Higher Ed’s Future: Addressing SEO and AI with Brian Piper

Gil Rogers sits down with Brian Piper to talk about today’s hot topics, Artificial Intelligence and SEO, and their impact on the future of higher education.

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Who is Brian Piper?

Brian Piper is the Director of Content Strategy and Assessment at the University of Rochester and the co-author of Venturing forward.

In this Episode

Brian Piper, the Director of Content Strategy and Assessment at the University of Rochester and the co-author of Venturing forward, we confront the AI revolution reshaping the very fabric of content creation and SEO. We probe how AI not only crafts and refines content but how it’s also redefining user search experiences, as seen with innovations like Google’s SGE., joins FYI host Gil Rogers to talk about the future of search engine optimization (SEO), data, and artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education.

Brian explains the need for schools to start integrating AI into their processes, rethink their content distribution, and boost the reputability of their domain. He delves into the changing dynamics of search engines and the potential impacts of AI on content creation, search rankings, and community building. Venturing forward, Brian imagines the AI revolution reshaping the very fabric of content creation and SEO. They probe how AI not only crafts and refines content but how it’s also redefining user search experiences and expectations, as seen with innovations like ChatGPT. 

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Episode Transcript

Higher Ed’s Future: Addressing SEO and AI with Brian Piper

Publishing Date: February 6, 2024

[00:00:00] Gil: Welcome back to FYI, the For Your Institution Podcast, presented by Mongoose. My name is Gil Rogers. And today, we are going to be talking to Brian Piper, who is the Director of Content Strategy and Assessment at the University of Rochester.

Brian will be talking about search engine optimization, data, AI, and content marketing, and the overlap across all of those different items in higher ed and how it’s going to impact our plans today and in the future. Let’s listen in on Brian and I’s conversation. Hey, Brian. How are you?

[00:00:39] Brian: Fantastic, Gil. Thanks so much for having me.

[00:00:41] Gil: Yeah, thanks for joining us today. You’re in Rochester or in the Rochester area right now, I’m assuming.

[00:00:45] Brian: Just outside of Rochester. Yep.

[00:00:47] Gil: Awesome. How’s the weather up there?

[00:00:49] Brian: It snowed yesterday, but it’s clear and starting to warm up today, so.

[00:00:52] Gil: Awesome. So, for our podcast listeners, clearly, we record podcasts ahead of time. So, when this episode drops, we’re going to look and see if it snowed or rained the day before the podcast episode is actually in your devices. So, we’ll keep an eye on that. That will be fun.

So, Brian, tell us about your role at Rochester. We were joking before we started recording that there’s a lot of letters in your title, the director of content strategy and assessment. What does that mean? What does a director of content strategy and assessment at the University of Rochester do?

[00:01:21] Brian: So, basically, when I was hired, the way they described the job to me is they wanted me to look at the data around our content and figure out what content was working and what wasn’t and why, and then figure out how to use those insights to make more of what was working.

[00:01:37] Gil: Awesome. And what has that led you to do outside of the work? Because I know that you’ve got content that you’ve published. You’ve got areas of expertise that you’re very active on LinkedIn and very active sharing thoughts and insights. What are some of the things that’s helped you to, to learn and build upon as you’ve been at Rochester?

[00:01:56] Brian: Well, it was interesting because when I first came into the department, like, during my interview, I actually said… like, I came from a defense contracting company, and I, I said, “You have a lot of content. You put so much content out.”

And we need to figure out how to make sure that we’re putting out the best content that we have and that the time that we’re spending working on all this content is actually paying off and we’re reaching the audiences that we want to reach and they’re taking the actions that we want them to take.

So, pretty quickly, after looking through some of our content analytics, I realized that our organic traffic was about 40% of the overall traffic to our new center site, which was, you know, where we publish most of the original content, the research content that we publish.

So, I immediately knew from my background that there was a great opportunity to do some SEO there. So, within the first six months of the first year that I started, I doubled the amount of organic traffic that we had coming to our new center. So, when leadership saw that, they said, “We should be doing this across the entire institution.”

