Articles Posted in K12 Publishing

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Hype alert – Web 2.0 Marketing is a paradigm shift but only a portion of the market is using it today. In Part 1 I argued that market trends should be pushing you to use social networking, blogs, wikis, and the other tools of Web 2.0 in your marketing mix. Given the uneven adoption of these tools in your customer base you will be managing a mix of the old and new for quite some time. So think of it as expanding your paradigm.

Before we go on I want to add to what I said in Part 1. There is one additional reason for doing all this that is specific to the education market. Most teachers are isolated in their classrooms – they yearn to have their voice heard and to be part of a larger community. The asynchronous nature of most social media are ideal for meeting this need. It is one of the reasons there are so many education groups already on Ning.

So what does this “paradigm expansion kit” look like? Here are five ways of thinking like a Web 2.0 Marketer that you can add to your toolkit.

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Education marketers have been slow to adopt wikis, blogs, social networks, and virtual worlds. There are valid reasons for this (see below), but it is time for us as an industry to begin embracing these tools. In this series I’m going to explore the industry context, the gestalt, and some concrete ideas to help you get started down this path.

Over the past year I have been asking people “what is the first thing you do in Amazon after you make sure you have the product you were seeking?” The almost universal answer is that people scroll down to look at the user generated comments. This is the power of Web 2.0 at work – what your peers have to say on a subject is far more important than anything a company might say.

There are two primary reasons the education industry should be employing Web 2.0 tools:

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By Guest Blogger Randy Wilhelm

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Educator’s love the internet but they have valid concerns about using it in the classroom. Thinkronize’s study, “Schools & Generation ‘Net” uncovered compelling insights from nearly 1,000 principals and library media specialists. Relevancy, commercialization, information literacy, instructional validity, and children’s safety were all significant issues. Today we look at 5 ideas that can help you rethink your on-line offerings to fit into today’s classrooms.

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1. The Internet is a Valuable Instructional Resource

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Sometimes in the rush to finish a chapter on deadline or to get six copies to Paducah by Friday we loose sight of the essence of what we are doing.

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Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietanmese monk, writing about how everything is connected expressed it this way:

When you look at this sheet of paper, you think it belongs to the realm of being. There was a time that it came into existence, a moment in the factory it became a sheet of paper. But before the sheet of paper was born, was it nothing? Can nothing become something? Before it was recognizable as a sheet of paper, it must have been something else – a tree, a branch, sunshine, clouds, the earth. In its former life, the sheet of paper was all these things. If you ask the sheet of paper, “Tell me about your adventures,” she will tell you, “Talk to a flower, a tree, or a cloud and listen to their stories.”*

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Barbara Russell, founder of Options Publishing, was honored at the Association of Education Publishers (AEP) awards breakfast this week in New York. She spoke about entrepreneurship in the education market and why it matters to those of us who care deeply about providing schools with innovative high quality instructional products.

When multi-billion dollar companies like Pearson, Houghton / Riverdeep / Harcourt, and McGraw-Hill consolidate much of the business we need entrepreneurs driving change at the margins. Without pressure from this dynamic source our industry will collapse under its own weight.

She began by outlining the four characteristics that she believes entrepreneurs share.

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Open Source culture in K12 Education will have a profound impact on our industry over the next 10-15 years. Open source already touches instructional content, classroom management, student information systems, and IT services. Where else will it find a purchase?Fingertrap

Ironically, the attempts by the old guard industries to protect their traditional interests in a digital age are accelerating the change. The more restrictive copyright and trademark laws become the more incentive there is to create open source content. Many education publishers are going to find themselves in a Chinese Finger Trap – the more they struggle the worse the problem will become.

The music industry is proving that no one ever “wins” an argument with their customers – the question for education is whether publishers can remain relevant in this new era by learning from other’s mistakes.

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I’m thankful that I get to work in a business that actually means something in this world. When we do our jobs well good things happen for teachers and kids. Thanks to my friend and mentor Peter Lycurgus for giving me the nudge in this direction 18 years ago.

I’m grateful for boundless curiosity, mans drive to overcome ignorance. It is the engine that drives learning. I’m also thankful for the endless pool of ignorance out there – without it we wouldn’t have a market.

do your jobWith gratitude I think of all the wonderful people I’ve met over the years in education. From the pinnacle of power in DC to a 1 building district in rural Washington state it has been a privilege to know people who care passionately about our children and their future.

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Information Overload is a serious problem in our culture today. People are frustrated and overwhelmed by the fire hose of information they are trying to absorb. But, as the American Philosopher Ann Landers was fond of saying:

“No one can take advantage of you without your permission.”In summary:618617_firemen_hose_practice

  • Personally we need to take control of our information diet. We need to discard our old paradigms and seek information only when we need it.
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Marketing and selling in the era of infinite input feels like howling into a gale. The average urban dweller is subject to 4,000 ads a day, 1 every 14 seconds. The only sane defense is to tune it all out, to turn it into wallpaper for your world.

Earlier in this series on Information Overload we looked at our broken paradigms of information management, a new personal productivity paradigm, and 10 ways to build instructional products for today’s learners. Today we look at what this means for those of us in the persuasive professions. The suggestions here are not just for education publishers – they are what I consider best practices for all marketers.

The fundamental problem is that the signal to noise ratio has gotten completely out of whack. I have an email account that I’ve been using for several years. Spammers have gotten their grubby little mitts on it and I now get over 3,000 spam emails a week at this address. I have great filtering – less than 100 make through so that isn’t the problem. The issue is that I no longer bother looking for false positives – I just delete it all and hope/pray that if it is important the person will find another way to reach me.

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How should we design textbooks and education technology for a world where information is no longer scarce or hard to find? It is time to rethink how we build education products based on new paradigms of information management.

In Part 1 of this series we explored the broken paradigms about information that are driving most of batty. In Part 2 we explored strategies for adopting a new information paradigm to help us survive and thrive in the new climate.

956183540_18bff94222_m.jpgToday we take a look at ten ideas for how we can build products that tap into the new zeitgeist. These are nuts and bolts tactics publishers can use to rethink product development.

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