Our Word: SIUC's marketing strategy a snooze - Our Word
BoundlessGallery.com had a really great marketing professional, Stan Hansen a couple of years ago. He left us to chase his GF (now Wife?) up to Chicago. I'm on the road and likely would have missed this one if he hadn't sent me the link.
I feel like I have made a little contribution to SIU through this blog, look the DE gets it! Marketing and PR are one of the drivers that SIU is failing. The Dean of Business said something about how marketing is both the message and the product. I think that if SIU gets the marketing story together, they still have a product problem. One step at a time.
It is interesting how many good people we have lost at BoundlessGallery.com because their GF/BF/Wife/Husband/True Love/whatever couldn't find work in Southern Illinois.
No, this is not the beginning of this blog being active again.
10 comments:
Hey Peter, Thanks for the compliments.
A) Yes Wife.
B) I do not think her not finding a job down in So Ill was why I left. I think there are plenty of other reasons, most of them listed on this blog.
Here is my story. One day in May of 2005 I was looking for jobs in the business section of the Sunday Chicago Tribune. It was about 15 pages long or so. After that I picked up the Sunday Southern. It was 2 pages long, 2 PAGES. Like the article about the picture on the home page of the SIU website that I sent to Peter, it was something that reflected on the culture in Southern Illinois.
Now I am not saying that this meant anything overly specific, but it tipped me off to the culture down in Southern Illinois. Besides BoundlessGallery.com, there was nothing. There wasnt even enough people interested in BUSINESS to fill up more than two pages of the SUNDAY PAPER (I feel sorry for whoever bought ads on those pages), let alone enough jobs. Had something happened between me and boundless, I figured I had very little other options to turn to.
Even if I end up dead on my ass up here, at least I could say Chicago beat the crap out of me, not Carbondale.
So my advice to readers still in Southern Illinois looking to get in to business. WORK YOUR ASS OFF. You have a mountain of anti-business culture and climate to overcome. Luckily there are a lot of good people around there still that can help you out. If you can't find them, they are the one's whose cars are still in the parking lot at 6:00 PM.
PS, I should also mention that I found the article that I sent to Peter through Dave's Shawneenet news aggregator, which is AWESOME.
The DE said their newsroom had quite a laugh over the yawning picture. Well, there were quite a few people laughing at the DE newsroom over the whole Codee thing. Geez!!! Oh wait, they only students. Well, everbody's an expert.
The funny thing about the DE pic is that the professor is good. He gets high student evals. He has implemented an attendance policy that has improved the pass rate in the core math course he teachs. It is better to have students yawning in class than snoozing ar home! But, of course, from a P.R. point of view it was a dumb choice to use the photo with no context.
So why did they use the photo? The photographers are all experienced -- at least two are alumns. Their boss, Phil Bankester, holds two degrees from SIUC as does Janet Douglas, who is charge of the web site. Bankester has been working at the university for more than 25 years and is a personal friend of Poshard, so presumably he has the university's mission at heart. Douglas worked for Lucent Technologies and describes herself as a web genius. How could this happen?
I caught the explanation about why this photo surfaced. The excuse is that Sue Davis had lined up photos for the webpage a month or two ahead and they are still running the webpage on that playbook. It does sound like that department has gotten the message and is excited about improving to me.
Peter, you are either taking your marching orders from your friends left behind in MCR or you are just making this up as you along. Nobody lines up such photos "a month or two ahead." Come on, you're smarter than that.
I wrote it was an excuse, but who cares? Maybe they are smarter then the previous manager and will learn something. Everyone makes mistakes, the question is do they learn from this or just keep doing it?
>> The funny thing about the DE pic is that the professor is good. He gets high student evals.
Funny thing about being an SIU professor these days, if you give away free grades, you have high student evals. I suspect the results might be better if your student evals are average, don't you?
Some of you people keep defending our soft bigotry of low expectations and someday we'll be reminising on the days that SIU enrollment was north of 18000.
I was talking to a very knowedgeable old alum who is heavily involved with athletics and he said that "it will get worse before it gets better." In a lot of ways, what he said sounds like what Peter said.
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