So, then I started doing SEO workshops and keyword research workshops across the institution to help everybody figure out better ways to get your content seen, and to make sure that we were tracking on the analytic side of things, and we were looking at conversions.

And really started thinking about content strategy? And why are we writing this content? And who are we trying to reach? And is it working? And how can we look at the data and then measure and monitor that? So, it’s been a journey from just helping out my department on a single channel to now it’s become an institutional initiative. And, you know, I, I have also started speaking at conferences. And that has led to consulting with other institutions.

And I’m always surprised when I go to other institutions and start, you know, asking questions about how their content is connected to their strategy and how they’re measuring and how they’re looking at their data, that, a lot of times, most people aren’t because they’re so busy trying to get all the content out there that they don’t think about why they’re putting all that content out there.

[00:04:09] Gil: Yeah. And I think that’s one of the challenges, and we’ll talk about this in our next segment in a little bit, around content planning, but, you know, we’re fluid with how we do these things. Always the recommendation is we have to have fresh content. We have to update our content. We have to promote our content. But there’s the challenge of how and why, right? We had Kyle Campbell on last season on the podcast.

And, you know, for those who are active listeners, Kyle is a founder of Education Marketer. He’s a keynote speaker in his own right. He shares a lot about, you know, we need to focus on developing content that supports our audience because one of the things I’ve always said is that content marketing is the only kind of marketing that works in higher education. Everything else is just sales fluff, right?

And especially, if we think about it from recruitment, or we think about it from advancement, we think about it from our local community or global community for helping our reputation of our institution. We’ve got to define our goals with a lot of these and develop personas of who we’re trying to attract and we’re trying to reach. There’s a lot to unpack there.

And I think one of the things that people may struggle with is they oftentimes just get caught up in doing their daily day-to-day job, but also not knowing where to start. And so, I think let’s start with you as a person. I’d love to, kind of, understand your background that led you to this role. You’ve got a very vast background of in and out of higher education.

And then we can dive into helping people understand where to start. So, where did Brian start in all of this that has led you to everything you just spoke with about, like, when you were at Rochester, but what happened before that? What’s the prequel to you being where you are today?

[00:05:49] Brian: Yeah. So, it was a interesting journey because, like, my degree is in creative writing with a, a focus on poetry and a minor in philosophy. So, I always joked that I was ready to wait tables.

[00:06:01] Gil: Nice.

[00:06:01] Brian: So, I ended up getting a job as a web developer at a company that did a lot of online learning, and they did some website work. And I had no development background, but I was interested in technology, and I had done a little bit of coding just at school. And so, I started working with this team of really talented developers. And I wasn’t a very talented developer. And I never was. I wasn’t passionate about creating websites.

So, a lot of the times, they just put me over on the content side of things and say, “Rewrite the content so it’s better. And start looking into how we can get it on these search engines,” that were just starting to come out back in 1996 when I started doing all these. So, that led into, kind of, really understanding the backend of how to get content ranked and the importance of that and how it dramatically changes the visibility of whatever you’re trying to put out there.

You know, from there, I moved to working for a advertising agency, running their web development department. And that was a very interesting job, super-fast-paced, a lot of demands on tight deadlines and deliverability, but very focused on tracking and measuring. And started working with Google Analytics when it just started getting going. They just put it out as a product that you could use.

And from there, I went to work for a defense contracting company, and was still working in the e-learning department, but in 2013, I read the first edition of Epic Content Marketing from Joe Pulizzi, and immediately, I was like, “This is what I want to do.” You can sell things to people just by telling stories. You’re not trying to push something. You’re just informing them. You’re educating them. You’re entertaining them. And you’re building up trust with them.

You’re creating a relationship with them. And that will eventually turn to them coming back to you when they need to purchase something in your particular product area. So, I went right down to the head of our marketing department at the defense contracting company I was working with. And I said, “You need to hire me to be your digital marketing manager.” I couldn’t say content marketing manager because nobody knew what that was.

