Online Marketing… Top Topics from REACh

Spent a marvelous morning yesterday with the Chicago metro REACh group, people from various colleges and universities who focus on “adult” marketing and recruitment. We met at a suburban campus of Illinois Institute of Technology.

REACh’s Scott Pfeiffer and Tim Panfil asked for an ambitious program: cover 8 online communication topics in 2 back-to-back sessions of about 75 minutes each. The major challenge: compress some topics that I cover in 2 to 3 hour sessions into just a few key points to take back home. Since it is easier to let presentations grow than to shrink them, that was an interesting and useful exercise.

To start the day, I asked the people present to vote on which of the 8 topics we were covering were most important to them, the proverbial “if you could only pick one of these, which would it be?” question. These are topics (in the order covered) and the votes for each:

  • Web Design… 3
  • Search Optimization… 6
  • Writing Right for the Web… 14
  • Paid Search… 0
  • Web Analytics… 2
  • Video… 4
  • Mobile Marketing… 2
  • Blogs, Email, Chat Rooms… 7

I was a bit surprised and very pleased by the size of the Web Writing vote compared to the others. And just as pleased to see that the “old favorites” of Blogs, Email, Chat Rooms retain strong interest at a time when it is easy to be dazzled by new capabilities at the expense of “traditional” online communication that is still in favor with the people who use college and univesity websites.

3 New On-Campus Web Writing Seminars

“Writing Right for the Web” continues to be a popular presentation. Between now and early August I’ll be doing on-campus sessions at Fielding Graduate University, Stonehill College, and Dominican University. And look for another web conference with Academic Impressions in October and a CASE V Annual Conference session in December in Chicago.

Whether you start on-campus or online, improving the quality of your web writing is often the most important thing you can do for stronger engagement with your visitors. Ask me about a session on your campus at bob@bobjohnsonconsulting.com

Subscribe to Website Magazine

On a related note, if you have never checked Website Magazine, do that soon. Each issue includes worthy articles on more than one of the topics listed above. The current issue is at www.websitemagazine.com where you can subscribe to either a print or an electronic version. Or both. 

That’s it for now.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *