Promotion and the Golden Handcuffs of Capitalism

Ah, the heady odeur of success.

Or, whatever.

This year, as my Christmas present from the office, I got promoted. That’s right, it’s the best Christmas present ever, if you’re on the look-out for a bright new pair of golden, fuzzy, warm, vibrating handcuffs.

Don’t get me wrong, please. I’m actually quite thrilled about it. I’m now the Regional Director of Marketing and Enrollment, a sizable step up around here. The reality is, however, I won’t have much else to do in this new capacity that I wasn’t doing before. The promotion just buys me a bigger target on my back, right?

We’ve seen some enormous change around here over the past month. We’ve integrated the online and ground programs under the University of Phoenix brand, we’ve launched a massive new online advertising initiative (I’m sorry) that will leverage our market girth directly by cutting our costs in half. That means more pop-ups and banners, I’m afraid.

The PR team is launching (if they haven’t already) what they’re calling our corporate blog. Of course, it’s not a blog. There’s no blogging going on. It’s a marketing piece designed to show off how well our students can be polished into figureheads. Oh, sure, the students are writing the submissions, and I have to believe they believe what they’re saying. Of course, if they believe what they’re saying and they’re saying unsavory things, you probably won’t be seeing it on the old corporate blog.

And there’s the rub: we need more of our students, those having bang-up good experiences, and frustrating ones, to be blogging about it. I want to hear their faves and our failures. This is an unbelievable channel to tap and we’re doing nothing about it. This blogging thing is about the most powerful technology to enter into the lives of our students and we’re not making use of it in academics, operations, marketing, or enrollment on any large scale.

[Note to Self] I’ll be teaching again after a brief hiatus this winter beginning the middle of January. This course, I’m going to have my students start a public blog for their organizations over the course of the course and use it as a tool to communicate with the public effectively. I think there’s some real teaching in there.