[00:08:18] Gil: Yeah, 2013.

[00:08:18] Brian: So, she took a chance, and she hired me. And within the first year, I doubled our organic traffic just by doing SEO. And then we really started setting up our analytics so that we could actually track things and see performance and look at conversion times and start really getting into the marketing side of the content, but also still really focused on the power of SEO and the importance of our content to be able to connect with our audiences. And that led me right into the job at the university.

[00:08:51] Gil: Awesome. And for our podcast listeners, we will drop a link to the second edition of Epic Content Marketing, which I know you contributed to, in the episode notes. So, if you want to pick up a copy and start copying the playbook, that will provide you with the ability to do so. So, I think this is extremely helpful. And I think one of the things we’ll want to do in our next segment is help define some of these terms for folks.

Oh, I know a story that I always lean on is I was at a conference that was run by a consulting firm a couple of years ago, but still relatively recently. And one of the, you know, vice presidents of enrollment was sitting down with a consultant and had his notes on all the things he was supposed to be working on and things he was supposed to care about. And he had circled and highlighted search engine optimization.

And he said, “So, I’m hearing a lot about search engine optimization. What is that? What do I need to do?” So, I think in our next segment, what we’ll do is we will start with defining some terms, and then we’ll talk a little bit about current state of affairs, and we will lead into then what institutions should be doing and then thinking about in the future. So, Brian, thank you so much for joining. We’re going to take a break. And when we hop back, we’re going to kick off with some definitions of terms.

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[00:10:58] Gil: All right. We are back. I am here with Brian Piper, Director of Content Strategy and Assessment at the University of Rochester. And we spent a little bit of time learning about Brian’s background and some of the work that he’s done and outcomes of his work at various phases of his career.

And now, I think what we’re going to do is take a step back and help people to, kind of, understand, at the most basic level, some of the things that are most important when it comes to search engine optimization and content marketing. I think there’s a lot of times we skip to the, the intermediate and advanced level. And I think there are a lot of folks out there that might just need some support.

So, when we talk about things like SEO, or search engine optimization, can you help people understand at the, kind of, the introductory level what they should be focusing on and thinking about when it comes to that, kind of, core tenant of driving traffic to their website and engaging visitors? And then we’ll get into, kind of, how we do that as part of that process, but let’s start there.

[00:11:54] Brian: Yeah. I mean, so, you know, when I first started doing SEO, people were still really on the fence as to whether or not their business needed a website because most businesses at that time had a, a physical location or they sent out magazines to people who were going to be ordering from them.

But once people started seeing the amount of people who were online and the size of your audience, the way they could increase the size of their audience exponentially by being able to reach out to all these people, they started noticing, “Yeah, we should probably have a website.”

So, you put a website up, but then you have to figure out how to get people to it. So, there’s lots of different ways through push marketing that you can bring people in by sending out e-mails or by buying banner ads, but the most effective way, and still the most effective way, to bring people into your website is through organic traffic, so traffic through search.

People go to a search engine. They have a problem. They have a question. Your content comes up if it is properly formatted, if it’s using the right words, if it’s set up to rank well on the search engines. So, the goal has always been how do you figure out how to get to that first position?

And a lot of times, you know, once they started doing paid search ads, people were paying for that first position, but a lot of consumers got savvy to the point that these were paid positions. And if really, I wanted the, the best answer, I might have to go down past all those paid ads and get the first non-paid ad. And that content ranks high because it’s quality content and it’s answering the questions that I have and, and solving the problems that I’m looking for.

[00:13:39] Gil: So, when we talk about SEO, I think there’s a certain piece where institutions have a benefit because they have a reputable domain like a .edu, right? And so, that, by itself, is helpful. What are some of the things that we should be thinking about beyond just buying a .edu, because that has its own process that you have to go through?

