Advertising this Party

I know Nate is serious about Getting off the porch and so am I. I said before that we are not getting our message out to the right audience just because it is on the web and thus universally available. I started talking about presenting at AECT in Orlando only to learn that Nate was ahead of me there with the Overlay and the Strategic Task Force. Since then I have realized that between now and October is at least one lifetime in the blogosphere if not two.

I think that finding some way to keep these good conversations visible in some ongoing way would be useful but I continue to contend that we also need to send the invitations into the established venues of communication. A presentation in October is too long to wait. We should still do that, but before then we should publish something. Here’s a radical idea – why don’t we actually advertise? Get an ad in TechTrends or ETR&D listing the topics of some good academic conversations that we have had in our stadium and invite people to visit us.

This would be print, so the conversations would have a different type of life, but the ad could point people to a website which teaches how to join the blogosphere as a reader, provides links to the conversations in the ad along with all the blogs that have participated in any of those conversations and teaches them how to begin writing a blog when they are ready to contribute in that manner. Perhaps it should provide a link to the aect-members list of blogs so they can get a dynamic list of bloggers to look at. The point is that we have to advertise our party in a way that will get to people, but email is not easy and definitly not persistent. We need it in print!