Two years ago, social media was a hot topic at AACSB conference. This year a talk on social media sounds dated. Nevertheless, Samantha Novick who is the new media specialist for Thunderbird School of Global Management gave an insightful presentation on how to engage alumni using LinkedIn. The communication team in the School of Business doesn’t do much with LinkedIn since the Career Center handles it, which makes more sense in our case.

The last session was on maximizing marketing and communications reach with minimal resources. Stop outsourcing is one of the most effective cost-saving strategy and bringing staff in-house is a great move. Though hiring one person who handles both print magazine and web site design and development is the right method. I am not doubting that print designers can’t create a web site or vice versa, but to get the best from the both world is easier said than done. For me, someone with a strong web design background (HTML, CSS, SEO) and some graphic design skills is a much better fit for business school.

While all the sessions I had attended are informative, what I find most interesting is building a brand culture. How can we create something that is unique for our school? How can we position our school beyond our location, the usual academic programs and the overselling if “leadership?”

I didn’t expect to learn anything technical here, but it seems to me like everyone is struggling with its own CMS and some is looking for workaround using WordPress. Each mentioned about mobile version in development, but none makes use of its current content with responsive web design. I am more surprise that none of these schools is doing anything for the iPad. I could see all the cost of printing magazine, annual reports and publications could be saved if we start thinking about marketing our message for e-readers.

I finally landed in Tampa, Florida at one o’clock in the morning today. My original plan was to fly out at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, but I booked a day late. I made a horrible mistake and caused a great hassle, but in return I had some time to spend with Dao for a day. So I can’t complain.

I didn’t go to bed until 2 a.m. and woke up at 7 for some breakfast. The last thing I needed was to listen to some inspirational speech, but I have to handed to Donna Typson who delivered a motivating talk on “Peak Performance.” She was engaging in sharing her personal accounts and also providing some great advices. Here’s are a few wisdoms to keep in mind:

1. Don’t let your job take away your time with your children
2. We live our life in chapters. You are the only one who can give yourself permission to turn a new page
3. To be successful, you need to share time, energy, knowledge and contact

After her speak, I went up and bought her children’s book titled The Red Bow.

Followed by Typson’s was a presentation from The Mihaylo College of Business and Economics on “To Brand or Rebrand: Leveraging Research and Technology to Build B-School Brands.” Mihaylo is in the process of building its own social network using Moodle. The site has the following features: My Mihaylo, connections, classes, workspace, docs, bridge and goals.

After lunch, Tim Westerbeck, president of Eduvantis, gave a presentation on “Building a Brand Culture.” Here are the five principles he highlighted:

1. Identify your core institutional values
2. Codify the core values as “constitution”
3. Embody core values in everything you do
4. Develop policies and practices reflecting the core values
5. Deliver a service experience consistent with core values/brand

The last presentation of the day was from Daniels College of Business on how the communication team built danielspioneer.com from brainstorming to getting feedback to implementing site using WordPress. In a way, this site is somewhat similar to our “At the Center of It All.” The second half of the presentation is on “Managing Communications When Things Go Wrong” by Darlene Rotch, Chief Executive Officer, Panorama Public Relations.

For dinner, I went to Champp’s with five other people for informal networking. We had hamburgers and exchanged business cards. I am looking forward toward tomorrow’s programs which are “New rules of engagement: How to elevate your business school’s Web 2.0 to the next level” and “Maximizing your marketing and communications reach with minimal resources.” After that, I will head back to Virginia to be with Dana and Dao. I miss them so much already.

Lat weekend my sister gave me a dozen of American CDs I left at her house before I moved out. Unlike me who tend to throw junks out, my sister keeps everything. She drives me nuts sometimes, but I am glad that she still kept some of these old joints.

I went through the pile of CDs and spotted R. Kelly’s 1993 12 Play, which brought back so much memories even though I never liked the entire album because of the rap tracks. Let’s face it. R. Kelly can sing, but he can’t rap. He made a great choice of abandoning rapping altogether in his later releases. Except for “Sadie,” an emotional dedication to his mother, 12 Play was a booty-call soundtrack, especially with tunes like “Sex Me,” ‘Your Body’s Callin'” and “Bump N’ Grind.”

When I tried to tune my wife into 12 Play, I played one of the hottest hits in the 90s and she told me to turn it off. The bass gave her a headache. While I see nothing wrong with a little “Bump N’ Grind,” she doesn’t seem to “need someone, someone like me to satisfy [her] every need.” I guess that’s how marriage goes!

This is the forth time I have seen the white man in his 60s sitting in Starbucks pretending to talk on the phone. The first time I thought he did until he took his hand away from his ear without a phone in his hand. He was just rambling about the government, economy and some sort of CIA. I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about, but I hope that he doesn’t do anything crazy at Starbucks.

Since we don’t get to spend too much time with Cu Dao during the week, we want to spend as much time as we could with him on weekends. We usually take him out of the house even when we don’t spend time at grandparent’s places. Weekends are our bonding time.

Saturday morning Cu Dao woke up at 7am and demanded milk as usual. I washed him, changed his diaper and brushed him (with force). I gave him some breakfast while tried to organize the rooms, but he wanted to helped me instead. Cu Dao loves to help out Daddy around the house. So we out things away and did some laundry and dishes.