But as far as having reputability of your domain and a frequency of content, what are some of the things that people should think about? And then we can talk about how they can accomplish those things when they have the rest of their jobs to be worrying about because I know that part of not understanding these things is being so busy with their day-to-day. What’s some things that help with boosting reputability so that you do rise up in those rankings?

[00:14:19] Brian: Yeah. So, there’s a lot of different things to think about when you’re creating content and, and when you start doing SEO, but what I always tell people is come up with the best content, come up with the best answer for your audience, really think about who your audience is, what problem you’re trying to solve for them, and write content that solves that problem.

Your content marketing is about establishing trust with your users and making sure that they know that you understand them and that you’re just trying to help them. In the second edition of Epic Content Marketing, we talk about River Pools and Spas. It was a pool company. It was a installation company. And in 2008, they were about to go out of business.

And the owner of the company just went online. And he put every question that he had ever been asked about how to install pools up on the website, open information for anybody to come find, and it worked. He had all the answers up there. People could just go. And they just started trusting that company as a resource. And then eventually, when they got to a point where they wanted to do their own installation, they were like, “Well, let’s call them.”

And River Pools and Spas is now one of the largest manufacturers of pool inserts in the world because they got so much business from content marketing that they actually had to start making their own pool inserts because their supply wasn’t big enough for them to actually do all the jobs that they needed to do. So, it’s all about creating the right answers, the right content, that your audience needs.

Now, on the other side of that, you can really start looking at different ways to make it as easy as possible for your users to find this content. So, there are sites like answerthepublic.com where you can go, and you can type in a keyword, and it will tell you all the questions that people are asking about that keyword. And so, then you can just go to your website.

And you can put a list of all those questions and all the answers, establishing yourself as an expert who knows all the answers to all these problems and is just helping people find the answers to those problems on your site. And the more traffic that you can generate for your website, the more that’s going to help increase your rankings in search, increase your domain authority, and increase the amount of people who you’re helping.

[00:16:40] Gil: Yeah. So, you mentioned the term domain authority, right? That’s another area of insight that, I think, a lot of people would benefit from of really defining that term and how that can apply specifically to higher ed institutions.

[00:16:53] Brian: Yeah. So, a domain authority is a, a term that was basically made up by some of these SEO software companies. So, moz.com is a, a, a company where you can go, and they will give you all sorts of insights about how your content is ranking in search, and how many people are searching on the particular terms you’re ranking for, give you a lot of different insights.

But they came up with this term called domain authority, which is basically just a way to rank different websites based on the authority that they get from the amount of content they have out there and how they’re ranking for different search terms.

So, it’s, kind of, arbitrary, but generally speaking, if you have a high domain authority, it makes it easier for you to capture some of the more difficult-to-rank-for terms. So, for example, at the beginning of COVID, we have a domain authority around 86. And the CDC has a domain authority up around, like, 94.

We were able to put out content because it was so focused on the questions that people were asking about, like, how many times do you need to wash your hands to protect against COVID and how long do you need to wash? We were able to get our content ranking above the CDC because we were specifically answering questions that people had because we had physicians who are answering those questions.

And they were succinct, easily attributable answers that we were able to put up on our website along with a breadth of other content around mRNA vaccines and research that we were doing around COVID and some of the testing that we were doing on the different vaccines. And so, that allowed us to start ranking higher for those terms than another group that had a higher domain authority, but we just had better content and better answers.

[00:18:48] Gil: So, I think, again, from a practical perspective, I think institutions are best served by taking a step back and saying, “What is the content that our audience is looking for, and how can we create content that supports them?” And no matter… I want to say no matter your domain authority, but that can offset a lower domain authority because you’re creating a content that is actually serving those problems.

I think about, like, college search websites and how, when you search for an institution by their name and say, “Application information,” a lot of times, their website might actually rank lower than one of those “lead-gen websites,” because those sites have done the work to develop the content that points people in their direction, which is why these websites are so successful, right? They’ve mastered the, the SEO game for admissions-related content.

