A second full day of programming is complete. My brain is tired, but what a great next round of takeaways.
Be Curious; Not Confrontational
That was the theme I took away from the session on leading and working with cross generational employees. It’s not easy to lead people with such broad expectations around the work environment. However, one of the takeaways is that it’s often our approach that makes the concerns much worse. We would be better served to ask curious questions and find non-confrontational approaches to engage both new and old employees to see if there is a happy balance. Not everything is easily adjusted, but often — there’s likely more opportunity than we might realize if we can create a culture where the feedback is accepted.
Always have an Org Chart in Your Mind
As our institution is going through some organizational change in the department (for all the right reasons), I found myself thinking about this one in particular. The speaker urged that it was important to develop an ideal org chart and job descriptions and revisit them once a year. This way, when openings or transition happens we’re better prepared to manage it and to move quickly. The speaker also suggested visiting it each year to make sure it’s relevant because sometimes other adjustments and changes on campus occur that change our perspective.
Spend Money on the Right Things
In a session on student influencers in marking, one of the panelists talked about the value of working with an agency for influencer marketing. Their rationale was that the agency had familiarity in something that’s fairly new to higher education, was familiar with the NIL process should they want to go with an athlete, and could provide more robust coaching and training. Makes complete sense. Their logic was spend the money (or time) on getting it right on the front end always saves time from cleaning up a mess. What an analogy to so many things in our world.
Blend Authenticity with Flexibility
In the same session about using influencers, someone asked how do you keep it authentic. The team shared how they managed this, and I thought it was wildly smart. They have a suite of key messages each quarter, and they allow the influencer they are working with to pick from those offerings. It helps ensure the message is relatable for the campus and prospective students but also gives the influencer control in what they talk about in a way that aligns with the kind of content they produce.
Have fun with AI
At dinner, Bart Caylor and I had a great conversation about AI. He shared a few use cases that he and his team were using, and I shared a few I was using. One of the things he mentioned was using the Perplexity AI tool more. He whipped out his phone and showed me how it worked. It’s the child of searching something on Google and writing something in ChatGPT. I can immediately see so many different use cases for it, and I’m curious to get home and play with it a bit more. We also talked about campus tours, experiential marketing and much more. A reminder that the conversations outside of the sessions can be as valuable as the great sessions.
Thank You
Thank you again to all the great conference speakers. So many good insights at this year’s conference. I’m excited to start the work of implementing some of the lessons learned.
And Carrie On 