January 2009 Archives
For the last several years, when we get to January the Symposium begins to dominate my life. This year is no different, and things are beginning to ramp up. In my last post, I mentioned the "reimagine" campaign that is being put together. We are full throttle into this as the final editing of Chris Brady's video is being done and scheduling of two videos with Stuart Selber and Elinore Madigan and their respective students is happening now. At the same time, I am working with Jeff Swain and Dave Stong on creating a poster campaign tied to the videos that is looking really good. Dave has done his usual phenomenal job on these posters. His level of craftmanship and design sense are always at an incredibly high level.
Speaking of Dave, this leads me to something that I didn't expect to happen when I started doing these weekly reflections. I subscribe to many of my co-workers' blogs, and I read many of their posts, but I have hardly ever commented. However, now that most of the staff are writing weekly reflections, I find myself not only commenting on those posts, but on many of their other posts as well. Dave is one person whose blog I have commented on frequently in the last week. I didn't expect that to happen because I have a hard enough time writing posts to my own blog. Not because I don't want to, but because I don't find it easy. I started this particular post on Friday, 1/23, but it won't get posted until Monday, 1/26 because I keep going back and rewriting it. I can't help it. I know people have told me to treat writing a blog as a stream of consciousness type of thing, but I just can't do it. At least not yet. So it takes me forever to write a post.
So I say to myself that I should just write one post a week for now, and that it'll be no big deal. Heck, I really should be able to get 4 or 5 written. Yet here I am with just the one post. But something is happening. Even though I have only written one post a week on my own blog, I am doing more writing in general because I am really getting into reading and commenting on my co-workers' spaces. Oh, I'll spend more time than I should writing and rewriting my comments, but I'm writing. And it is inspiring me to write more and share my ideas. I am still daunted by the fact that I can't just write what I am thinking at the moment and let it go; that I have to go back and analyze it and go over it again and again. However, I really find it gratifying to comment to my co-workers, and my hope is to have them comment to me. I just hope they find what I have to say as interesting as I find their stuff.
This was a busy week highlighted by two main focuses - the marketing campaign for the TLT Symposium and the publishing of fresh, daily content to the TLT site that will then aggregate into a new page published on the last day of the month to become the internal newsletter. Both focuses are making great progress, but, as I have often found, they just don't come together as fast as I would like them to.
I have worked on the Symposium marketing campaign for the last several years, and I have always found it to be incredibly challenging and incredibly rewarding. I think it's fair of me to say that the Symposium is always a huge project that leads to a great deal of stress and exhaustion, but there are components of it that I greatly look forward to-namely the marketing campaign. I really think the marketing took off last year with the "Faculty Stories" concept, and for this year we wanted to build off of that in a way that made sense but was also very different from what we have done before. The "reimagine" campaign, as it is being called, is really coming together nicely, but it is taking a great deal of time to complete. This has started to cause some stress with me, but I think the final product is going to be fantastic. What I am really excited about is how we are weaving the campaign into the actual events of the day during the Symposium in a "drop in" way as we talk to our presenters, attendees, and speakers. These interviews and conversations will be available during the day in video form on the Symposium site, and they will fit seamlessly with the information that was completed prior to the day of the event.
We're also trying something new with web site banner ads and a widget for personal blogs (which I am going to see if I can make work on my blog with this post). Instead of sending the ad out asking people to place it onto their web sites, we are creating a page on the Symposium site where the ad and widget will be for people to grab and use as they wish. The idea of doing it this way is a continuation the word of mouth tactic used for the "tag this" feature at last year's Symposium. Basically, we want our community to pick up on the fact that the Symposium widgets are being used on blogs and others will then use it as well. We also plan to use Twitter and Facebook as opposed to the newswires to continue the social networking aspect that has been the theme of past Symposiums and become a huge facet of how our community interacts.
The other main focus of the week was the publishing of content to the TLT site and the creation of the new form of the TLT newsletter. I am very pleased with how this is coming, and we are finally underway with posting daily content. The daily content shows up in the RSS feed, and a page will automatically publish on the last day of the month that is the new form of internal newsletter. This whole process is a going to be a vast improvement in not only keeping the TLT site up-to-date with what is happening within TLT, but also with generating content for the internal newsletter (which was not something I would call an easy thing to do at times).
There is still a lot of work to be done on both of these projects, and I go back to the fact that I like how they are coming together, but sometimes it seems to happen at much slower pace than I would like. However, both of these projects involve a lot of new ways of looking at how we do things, so it's not going to be something that happens just like that. Most importantly I just want to get them right, and I think we're heading in the proper direction.
With games such as World of Warcraft that have millions of users with paid accounts it really struck me to learn that Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock is the first game in history to reach $1 billion in sales. Now the entire Guitar Hero franchise, which was launched with the first Guitar Hero in 2005, had previously broken the $1 billion sales barrier, but GHIII, which was released in Fall 2007, is the first single game ever to reach that number.
The article where I read this story mentions that sales of real guitars have increased during the same time frame. I actually mentioned to my brother months ago that I would like to learn how to play the guitar (I don't think this desire was directly a result of my playing Guitar Hero, but I know that playing GH didn't hurt), and, what do you know, for Christmas he got me a super sweet Ibanez electric guitar. The thing is just gorgeous! Sadly, I think it is going to be a while before I am able to play anything on it that doesn't sound like huge chunks of metal scraping together.
Not only are sales of instruments increasing, but artists who songs appear on the game have seen increases in download sales and inspired renewed interest from consumers. To quote the article from Edge, "first-week sales of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith tripled the the first-week sales of the band's previous album." That is truly amazing.
I have always been a video game junkie. My friends have always said that video games are "my drug." Well, as we see the power of these games and how they are becoming a driving force in other forms of entertainment and artistry, I like to look back and think that I was onto something for all of those years. Was I really just a junkie, or was I a visionary? Ok, I guess it's fair to say that the people making the games were the visionaries, but I was definitely on board for the ride.
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