And so, that’s where, one of the recommendations, obviously, one, you can try the if you can’t beat them, join them. So, you just buy the traffic from those sources, but now, you’re just leasing data as you’ve always done, right? Or you can put in the work to beat them at their own game by creating meaningful content.

And so, one of the things I know that we wanted to also talk about is in this world of the need to create more content, the need to be more proactive, and seeking to rank higher, we’re also in a world where AI is starting to become a part of the, of the conversation around the impact it can have on the development of your SEO strategy.

And I, I know you’ve had a lot of thoughts in this space. And I would love your insights and perspective on, with everything you just talked about, with the need to develop content and develop your domain reputability, what are some of the implications you see in the short term and long term when it comes to using AI as a tool to support institutions with these efforts?

[00:20:32] Brian: Yeah. So, AI is, is definitely having a impact in content marketing. It’s having a impact in the SEO community. And it’s having a impact in search, how we perform search. So, we’ll, we’ll look at each one of those individually. So, just from a content perspective, now, anyone can be a content creator. It used to be you had to have some writing skills to be able to start a blog.

Now, anyone can go to ChatGPT and say, “Hey, write me a blog post about content marketing, and make it 2,000 words.” You can copy and paste that into a website. Now, it’s not going to be good content. It will be content. And you can tell ChatGPT, you know, “Optimize this for search. And include these keywords.” And it will give you content that is optimized for search.

It can create all your headers and your title tags, make sure the keyword is in there the right number of times. There was a guy who went out to one of his competitor sites. And he had ChatGPT scrape the site for all the keywords that he was ranking for.

And then he had it write 6,000 articles on a brand-new website that he created specifically targeting all of those keywords. And he stole a bunch of the rankings and a bunch of the search traffic from that other site. Now, he had a really low time on page because people got to the site and were like, “Wow, this content is, you know, not great. It’s not fantastic.”

[00:21:57] Gil: Yeah, yeah.

[00:21:59] Brian: It can take away your rankings because there’s going to be so much content out there. So, it’s even more important that you focus on creating really quality content really focused on your specific audiences. When we look at different ways that you can use AI to run SEO for you and to help you with your SEO, once you write an article, you can actually create a persona using ChatGPT.

You can have it build out the persona the way you want it for whoever. Let’s say, a, a potential undergraduate student. So, it will give you a whole persona. You say, “Tell me what their problems are, their decision criteria,” all these different things. You can get a pretty solid, basic, starting persona.

And then you can have that persona look at your website pages and say, “What content is missing on these pages? What questions do you have that we’re not answering with this content? Is the reading level good? What other keywords could we focus on?” You can have it give you a list of 100 different semantic keywords that you might want to target or include with your content. What other kind of content should we be creating?

What gaps do we have in our content? So, lots of different ways that AI can help you with SEO. And we’re using AI a lot to, to help us with our SEO. And then, the last step is search itself. So, SGE, the search generative experience, is, you know, what Google is calling their AI-powered search.

There’s Bing search, which is powered now by AI, all these different ways that when you type in a search, it will just generate a response for you based on the information that it has in its dataset. And I know a lot of people that are using ChatGPT as a search platform instead of going to Google. And I think we’re going to see more and more of that, especially as these large language models become better at giving you the answers that you’re looking for.

They’re already predicting that these AI-powered search is going to pull anywhere from 18% to 60% of our organic traffic away from our websites. So, for, you know, companies and institutions who are heavily relying on organic traffic and search rankings, we have to start thinking about different ways to get our content out there, different ways to make sure that our content is what shows up in these AI-powered searches.

And most of these search engines are now starting to cite the sources where they pull this information from. So, how do you create your content so that it gets included in the answers that AI is creating? And then people are still going to use regular search. They’re still going to go down to that list of all your different websites. So, you still have to make sure that you’re showing up on those.

But the way people, you know, are searching is going to continue to change, especially through, through next year. But when you start looking three to five years out, now, you’ve got to start looking at all the virtual and augmented reality spaces that are going to start really getting created. There are already universities and, and colleges that are creating virtual twins in the metaverse and offering classes, virtual classes, in the metaverse for students.

