Expert of the month: Eric Greenberg

Developing and running one of higher education's first Marketing Operations teams is something special.

That’s what Eric Greenberg has done in Philadelphia at The Wharton School since around 2013, when he began championing the growth of inbound marketing in the MarComm office after having spent several years in the department of web development.

Today, Eric runs a team of nine people at The Wharton School that covers a wide variety of scenarios. They run the Wharton content management system which has 130 websites on it, they are responsible for marketing automation and the graduate admissions Salesforce instance, as well as a school-wide email marketing platform. 

Eric believes in “servant leadership”, mentoring, sharing knowledge, and creating a healthy workplace culture and a team that respects diverse opinions and works together to achieve amazing things. Eric is also our expert of the month.

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What's Dennis cooking: AI & Creativity

It seems like AI will have a big impact making us more effective, more efficient, helping us generate ideas more quickly and perhaps even making us better understand our audiences and to tailor content and design to meet their needs.

Dennis Oswald is Brand Experience Manager at Netgen in Zurich and like most of us, he is just another curious human being trying to figure out what's going on with AI.

In a recent member call, Dennis looked at how AI will change the creative process and the broader impact for design leaders. 

As expected from a field that’s cooking faster than a microwave dish, we covered quite some ground. As Dennis said, doing the slides for the call was a creative wakeup call, but I think, that the call the same impact on most attendees.

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What can we learn from the University of Copenhagen CMS selection process

It’s quite unusual for a CMS selection process to take 5 years, but as the digital platform keeps growing in importance, year long evaluations are likely to get more common in the future.

In particular for large, complex and international organisations, where the task of migrating thousands of pages and custom-built development is a long, time-consuming and expensive one.

I recently spoke to Johannes Nygaard who is Chief Digital Advisor at the University of Copenhagen and a part of their CMS selection project. This project started back in 2017 and recently led to the selection of open source CMS TYPO3 as their new digital platform.

Let’s take a step-by-step look at what happened and see what you might be able to use in your own selection processes.

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Digital as enabler for sustainability

While sustainability is not a new topic in our member calls, we've mostly talked about how to create low-carbon websites, how to be smart about cloud computing and somewhat more technical angles.

Recently, Oslo-based digital leader Katrine Sundbye joined one of our local peer group meetings as a guest speaker and took a different angle in her session: 

“We need digital to meet the sustainability goals!”

In a recent member call, Katrine shared her thoughts with the community. She introduced us to the green growth model and the ReSOLVE framework by McKinsey. She also shared examples of how data and digital solutions are key enablers for keeping resources in use more and longer.

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How AI will transform internal communications

Reaching all employees and communicating successfully in this hybrid working environment has become a major challenge for companies.

Many have realised that just having an intranet or an employee app doesn’t cover it for internal communication as many employees are left out. To make matters worse, many internal communicators are struggling, understaffed and strained for time.

In a recent member call, we were joined by Kevin Hähnlein, Head of Product Marketing at employee communications and advocacy platform Haiilo. He shared his perspective on the future of internal communications, what a good employee experience strategy looks like and also how artificial intelligence will transform content creation at scale.

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Expert of the month: Andreas Ramos

“We are just at the beginning of seeing the practical application of AI in digital marketing.”

Andreas Ramos is a true Silicon Valley legend and when I recently spoke to him, he was just wrapping up his slides on what is probably the first university lecture on Using AI for Digital Marketing.

Andreas moved to Silicon Valley in 1992, has worked in engineering at SGI, SUN Microsystems and other companies. He did translations and localisation in six languages before joining as head of a digital agency, where he worked with Global Fortune 200 clients. Later he led global SEO at Cisco, where he worked in 44 languages in 86 countries.

Today, he’s the author of 22+ books (he stopped counting), several of them Amazon #1 Best Sellers, and also an instructor in digital marketing at Omnes Education, one of France's leading schools for management and communications.

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The six pillars of content experience and how digital asset management enables them

At its simplest, an exceptional content experience means delivering the right content, to the right people at the right time and in the right format. 

But brands across the globe know it’s not as simple as it sounds. And getting it right in times of economic uncertainty is more important than ever.

In a recent member call, Warren Daniels, CMO of Bynder (Digital Asset Management Platform) joined us to tell us about the six pillars of content experience and how digital asset management enables them.

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Higher Education digital needs to move to the next level

Surviving the next several years as a school requires investing in digital marketing beyond a basic brochure website and a couple of tweets.

The hard truth is that most schools lack the means, executive understanding, and staff to succeed in digital marketing.

For example, after twenty years of market availability, a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) is crucial to understanding how prospects engage with your digital ecosystem. Yet, it's rare to find a school outside the top 5% that even uses a MAP for more than an overpriced email platform.

