I wrote that last piece on Brian Mueller and, with all the good stuff I’ve been hear­ing about him as our new CEO, I can’t resist post­ing a link to this video of Steve Ballmer doing the “Dance Mon­key­boy” thing, some of his own spe­cial breed of moti­va­tion. This has been the legacy of Microsoft for some time now, eas­ily since 2000, and you have you ask your­self: is he like this … on a dare?

Tech­no­rati Tags: Brian Mueller, Lead­er­ship, Microsoft, Steve Ballmer

This isn’t a sur­prise to any­one by any stretch, but it’s an inter­est­ing reminder of just how dra­matic the changes around this place are right about now.

PHOENIX–(BUSINESS WIRE)–March 29, 2006–Apollo Group Inc. (Nasdaq:APOL) announced that Brian Mueller has been appointed to its board of directors.

Mueller has been with the com­pany for 19 years and is cur­rently its pres­i­dent. In his career with Apollo Group and Uni­ver­sity of Phoenix he has held many posi­tions, most recently as CEO of the Uni­ver­sity of Phoenix Online cam­pus.



Dr. John Sper­ling, act­ing exec­u­tive chair­man of Apollo Group, said, “We are pleased to appoint Brian to our board of direc­tors. He is an excel­lent com­ple­ment to our board and we look for­ward to the con­tri­bu­tions and guid­ance he will pro­vide as we con­tinue to grow and expand.“



Mem­bers of the company’s cur­rent board of direc­tors are John Sper­ling, Peter Sper­ling, John Nor­ton, John Blair, Hedy Gove­nar and Dino DeConcini.

The cam­pus direc­tors and regional vice pres­i­dents just got back from a meet­ing in Phoenix dis­cussing the future of the orga­ni­za­tion with Brian and his team as we all move for­ward with this long-overdue inte­gra­tion between Online, the ground cam­puses, and Axia Col­lege (come April 1). These are shake-up meet­ings, designed to make peo­ple feel just uncom­fort­able enough to take action, to force change in the way we per­ceive the deliv­ery of educ­tion. He — Brian — comes to the table with an inter­est­ing rep­u­ta­tion. From peo­ple who’ve worked for him directly I’ve heard the fol­low­ing:



“If he wakes up with a brain­storm, it bet­ter be imple­mented by 1:00.”



“He’s a mer­ce­nary.… Very good, but very deter­mined.”



“Tough love. Exhas­tive, tough love. If he doesn’t love you, tough.“



But the real response came from a cam­pus direc­tor I trust and respect dearly, who hasn’t had much con­tact with Brian and was skep­ti­cal about his role in the orga­ni­za­tion, She came back from the meet­ing and said, “I don’t care what you say about this guy. I don’t care what peo­ple call him. This time around, peo­ple are fol­low­ing him. He’s a leader, and we’re fol­low­ing him. We’ll get through this.“



Makes me want to do that much more today. Nice feel­ing.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Apollo Group, Brian Mueller, Edu­ca­tion, Uni­ver­sity of Phoenix

Here’s a won­der­ful Spike Jonze mini-doc on Al Gore and fam­ily. It’s only 13 min­utes and worth watch­ing in its entirety. It paints just the right pic­ture of the Gores, albeit a few years too late.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-29385328971143264&q=al+gore

Hav­ing spent many years in New Jer­sey, I com­pletely sym­pa­thize with the film­mak­ers of the fol­low­ing. These guys got together and obeyed the speed limit in Atlanta and brought a major high­way to a stand­still. Dan­ger, poten­tial loss of life and limb, dam­age to prop­erty, every­thing you look for in a sound traf­fic sys­tem. This is five min­utes long and worth a watch!

“A Med­i­ta­tion on the Speed Limit”

The mar­ket­ing world is abuzz with the notion of blog­ging and pod­cast­ing as tools for greater sat­u­ra­tion, vis­i­bil­ity, touch, what­not. We’ve been has­ing out some of those con­cepts around here and I thought I’d take a minute to out­line them.

I started exper­i­ment­ing with pod­cast­ing last month for a pub­lic rela­tions course I just wrapped up. It was a small class, a good one full of guinea pigs for my tech machi­na­tions. The course is offered as a hybrid — on ground one week, online three weeks, on ground one week — so I pitched to the stu­dents that it might be a fun experiement to try pod­cast­ing my online lec­tures for the three weeks we’re not together.

Using Garage­Band, a new con­denser micro­phone, a PreSonus break­out box, and my pre­vi­ously typed lec­tures as my scripts, I jumped in. The feed­back was won­der­ful. I had stu­dents telling me that the whole con­cept changed the way they inter­act with the con­tent. That they gather around their com­puter with their fam­i­lies and lis­ten together — a la some sort of post-modern “Fire­side Chat”.