Those searchers are all voice searches that are all going to be AI-fed. So, we really have to start thinking about how we’re going to adapt our content and how we’re going to change our strategy to make sure that we’re still reaching the audiences that we need to reach in the places where they’re looking for content.

[00:25:37] Gil: Right. So, I think that’s a great spot to pause. We’re going to take a break. And when we come back, I would love for you to give us a little bit of your thoughts on what that future looks like and what institutions need to be doing to address all of those pieces that you just brought up, because I think what we oftentimes do is oversimplify and think, “Oh, we’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing.”

And I, I made a joke earlier today with a colleague that, you know, 25 social networks came and went before higher ed figured out social media. And it still hasn’t figured out social media. We’re really being honest on the grand scale, right? And now, search engines will have come, and not gone, but come and evolved pretty rapidly.

And there’s not going to be an option for institutions to keep up, right? And so, we’re going to take a break. When we come back, I would love to hear some of your recommendations and thoughts on what those next five years look like and how institutions need to be acting now to be ready for it.

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[00:27:32] Gil: All right. We are back. And we are here with Brian Piper, Director of Content Strategy and Assessment at the University of Rochester. And before the break, we just went down a really important stream that, I think, is going to be super beneficial for our audience.

And that is the rapid changes that search is going to have over the next five years, in part because of things like ChatGPT, in part because of things like voice-activated search, VR, AR, all the different pieces that I think higher ed right now is really grappling with how to incorporate these things into instructional technology, into student engagement, into advancement. And so, when we think about these as challenges, you know, there’s a lot to unpack.

And, Brian, you, you started in our last segment, sharing, kind of, the… uncovered all of these things that, that institutions need to be thinking, need to be thinking about. I’d love for you to share some of your predictions and thoughts for the next five-plus years and how urgent the need is for institutions to really come together with a plan.

[00:28:34] Brian: Yeah. I think the need is extremely urgent, I think, with the threats that a lot of higher ed institutions are facing with the impending enrollment cliff that we know is coming. They’ve been talking about it since 2015. They’ve been talking about the fact that, demographically, we’re just not going to have the same number of students that we have now and that we have traditionally had.

We’re already seeing schools that are shutting down or that are merging with other schools because they’re not getting the numbers. They’re not getting the donations. They’re not getting the applications. So, how do we better serve the populations that we’re trying to reach?

I see it all coming through content, but thinking about how you’re distributing that content, and not only what story you’re telling, but who is telling those stories, and where are those stories living. So, I think we’re going to see a push. We’re going to see a lot more AI. By the end of next year, AI is going to be integrated into all of our processes. It’s going to be integrated into all the tools that we use.

And if your institution is not starting to think about how you’re going to start integrating AI, that needs to be a priority for next year. You need to start thinking about creating a, like, a marketing AI council or a institutional AI council. You need to come up with AI policies because people are already using these tools. They’re just using them without any guardrails, without any guidance-

[00:30:05] Gil: Right, right.

[00:30:06] Brian: … without any training. Salesforce did a study. And 60% of employees are already using AI in their jobs. They’re just not telling anybody. They’re just using it the way that they have trained themselves to use it in many cases. So, I think that’s going to be critical for institutions to, to start thinking about that. I also think it’s going to be critical to start thinking about search outside of Google as a search engine. I mean, we know that YouTube is one of the major search engines-

[00:30:36] Gil: Yeah.

[00:30:36] Brian: … especially for, you know, our prospective student audience. TikTok, also a major search engine. Students are going there to do their research on colleges before they come to websites for the schools. Now, parents are still coming to the websites. They’re gaining information the way that we’ve traditionally thought about marketing, but students are doing it differently.

And they don’t want to just hear me talk about why you should come to our institution. They want to hear other students talking about that. They don’t want to see the highly produced, very professional videos that talk about what a great institution we have and that interview some of the students. They want to hear students in our dorms talking about what they like about it and what they don’t like about it so that they can tell if they should start going there or not.

