Posts filed under 'Branding'
Thank you! I have really enjoyed my month as an eduWEB blogger, and hope that those readers coming to the conference in 3 weeks will knock me on the shoulder and say hello in Atlantic City! (Also, I’ll be presenting 9:45am sharp on the 3rd day of the conference - I hope you’ll stop by!) Today is June 27 and our Canadian offices (where I work) will be closed from now until July 2nd - so this is most likely my final post, and then on to Carmella, the July guest blogger.
So I am letting go. I am letting go of your “ears” with my final post. And if you do not hear from me again, it will mean I successfully let go of the web over the long weekend (horrifying!) I hope that any readers out there that are still debating social media will let go and dip their toes in sometime soon - just to see if the water is warm. I am here if you have any questions, so please ask.
Social media is NOT the answer for everyone. Earlier this month I blogged about Target vs Wal-Mart and the disaster that was the “Wal-Marting across America” campaign. If you have more critics than supporters, you will definitely want to approach the social web with a cautious strategy - and there are definitely some schools out there that feel this is the case, my heart goes out to you. We have looked at some solutions such as a Facebook Page with the wall and discussion boards removed - and with “Ask the University” forms and other custom widgets that replace the wall/discussion forums as the primary activities on the page. We are also launching solutions for comment moderation and content control on social platforms such as Facebook and MySpace, coming soon to a network near you.
Social media can be VERY cost effective. The costs are usually time, rather than money (although money certainly helps - one national company offered a $40 incentive for students to join their online community). If you are an over-worked department (ha), you will definitely have to decide ahead of time how much time you can invest in social strategies - and whether you can maintain that commitment over time. The nice thing is that students and young grads are well versed in these technologies and can bring you new ideas, and can be paid via bursary or something nice like that.
Here is why I want you to let go: Higher ed is flagged as a field that trails behind corporate and commercial marketing, due to silo’d department structures, level after level of decision committees, and goodness knows what else. I don’t think that is very fair. There are more than a handful of schools doing fantastic things with social media (wayy too many to name, so watch bloghighed.org for updates from some very active folks). Whether or not your school has gone “social” depends on the enthusiasm of your decision makers, and sometimes on the level of necessity. In regions that are facing bleak demographic outlooks, online video, interactive recruitment portals, and social network liaison officers are definitely more the norm than abnorm. If you’re out there, wave you flag and show off your brave new world of marketing because not all of higher ed is trailing.
If you are not one of these brave schools, but are looking at them and thinking “hmm, nothing bad has happened yet” - go with it. If you spend 2 months researching the technologies, another month drafting an internal proposal and another month convincing your committee to buy in - and then 2 months trying to get marketing and IT to work together (let’s not even touch on departmental and faculty marketing units) - guess what, your plan is 6 months out of date by the time it goes live. And in terms of web, that is a big problem.
Get buy in to go social, and then move fast. Keep your initial research broad and focus on the fact that COMMUNICATION IS NOT THE SAME. People, namely your alumni, donors and applicants, are talking to each other differently and expect you to talk to them the same way. Once you have permission to heaven forbid install a blog, go with the most enthusiastic potential blogger and get them onto blogger, wordpress, typepad - whatever. These are all fantastic free services. You can build your beautiful branded blogging microsite later, but get the activity started. This way you get to do 2 news releases, one for the blogger launch and one a month later for the microsite launch - yay! Do the same with everything else, test it fast, test it live and then expand. You can hypothesize all you want, but you really won’t know what your audience is going to do until you let them go at it.
The last way I’d like you to let go is to let conversational marketing into your tightly woven brand identity. I’d throw stats at you but we all know that social technologies are doing well because they simply fit human behaviors and needs, and we all know that a large chunk of your applicant pool is in that young, mediated generation of web addicted millennials. It’s not all because of technology - many teens are actually not tech savvy at all. But they know how to talk, and talking is important to them. Last year our national applicant survey (100,000 applicants) found that 87% consulted their friends for information during their school decision process. That’s more than viewbooks, family and teachers.
If you aren’t ready to drop your guard and chat with your applicants and students on your official .edu, or if you are just looking for a way to reach applicants effectively online, I invite you (implore you!) to take a look at our free student network. Students join for free and get read outs of where their friends are going, why their friends are going where they are going, whether they got a scholarship and where they turned down an offer. Our SkoolPool community started on Facebook and is now much, much broader - and is free for both students and schools. We have paid level packages with custom higher ed applications designed to meet your unique marketing and recruitment needs, but we also have a basic level option that gets you into the conversation in a safe, comfortable environment. If nothing else, registering for the free level replaces your “?” icon with your logo and gets your admissions contact info out there for students who want to get in touch.
So please, let go. Don’t over plan, and don’t try to control too much information. Whether or not you are “social”, your students are and there is no embargo to stop them from voicing their opinions.
That’s it from me - please drop by our booth in Atlantic City and check out our presentation on Wednesday (abstract below). I will be publishing the results of our annual applicant web trends survey on my normal blog early in July - so please consider stopping by once or twice to stay in touch!