Hyper­bole aside, it helped me, too. Being able to pro­vide the tone of the lec­ture along with the slides allowed me to con­nect with the mate­r­ial in a new way, to con­nect in a way I hadn’t expe­ri­enced with the tra­di­tional on ground lec­tures to boot. They’re focused. They’re tan­gi­ble. They’re tac­tile, in a strange way, know­ing that the stu­dents are out there ware­hous­ing my mate­r­ial on their iPods makes the whole process bril­liantly fused with dis­tance edu­ca­tion.

When I finally took the lid off my lit­tle exper­i­ment for Uni­ver­sity admin­is­tra­tion, the response was guarded, but pos­i­tive. While the tech­nol­ogy was daz­zling — cer­tainly daz­zling to those who have no expe­ri­ence with this sort of wiz­ardry day-to-day — the cyn­ics and tech­ni­cal folks ral­lied against the con­cept for every rea­son you can prob­a­bly already imag­ine: too expen­sive to host, too expen­sive to serve, can’t put Uni­ver­sity intel­lec­tual prop­erty on a pub­licly acces­si­ble site, etc, etc, etc.,

But it sparked dia­log, and gave me a soap­box to talk about this tech­nol­ogy from a PR per­spec­tive. Here are my points:

1. This tech­nol­ogy frees orga­ni­za­tions from the whims of pro­fes­sional media.




2. This tech­nol­ogy allows orga­ni­za­tions to develop the elu­sive “Trans­par­ent Rela­tion­ship” with their publics.




3. Orga­ni­za­tions who ignore this tech­nol­ogy risk alien­at­ing a large new mar­ket seg­ment that expects otherwise.

The Whims of Pro­fes­sional Media

The PR role is a tricky one. Align­ing an organization’s mes­sage with the needs of the media pub­lic is not an easy job. To do it well, it requires a mind-numbingly detailed aware­ness of media out­lets in the mar­kets and within that under­stand­ing, a grasp of the time­li­ness of news as it passes through the pub­lic fil­ter. When hard news is heavy, when trends fall out of favor, get­ting your pitches acknowl­edged can be chron­i­cally dif­fi­cult.

Our con­tract and in-house PR pros are won­der­ful. They get it. They under­stand our mes­sage and they drive to spread the word by defin­ing and craft­ing mes­sages and deliv­er­ing sto­ries to media out­lets with whom they have a sound his­tory — a rela­tion­ship. But if the news cycle dri­ves our seg­ment out of the spot­light, our story is canned no mat­ter how strong the reporter rela­tion­ship is.

What this tech­nol­ogy deliv­ers orga­ni­za­tions is oppor­tu­nity. Oppor­tu­nity to define and craft your mes­sag­ing, define your core audi­ence, and deliver your mes­sage your­self in a cost effec­tive medium. Orga­ni­za­tional PR pros can now con­trol the dis­tri­b­u­tion of their mes­sages and take advan­tage of time­li­ness and tar­get­ing that com­pli­ments the news cycle, not com­bats it.

Trans­par­ent Rela­tion­ships

I’m a sub­scriber to the idea that mar­kets are con­ver­sa­tions. The brains that have lead the charge on that front are cer­tainly greater pros than I at this stuff. So, what I have to say here really serves to amplify a point that I’m not sat­is­fied is trum­peted loudly enough.

Publics expect the con­ver­sa­tion.

Mar­keters do their level best to fig­ure out how to start the con­ver­sa­tion because it feels like value-added to let our cus­tomers in on our lit­tle secrets. Value-added is no longer of value, it’s assumed. If we stand on our walls and open doors for min­ions to enter and behold our inner-workings, we’re shut­ter­ing the rest of the world — we’re invit­ing the masses to go else­where, to find the con­ver­sa­tion.

We’re not doing our cus­tomers any favors by build­ing trans­parency into our oper­a­tions. We’re doing just what they have expected all along.

Igno­rance is Alien­ation

The time to start the dia­log is yes­ter­day. The tech­nol­ogy is far too easy to adopt, to build upon, to pro­duce pass­able con­tent. With another day that goes by, so goes another of our peers lever­ag­ing these tools against us. The gen­er­a­tion we’re mar­ket­ing with, the Echo Boomers, Mil­lenials, Flip-Floppers, Thum­bers, they are already the MySpace gen­er­a­tion. They’re raised on dis­tance edu­ca­tion. They’ve stud­ied their online games, they’ve IM’d across fan­boards and now they’re Skyp­ing all around us while we’re just get­ting used to DSL.

Con­tent

But it’s more than just the tech­nol­ogy. Right now, blogs are read if they’re per­ti­nent. Pod­casts are devoured because they’re cool. If that time­line per­sists, blogs should be com­pletely out­moded in three years and pod­cast­ing will be a vast new adver­tis­ing spon­sored audio­vi­sual black hole. Pop­u­lar­ity will be defined by util­ity: the level at which we’re able to deliver use beyond cool.

Here are a few things I’m work­ing on right now.

