's very reliable. If there seems to be some interest in creating a blog for the college, they'll set it up for free.

Valoree Dowell from Campus Marketing was next with some reporting on the differences between traditional marketing strategies and online marketing strategies. She stressed that online marketing is changing how we talk to people and we must be prepared to adapt.

Josh Paulsen from Campus Marketing gave a great presentation on Search Engine Optimization and Marketing, Social Networks, and Viral Marketing strategies. While he didn't go into much depth, it was still good information, and stuff that the College is doing already.

Chris Pfeiffer from Media Solutions gave an update on thier current projects and how they will integrate into this New Media idea for the University. First, they are upgrading their website tracking software Webtrends to be much more robust and reliable. However, this doens't affect us because we don't use Webtrends, we use Google Analytics, but it might be worth having a conversation about switching over. Second, the university search engine is getting an upgrade to be more accurate and provide guided results. Last, but most importantly, OIT and Media Solutions are currently working on a media management system for the entire university. This system, they say will be like Flickr, YouTube, and iTunes all rolled into one, and will be extreamly easy to use. This will help us out quite a bit I think, but we'll have to watch for compatability issues.

The Council decided after all was said and done that there needs to be a forum/council/workgroup to help decide what needs to happen and how it can be accomplished. Everyone seemed very keen on the idea to get creative and IT people together in the same room to brainstorm and come up with solutions on how to make the Web 2.0 jump. There will more information forthcoming from Coralie's office about this.

Well, that is about it from the Comm Council. The next meeting will be August 20, 2008, location TBD, and it will feature ASUU and the Chronicle and how to interact with them.