The little guy got tired around 9 something and wanted to join his mom in bed. I sent him upstairs with another bottle of milk and they didn’t get up until 2pm. In the meantime I cleaned up the house and vacuumed the cars. After that I spent some time on the laptop and rest a bit before all three of us headed to Costco and H-Mart for groceries. We then went over to my sister-in-law’s house dinner. We didn’t get to out on Saturday, but we got most things done around the place.

Sunday morning, I dragged them both out of bed before 8am. We had breakfast and hang out until 10:30. We decided to visit the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History. We took the Metro in instead of driving because Dao loves trains. He sure enjoyed the ride even though couldn’t keep his eyes open. He finally fell asleep in Dana’s lap around 11:45; therefore, we made a detour to Chinatown for dim sum.

Dao woke up as we tried to placed him into the stroller so he only napped for about 15 minutes or so and that when I knew we’re going to have some fun. He misbehaved a bit in the restaurant, but managed to sit still for a couple of minutes for us to enjoy dim sum. After brunch, we strolled straight to NMNH hoping he would nap again, but he didn’t.

Once in the museum, we let him roamed free and was like a drunken little guy. He enjoyed running around the place more than staying at one spot so we sort of skipping through the museum. I would love to come back for some more thorough walkthrough. He did enjoyed the little butterfly room. Instead of taking the elevator up to the third floor, he wanted to take the stairs. By this time, he was running on reserved battery. He finally felt asleep when we headed into the orchid exhibition. By this time, we were also tired so decided to walk back to the Metro. We stopped by Barnes and Noble to rest while letting him sleep. We shared a venti mocha frappacino, something I haven’t ordered for years.

If I were to teach web design, Brian Miller’s Above the Fold: Understanding the Principles of Successful Web Site Design would be my choice for textbook. You won’t learn HTML5, CSS3 or jQuery in this book, but you’ll learn about whitespace, grid, typography and design elements for the web. Miller also provides great screenshots of web sites to illustrate his points. For instance, Apple’s homepage is a perfect example of showcasing products above the fold, which according to Jakob Nielson is where users spend 80% of their time looking for information.

My golden ticket for VaultPress has arrived today and I signed up immediately to secure “At The Center of It All,” an active, engaging site for GW School of Business.

The initial intention for “At The Center of It All” was to replace our bi-weekly newsletters, but the site has evolved in such a short period of time. We now post news, events, publications and video on a daily basis. My colleague who is the associate director of media relations is doing a fantastic job of keeping the site fresh all the time.

When we launched the site, I have to use Lunarpages to host WordPress because the University server doesn’t run on PHP & MySQL. Since the University is not supporting us and we’re hosting WordPress outside of the school, I am responsible for the site. Although Lunarpages is hosting both Visualgui.com and iLoveNgocLan.com over eight years without any issue, I don’t want take the risk with the University’s web site.

Now that the site is being backed up by the WordPress experts, I don’t have to worry much anymore if something goes wrong. For $15 a month, peace of mind surely is VaultPress’s most popular feature. VaultPress is a great service and I am sure it will be successful. VaultPress is another reason I am strongly rooting for WordPress.

2/22: “Learn the word ‘aqua’ in Portuguese (water).”

2/24: “He is a great soccer player. Great control of the ball (great coordination). Played with flashlight project on the wall. Very happy :)”

2/25: “Sometimes when he wants something he grabs us by the hand and ‘direct us’ to whatever he wants to do. Very playful.”

You didn’t want go into your class yesterday. You looked a bit grumpy until Brit, your classmate, came up and gave you a hug. You smiled and joined the class. You’re a lucky boy!

Heather Armstrong brings in quite a hefty income for blogging on Dooce.com about poop and spit up. New York Times reports:

[Heather Armstrong] is the only blogger on the latest Forbes list of the Most Influential Women in Media, coming in at No. 26, which is 25 slots behind Oprah, but just one slot behind Tina Brown. Her site brings in an estimated $30,000 to $50,000 a month or more — and that’s not even counting the revenue from her two books, healthy speaking fees and the contracts she signed to promote Verizon and appear on HGTV. She won’t confirm her income (“We’re a privately held company and don’t reveal our financials”). But the sales rep for Federated Media, the agency that sells ads for Dooce, calls Armstrong “one of our most successful bloggers,” then notes a few beats later in our conversation that “our most successful bloggers can gross $1 million.”

Wow!

It doesn’t take long to fall in love with the British soul-pop singer Adele. In fact, the opening track, “Rolling In The Deep,” on her sophomore release, 21, hooks you right in. Who can resist the smoky, sexy voice complemented with the damn catchy beat? The second track, “Rumor Has It,” gets even better. In addition to the memorable melody, the hypnotic drum claps and the savor jazz keyboard lick, the punchline is dead on: “You made my heart melt, yet I’m cold to the core / But rumour has it. I’m the one you’re leaving her for.” On the slow pop ballad, “Don’t You Remember,” so pours her heart out more like an old soul than a twenty-one-year-old girl. 21 has a few stalled moments, but the album is definitely worth listening.