1. Reme­dial Skills Devel­op­ment It’s not really fair to call them “reme­dial skills”. Many stu­dents who hit our classes don’t have the basic for­mat­ting, com­put­ing, and crit­i­cal think­ing skills to feel com­fort­able in our pro­gram. To help out, we’re launch­ing a pod­cast show, talk radio style, inter­view­ing our best fac­ulty across dis­ci­plines giv­ing stu­dents tips and tricks on basic aca­d­e­mic per­for­mance. Not sure how to for­mat and APA paper? We can talk about that. How about Pow­er­Point? We can get you started there as well. Need to know what is and is not con­sid­ered pla­gia­rism? We’ve got you cov­ered. These will be hosted cen­trally and offered as an enroll­ment tool for aca­d­e­mic coun­selors and fac­ulty with stu­dents not quite ready to for prime time academia.




2. Trends and Issues This is a round­table dis­cus­sion show tak­ing on the issues of con­cern to our stu­dents. Where will the jobs be in tech five years from now? What’s it like to leave school and join a union as a teacher? I’m 23 and my older class­mates don’t under­stand me — what’s with that? We’ll bring in fac­ulty experts and toss around and issue for an hour, hop­ing to build a resource for our stu­dents to sink their teeth into; some­thing that will help them feel more safe and con­fi­dent in clas
   s. They’re not alone, and we understand.

They’re weather bal­loons, but we’re doing our best to get on board now. Does the orga­ni­za­tion under­stand it? No. Is it our charge to push, and keep push­ing until they do? Absolutely. Our cus­tomers expect it.

A new fea­ture to the iTunes Music Store is users’ abil­ity to pur­chase an iPod com­pletely through iTunes. Why is this impor­tant? Sev­eral inter­net crit­ics have spec­u­lated that the iTMS browser is the future of the inter­net: easy-to-use, sim­ple, and graph­i­cally pleas­ing. This is one more step towards mak­ing iTMS a web browser.

Agreed. I’ve been think­ing about this for some time. We need an iTunes Soft­ware Store, iTunes Ama­zon Store, iTunes eBay Store, and so on, and so on. This inter­face works because of the trick of the eye — you don’t believe you’re online when you’re in it. The metaphore of your iTunes library allows you to be in the sale with­out know­ing it — just click on an artist in your library and POOF, you can buy more just like that.

read more

This is one of those won­der­ful ads that cuts to the core of what it means to be a dad for me. Of course, this is com­ing from a guy whose pri­mary pur­pose in breed­ing is to develop smaller ver­sions of myself for movie bud­dies. As it is, many thanks to the Ad Coun­cil for this kind of pos­i­tive reflec­tion and cin­e­matic genius!

Ad Coun­cil on Being a Dad

Tech­no­rati Tags: Father­hood

Hat’s off to Lewey Geselowitz. I never played Quake 2 — believe it or not, I was a Deep Space 9 guy — but this is the coolest mod I’ve seen for a game yet. Crazy, crazy — I actu­ally expect a dragon to pop out, or an Amer­i­can eagle, or Pamela Anderson.

“Quake II AbSIRD is a mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the stan­dard Quake II ren­der­ing engine so that it can cre­ate SIRDS instead of nor­mal 3D envi­ron­ments. This means that you can play Quake II just as you nor­mally would (sin­gle player, net­work play, most mods, etc) except all the 3d objects and char­ac­ters will jump out at you with the full 3D power of SIRDS.”

Jump out, yeah. I still can’t quite fig­ure out how your visual acu­ity is affected by mutants with chain­saws. I know my reac­tion time ain’t that great.

Quake 2 AbSIRD at Lewey’s World

Appar­ently, real researchers have finally found the rosetta stone of pub­lic speak­ing, and it’s inter­course. That’s right, all your visions of fright and peril are awash in a warm glow with only a quick brush of love in the back seat.

Vol­un­teers who’d had PVI [penile-vaginal inter­course — ed.] but none of the other kinds of sex were least stressed, and their blood pres­sure returned to nor­mal faster than those who’d only mas­tur­bated or had non-coital sex. Those who abstained had the high­est blood-pressure response to stress.

Check out the new truth here. Then get busy.

For those who don’t know much about Uni­ver­sity of Phoenix mar­ket­ing, if you haven’t run across a ban­ner or pop-up, let me bring you up to speed. Organization’s like UOP are cost per lead shops; adver­tis­ing has only as much value to the com­pany as can be assigned each indi­vid­ual new prospect on a vol­ume basis. For exam­ple, if we do 20,000 blow-in inserts in a mar­ket that costs us $10,000 and see a return on that of 50 new leads, our cost per lead is $200. If we do a direct mail drop to 75,000 that costs us $30,000 and we see 200 leads, our cost per lead is $150. Inter­net? I’ll spare you the vol­ume, but shoot­ing for a cost per lead between $45 and $80 is pretty darned good. These are all just broad strokes examples.

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