If you're a community college or a smaller school and you own a marketing platform from Hubspot/Adobe/Salesforce, the going salary for a digital marketer who can use those tools to get results is over $100,000. Have you budgeted that much?

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Hyperautomation: More hype than hyper

The first and foremost question which comes to mind is: What is hyperautomation?

According to industry analyst firm Gartner:

“Hyperautomation is a business-driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. Hyperautomation involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools or platforms, including: artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, event-driven software architecture, robotic process automation (RPA), business process management (BPM) and intelligent business process management suites (iBPMS), integration platform as a service (iPaaS), low-code/no-code tools, packaged software, and other types of decision, process and task automation tools.”

Now from the above definition from Gartner is very clear but at the same time it’s complex, it’s integrated, interdependent but mutually exclusive and independent at the same time. Which adds to more confusions, queries, fears, complex terminologies and eventually results in procrastination, lack of confidence and finally failures.

If there is any organisation which comes forward and say that we have attained hyperautomation or we are a hyperautomation organisation, I would humbly say either they are not sure or not aware what they are doing or they are definitely on the wrong path.

In my view, hyperautomation is not a state or a milestone or a title. It’s a journey. A journey that continues as we mature, as new technologies arrive and also when Gartner’s definition of hyperautomation changes, as it will in the foreseeable future.

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Does your IT project hurt?

If your IT projects hurt, you are far from alone. There are many reasons why these things go wrong, even with smart people and good intentions all around.

Martin Michael Frederiksen is a self-proclaimed grumpy project realist, and a seasoned Danish software executive. He recently created a top 10 list with the usual painful symptoms which caused some good debate on social media. As it turns out, all these digital projects we've been doing still have a success rate with plenty of room for improvement.

In a recent member call, we reviewed his list of usual pains, and extended his list of helpful tricks.

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The missing manual for service organisations

How do you lead and deliver successful services, sustainably? 

All organizations are becoming service organizations. But most weren’t built to deliver services successfully end-to-end, and the human, operational and financial impacts are abundantly clear. 

In the digital era the stakes are even higher, given how rapidly services change. Yet default working practices (governance, planning, funding, leadership, reporting, programme and team structures) inside large organizations haven't changed. Rather than modernize just one service at a time, it's the underlying organizational conditions that need to be transformed — anything less is futile.

Kate Tarling has written the must-read guide: The Service Organization, which came out in February 2023. In a recent member call, Kate introduced the book and we also talked about the future of service organizations.

Below you’ll find my highlights from the call and at the end you can lean back and enjoy the recording.

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Expert of the month: Tina Schmechel

If you follow the news, even just a bit, you can easily get the impression that we live in an age of self-centeredness and are more focused on our own success than helping others.

In her work as the Alumni Communications & Digital Marketing Officer at Imperial College London, one of the UK’s leading science-based institutions, Tina Schmechel gets to work with graduates from a variety of backgrounds and walks of life. Her experience is the exact opposite: people are supporting, encouraging and giving their time, energy and enthusiasm.

Tina has been with Imperial since just before the COVID-19 pandemic and previously worked in marketing roles in the high-end fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and luxury sectors, both in the UK and abroad. A journalist-turned-marketer, she’s authored one of Time Out’s most read articles on the 10 best rooftop bars in Barcelona and she wrote her thesis at Berlin’s Humboldt University on Banksy, the famous unknown street artist.

Tina is our expert of the month.

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Strategy for Trust

“We need a new strategy to earn trust and help consumers and citizens make confident decisions.”

This is the premise behind Trustworthy, a 2021 book by Margot Bloomstein with the catchy subtitle: “How the smartest brands beat cynicism and bridge the trust gap”.

Margot is a Boston-based working content strategist for more than 20 years, she’s consulted with clients in a range of industries, from software-as-a-service to sex toy retailers and footwear technology to 401(k)s.

In a recent member call, we held a book club for Trustworthy. Margot introduced the book, explained how to bridge the trust gap, what the smartest organizations are doing to foster trust by using content and design to build the confidence of consumers and citizens alike and much more. 

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Higher Ed usually does not need proprietary website platforms

In almost 20 years of working with the web in Higher Ed, I've seen many marketing websites built in all kinds of systems or even home-grown systems. The one thing that I've found in common with schools that use proprietary website platforms instead of the very common open-source ones is that no one knows how to use them! Especially at smaller schools and colleges.

Usually, no internal staff members have the technical know-how to affect change in the systems, and most schools don't have the luxury of hiring technology staff based on one specific platform with proprietary programming needed to do even the simplest of things. Additionally, these schools are mostly beholden to either the platform's creator, an agency, or both for any changes that need to be made.

Those factors = Time and Money.

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