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In higher education, marketing is a dirty word.

Some faculty members believe that self-promotion is offensive to their intellectual, academic pursuits. What these purists don’t realize is that they’ve been marketing for their entire careers. They do this through the normal course of their job.

Eleven Ways Faculty Members Market Themselves

11. Applying for research grants

10. Serving on committees

9. Joining professional associations

8. Editing or reviewing for journals

7. Running joint research projects

6. Going to conferences

5. Using their own textbooks

4. Presenting at conferences

3. Hosting or moderating symposia

2. Giving interviews with the media

1. Publishing, publishing, publishing

Faculty members aren’t just marketing for themselves, either – they’re marketing for their employers. Schools rely on faculty members to spread the word (after all, how else will they get funding or publish?) which benefits the schools. It’s symbiotic, and it’s certainly not evil.

Marketing covers a wide range of activities, and most people have a narrow understanding of it. Marketing isn’t advertising, it’s not press releases, it’s not packaging, brochures, or websites. It’s all of these things, and much more. Marketing is about creating value, developing an identity, establishing awareness, and selling a product. Marketing permeates all facets of an organization.

• This post assumes that you are already a Ph.D. and have a tenure-track job somewhere.

I left this comment in response to HighEdWebTech’s post, Exterminating Form Spam and decided it was worth sharing here.

In my opinion, CAPTCHAs are a “rock and a hard place” kind of idea. They can be effective against spammers, but are increasingly frustrating for real users. But as it happens, real users are the ones you care the most about.

Isn’t it more important to take care of these users, even at the risk of a bit of spam?

Meanwhile, there are lots of little tricks that knock out the majority of spam submissions, such as hidden (or display:none) fields – scripts don’t know any better and fill them in, so you can eliminate any that have that field filled. Or possibly relying on Javascript methods for submission, which most scripts will not support and parse.

Now it’s time for another Tales from a Psychologist...

“The false consensus effect is the tendency for people to project their way of thinking onto other people.”

In other words, if you believe something you’ll assume that most people would agree with you.

This has dangerous implications for those in charge of creating software and websites. If you’re developing for the common user, you have to be extra careful. After all, you’re not the common user. Software developers often assume that users know how to interact with their software just because the developer does.

Remember this for the next time that you hear someone claim that nobody scrolls. Or that everyone knows you can click the logo in the header to get to the homepage.