Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/80527
technology Texting Club Makes Marketing Magic WHEN IT COMES to reaching students, e-mail and social media have their place, but they also have their drawbacks. Younger students, especially, rarely check their e-mail accounts. A message on Facebook might be buried within a day's worth of updates. That makes both channels inefficient options for effective, timely communication. Texting, on the other hand, is a different story, says Eric Schulz, co-director of strategic marketing and brand management at Utah State University's Jon M. Huntsman School of Business in Logan. "Students have their phones with them all the time, and texting is their preferred method of communication," he says. After having one too many e-mail blasts generate too little response, the Huntsman School created a "texting club" for students across the university last year. To start the texting club, Schulz chose Txtstation technology from CommerceTel, now owned by Mobiv- ity of Chandler, Arizona. At the beginning of the 2011–2012 academic year, the school invited students to send a text to the sys- tem. Their text automatically signed them up for the texting club and entered them in a contest to win one What Can Watson Do? IBM AND THE University of Roch- ester's Simon School of Business in New York recently held the first "Watson" academic case competi- tion. Developed by IBM, Watson represents a new class of cognitive computer systems that can answer questions posed in natural language quickly and accurately. Watson also can filter rapidly through large amounts of data—or Big Data—and apply advance analytics, which has many implications for industry. For the competition, students were asked to present their best ideas for 58 September/October 2012 BizEd using Watson to solve societal and busi- ness challenges. Twenty-five MBA and MSc students competed in teams, sub- mitting seven proposals. Judges chose three winning ideas based on how well each team presented its business plan and understood the application of Wat- son's cognitive reasoning and advanced analytics capacities. The first-place team proposed using Watson to analyze meteorological data and census numbers to help crisis organizations identify weather patterns and improve response times to weather- related disasters. The second-place team To be effective, texts must be actionable, timely, and relevant to a wide audience. of two prizes—a $500 gift card to the campus bookstore or a year's supply of ice cream from Aggie Ice Cream, a popular local shop. More than 5,000 of USU's 12,000 students signed up. The Huntsman School uses the service to inform students about campus speakers, gatherings, and