[sakai-pmc] Getting More Marketing Resources

[Josh Baron]

Chuck,

Thanks for the follow up, and glad to have this move to the list.

I think Mark is definitely the right person for this type of project, very 
experienced PR person and a great teacher.  At least initially, these will 
be graduate students so of whom will have a good deal of real world 
industry experience which will be beneficial as well.  I think developing 
the types of videos you shared would be a great way for the students to 
contribute and mirrors some of the things students at Marist did for my 
office when we were moving to Sakai (they created a 1 minute commercial 
that aired on our local TV station, etc.). 

Mark is interested in having this work span multiple semesters with the 
idea that the his students would form a marketing and communication 
consulting company for Sakai.  During the first 8-week graduate course 
this fall, one of the teams would like/need to work with us (the PMC and 
larger Sakai community) to better understand who we are, our product, etc. 
and then, based on this, begin to provide services to us which I can 
imagine might be short videos of this nature.

Mark and I are going to be speaking with Ian on Wednesday this week to get 
his thoughts.  I'd like to try and schedule a brief meeting with you (and 
anyone else on the PMC who is interested) and Mark for next week if that 
is possible.  Let me know sometimes that might work.

Thanks, Josh

-----------------------------
Joshua Baron
Senior Academic Technology Officer
Marist College
Poughkeepsie, New York  12601
(845) 575-3623 (work)
Twitter: JoshBaron



From:   Charles Severance <csev at umich.edu>
To:     sakai-pmc at collab.sakaiproject.org, 
Cc:     Josh Baron <Josh.Baron at marist.edu>
Date:   08/18/2014 10:44 AM
Subject:        Re: Getting More Marketing Resources



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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