The HighEdWeb Association found my long lost brother… Matthew Joly
March 20th, 2008 by Karine Joly
Today, they even sent “Matthew” an invitation for the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference.
Problem is I don’t have a brother and haven’t planned (or ever thought about it for that matter) any gender-changing surgery.
Lori from the conference committee gave the explanation in a blog post posted yesterday:
Due to a mail merge snafu with our conference mailing lists, some folks received a “Save the Date” postcard this week that appeared to be addressed to an unknown sibling or spouse.
While I saw Lori’s post yesterday, I got “my” invitation in the mail today (yeah, I leave in a far far away corner of the world) just a couple of hours after reading the following excerpt in a very interesting article, ‘Dead-tree Medium’ No Longer: For Many Marketers, Print Outperforms Digital published yesterday in Knowledge @ Wharton:
According to Wharton marketing professor Eric Bradlow, print offers marketers a clear advantage over digital media, such as email. “Many people see email as impersonal and costless to write,” he says. “People want to feel special. In marketing [terms], email is transactional; paper is relational.”
Calling me “Matthew” sure makes me feel… very special.
Related Posts:
- Know a higher ed web professional champion? Nominate her/him for the HighEdWeb Board of Directors before March 30, 2007!
- HighEdWeb 2008: Check out the redesigned conference website and submit your presentation proposal
- Want to get a chance to show off your web design skills and talents to your peers? Enter the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference Design Competition by January 21, 2008
- Got a place to host 400 to 600 higher ed Web professionals? The HighEdWebDev Conference is looking for a new location in 2008
- NJ HigherEd Webmasters Association: new executive committee, website and by-laws
That is a fabulous story :-)
I think that those who actually think print out-performs digital because of personalization (and like we haven’t all figured out how a mail merge works at this point) have never truly tried to personalize the content of their e-communications. At my last job, I personalized e-mails up to 14 different fields. Now I’ll admit that variable digital printing can do some cool things that I’m not sure we can replicate over email (and still have them work in all the most popular clients) but to say that makes it more relational is ridiculous.
Hah! We got a good chuckle around campus comparing names. Had some pretty good combinations!
Heh. Interestingly enough, both my director and I got our “Save the Date” cards to wrong names.
Gotta love technology.
We got two here and they were both incorrect. We had crazy name combinations on ours (including a George ??). They’re hanging on a community bulletin board now.