The Week that Was - 1/12 to 1/16

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.