There are a lot of institutions that are really starting to, to lean into this and understand the power of this and starting to do a really good job with this. So, I think, yeah, AI and figuring out how to integrate it into your processes so that you’re working more effectively and more efficiently is going to be critical over the next year.

And I think community is going to really be important for institutions to start thinking about how to create communities within their institution and within the global audience. So, people right now, when they think of search, they think of going to Google and finding their answers there.

As Google is filled with more and more AI content that you’re not sure if you can trust, you’re not sure if that’s really coming from experts, people are going to start looking for communities where they can go to find answers to their questions from real humans who have experience within different areas.

So, if you’re a research institution and you do a lot of optics research, think about a way that you can create a community and start building a community or participating in these communities that already exist in a way that’s going to position you as an accessible expert in this area where people can come to get their questions answered. So, I think those are some of the things, like, within the next year that we’re really going to have to start thinking about.

When we start looking three to five years out, I think we’re going to have to really start figuring out how to integrate virtual worlds and augmented reality into our processes. We’re going to have to start thinking about how to create experiences for our audiences, instead of just thinking about offering classes in the metaverse.

[00:33:15] Gil: Yeah.

[00:33:15] Brian: And I think we have to start thinking about how to integrate ourselves and our expertise into those scenarios and really leveraging our students, faculty, and staff as influencers, as communicators, as proponents for our institutions.

[00:33:34] Gil: Well, and I think, to go back to the, the comments about video before, I think mastering video, or at least trying to master video, is a step in that direction where that’s a visual medium, right? And there’s a visual element to it. It was funny. I was on a podcast last month where one of the guests, kind of, was bullish on video and saying, you know, “Higher ed hasn’t figured out video yet. They’re never going to figure out video.”

And I was, kind of, like, “Well, just because they haven’t figured out video yet doesn’t mean we shouldn’t figure out video.” Just like we haven’t figured out social media yet. We should still figure out social media, right? And so, I feel like there’s an element there around being discoverable with video.

And I, I saw it today. My alma mater, they were on that trend around, like, “We’re this. We do this. We’re this. We do this.” And there’s a video segment where they’re like, “We’re soccer moms. We do this. We’re hockey parents. We do this.” And this was, “We’re Hawks. We do this.” And so, like, I don’t want to advocate for, like, chasing all of the, the trends and chasing all of, like, the viral TikTok video trend, kind, kind of, stuff.

But if you can do it right and do it well, that’s a great way to showcase your students, showcase your campus without it being the highly polished students sitting at a table talking about how much they love the school, but a quick-hit fun and engaging element. I think that’s an area where there’s a lot of opportunity.

And that will bridge into better understanding these more in-depth virtual platforms and content because I think I don’t know anybody who is reasonably advocating for teaching in the metaverse like we started with online learning. If you all remember the early days of online learning, it was a laptop in the back of the room with the classroom in front of them. That’s supposed to be your, your, I’m doing air quotes for the, the podcast listeners, “online class.”

And there’s, there’s different mechanisms and methods to do it. I know we had Paul LeBlanc on a few weeks ago. And, you know, he’s now going to work in a space and doing research in a space around AI and the impact it’s going to have particularly in learning. And there’s a lot to continue with that conversation because there’s going to be so much rapid change.

So, to that end, I reserve to have you on again in a year and in five years, assuming the podcast gods allow it to continue to happen, as a, as a follow-up to this conversation. I think you’ve given everyone a lot to think about. And I want to thank you again for your time. Brian, why don’t you, if you can help us, kind of, help people understand how to stay in touch with you, get in touch with you? If they want to continue the conversation and learn from you, what are the best ways to do that?

[00:35:56] Brian: You can go to brianwpiper.com and sign up for my newsletter there. And I am Brian W. Piper on almost every social platform.

[00:36:06] Gil: Awesome. Well, we look forward to keeping this conversation going. And to our listeners, we thank you for spending the time. And we will see you next time on FYI.

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