Too Much Information
How many Panda 3.0 articles of the hundreds thousands published does a marketing professor have time to read? One? Two maybe? Busy professors don’t have time to worry as much about reading the industry news for hours each week to keep up. They have so many other things on their plate. In a sense, we put a healthy serving of only the most relevant, important news on their plate through our monthly News You Can Use blog posts.
Sifting Through The Information
Part of the value of Stukent’s textbook, Internet Marketing Essentials, is that we keep all of the material up to date; semester after semester. We sift through all of the info, and make sure our users, both students and professors, know about the most important things. And, let’s face it, there are a lot of not-so-important pieces of content that flow through the industry blogs each day.
Attend Industry Conferences
Beyond reading industry news, one way that I am able to keep up with the fast-paced and rapidly evolving world of internet marketing and its wide array of disciplines (email marketing, PPC, SEO, Analytics to name a few), is by attending industry conferences. This is something I have done for the last 7 years. I have told professors they need to attend these conferences, but the response is always the same. “Those conferences are expensive and I have to use my travel budget for academic conferences and research.”
We Go To These Conferences So Professors Don’t Have To
Last week I was in Denver at SESDenver, a ClickZ.com event. John Gagnon of Bing was the keynote. He talked about using tools that can help marketers map user behavior and use that data to predict future buying habits. If you have that insight, your ability to improve the timing and geo-targeting of campaigns increases. After, I caught up with John for about an hour, and I was able to get feedback from him on what he feels are the most important things for us to cover in our courseware. John shared excellent insights that will help us improve both our simulation and the textbook.
Stukent’s Commitment
We will continue as a company to do everything in our power to keep professors up to date so they can rest assured that our material is covering the latest, most accurate, and most relevant lessons from the internet marketing industry.