[sakai-pmc] Getting More Marketing Resources

[Charles Severance]

Josh,

I trimmed a tad from this note and moved the conversation to the sakai-pmc list to get wider input.

I like what you are describing below.  In the past, when we have tried to engage students to help us with marketing, we have not been too successful - I think that mostly the problems before were that we were asking too broad of questions and expecting an opinion on some question.

I think that this could work a lot better if we had more tangible artifacts that came out of the work.   One example that comes to mind is the 2008 Mozilla series of commercials - I think it was a contest  - they seem to do something like the from time to time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzcBJiBEYTo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19AM_NJoYWQ

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6cptd_mozilla-firefox-commercial_shortfilms

This would not have to be the only artifact white papers, case studies, etc etc would all be great artifacts.

I am happy to work with them.   This week is IMS in Ann Arbor week - I have some time but am mostly crazy.

/Chuck


On Aug 15, 2014, at 9:26 AM, Josh Baron <Josh.Baron at marist.edu> wrote:

> Greetings everyone! 
> 
> Although I'm still in the internal planning stages, given this posting I wanted to share with the group that over the summer I've been following up on some of the ideas that we discussed at the PMC meeting at Open Apereo around finding ways to engage marketing and communication students to assist the community.   
> 
> As I think we all agreed, such an approach would only be successful if we had a strong professional at the helm guiding and overseeing the students' work.  To address this issue, I've been working to recruit one of our senior faculty members in our School of Communications at Marist, Dr. Mark Van Dyke, who teaches many of our online graduate courses in our Integrate Marketing and Communication (IMC) program.  Mark, I believe, would be ideal in this oversight role as in addition to his academic credentials, prior to teaching he spent 25+ years in the Navy leading their communication office including several years as the second in command as their Deputy Chief of Information. Possibly more importantly, Mark has been involved in the Sakai community having lead a student team that developed and implemented our internal communication strategy for our transition to Sakai at Marist for which they received an honorable mention in TWSIA (you may recall seeing Mark and his students present at the Sakai conference in Boston a few years ago).  More on Mark at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/markavandyke. 
> 
> Mark has taken time to review a lot of current information on Sakai over the summer and is interested in having his graduate students in his fall courses engage with the PMC and others in the community to both work on developing a marketing and communication strategy as well as provide practical assistance on any "low hanging fruit" that we might identify.  In essence, his graduate students (many of whom are professionals themselves) would become the PMC's marketing and communication consultants with Mark overseeing their work.  He is also interested in having students in his second round of fall courses then help to implement the strategy.  He sees a lot of potential for this to become a long term activities in our IMC graduate program and would be interested in partnering with other faculty at other institutions to bring more students into this over time.  I've worked with Mark for many years on this type of model and have a lot of confidence that he can ensure that this would be both a great learning experience for the students while also being something that delivers real value to Sakai. 
> 
> I'm in the final phases of working some details out as I'd like Marist to provide Mark with some funding to help support the effort.  He is in the process of finalizing a proposal for this work that I can share with the PMC shortly but I wanted to get the groups initial reaction to these ideas first.  Also, Mark would like to try and connect with some of the PMC members for brief Skype/Hangout sessions before the semester begins as means to prepare his students. 
> 
> Are there any concerns or initial reaction to where this is headed? 
> 
> CHUCK:  Would you be available for a brief chat with Mark next week?  Are there others who would like to talk with him? 
> 
> Josh 
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