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CASE story - Chicago
December 13th, 2004
I’m in Chicago for the CASE District Five conference. This is my first experience rubbing elbows with other higher-ed marketing and advancement professionals. The conference is geared mainly at the communications components of marketing, especially when dealing with brand, development, alumni, and audience segmentation research. However, they offer an interesting Web track that promotes some of the newer methods and methodologies embraced by the Web industry.
Now, I admit nothing I heard today was new, but it made a huge impression on me because I realized that several of the trends and movements of the past three years on the Web have begun to hit the mainstream - or at least the mainstream “decision-makers” in communications. For instance, one of the presentations was about Web standards and why they are important. Keep in mind these are not techies at this conference. These are mid- to upper-level communicators and managers from the ranks of higher education. These people have never heard about Web standards. To top it off, there was a session on blogging and first-person narrative journals. It was amazing to hear how some of the administrators in the audience took to these concepts. I called Jim during a break and explained how I was impressed to see the concepts we learned at Web Design World 2001 in Seattle (thanks to Mr. Zeldman) beginning to rise up to this level in only two and a half years.
This is an interesting exercise for me because I have never been part of the main pipeline of communicators. Typically, I function with other Web pros that know this stuff inside and out. However, seeing what I did today, it makes me motivated to bring more support of emerging Web concepts to leadership, as it appears from today that the decision-makers are ready to listen.