“SkoolPool: Energizing your applicants with Facebook & OpenSocial”
Wednesday, July 23 @ 9:45 - Cayman A - eduWEB 2008
87% of college and university applicants are influenced by their friends when making their school choices. SkoolPool.com is a social hub that allows applicants to share choices, ideas, comments and decisions about school choices with their peers as well as institutions – across all major social networks! The SkoolPool network is powered by the peer feedback that applicants crave, and also creates a safe place for schools to tap into social media. Applicant demographics, interests and decision factors are collected and provide a 24/7 window into the decision process. This presentation will take you inside the making of a Facebook/OpenSocial application and review the insights won from joining students on popular social network websites. We will include statistics on applicant technology use, the ups and downs of building third-party social network applications and best practices for promoting your institution via social advertising.
Melissa Cheater
eStrategy Consultant, Education Marketing
Academica Group Inc.
email | web | blog | facebook | twitter | del.icio.us | skype: MelissaAcademica
Check out our new application for the Facebook platform, “SkoolPool,” that helps potential students track their consideration set and share it with their friends. www.skoolpool.com
June 27th, 2008
In my final post as May guest blogger, I wanted to say “thanks” to all of you who work so hard on your websites, especially the web content managers. In an earlier post I said that your website is your institution’s most valuable asset. Well, I’d like to correct that and say that I believe it’s actually you who should be considered your institution’s most valuable asset. Why? Well, consider this…
According to the most recent statistic I can find on Google and Netcraft, there are approximately 43 billion web pages on the World Wide Web today. Those pages are served by about 158 million unique websites. That’s an average of about 272 web pages per website. Now, according to Google, there are about 758 million web pages representing approximately 5,000 higher educational websites (.edu sites). That’s an astonishing 152,000 web pages, on average, per college site, or approximately 56,000% more pages than the average site on the World Wide Web.
Using these facts and figures, and excluding only the largest e-commerce and media related websites, it’s clear that there are no harder working individuals on the planet than you!
Given the extraordinary effort you and your team make on a daily basis, I have yet to find a single one of you that wants to complicate their job further with burdensome technology. My work revolves around your web content management software (CMS) needs, and over the years I’ve seen a lot of web CMS technologies make a lot of promises. The biggest failing of most of these technologies is that they often make managing content more challenging than before — not something you need!
So, our goal at OmniUpdate has been to keep our web CMS extremely easy to use; yet powerful as a technical engine. We designed it in 2001 exclusively for higher education; consequently, we understand how different your problems are from business and e-commerce sites. Our design ensures WYSIWYG ease of use for everyone involved, plus complete separation of content from design, version control and roll-back, content repurposing, and all the specs even the most hardened techie would love.
Why is this CMS approach important? Consider the fact that:
- IT staff benefit from a standards based approach to web CMS. XML and XSL are the backbone of Web 2.0 and at the very core of OmniUpdate’s templating system.
- Administrators benefit from the ability to control permissions and manage actions at a department and/or individual level — it’s a powerful capability (and very important) to decide and implement “who can do what” on your website.
- Recruiting, admissions, public relations and marketing staff benefit from all the communication and messaging features previously described earlier in this series: blogs, RSS, video, online chat, etc. (Yes, one CMS can do all that!)
- Decision-making committees appreciate a user-based pricing model that is scalable with flexible terms, and would like to purchase one product that delivers all the previously described benefits and functionalities.
OmniUpdate is used today by website heroes just like you to update the content on over 450 college and university websites. And there’s no doubt in my mind that YOU are your institution’s most valuable asset.
I look forward to meeting you at the eduWeb Conference in July.
Lance Merker
May Guest Blogger
CEO
OmniUpdate, Inc.
lance@omniupdate.com
May 30th, 2008
As I mentioned in an earlier post, it’s never been easier to shoot, and edit video. So, why is it so difficult to put video on our websites? Playback quality, browser compatibility, and other complexities make it so challenging that we end up doing something we really shouldn’t — putting videos on YouTube and using the embed code to display them. Go ahead and admit it, we’ve all done it! It might not even seem that bad of an idea, right? Not so!
Posting video to your campus website using YouTube can pose a problem. Your video production will be YouTube branded. Furthermore, if you click on the video while it’s playing, you’re redirected to the YouTube website. Allowing your visitor to be redirected to an external website is clearly not good marketing strategy. You may never get them back.
To keep in control of things, OmniUpdate is now offering a free service called Transcode-It. The idea is to make things really easy for you to take any video and play it right in your web page. Like this…
View the video playing in a fictional university web page.
Transcode-It is a free service that allows college web professionals to quickly convert any video, then upload and display it as a high quality Flash video embedded right in any web page. It’s as simple as inserting an image into a document. Feel free to try it right now at http://www.transcodeit.com/.
Transcode-It requires no software installation and creates a video file that plays on all modern browsers (Windows and Macintosh). Your resulting video will not be branded by Transcode-It, and will not redirect viewers away from your site.
In the spirit of community, we at OmniUpdate hope that colleges and universities will find Transcode-It a helpful service. We offer it as one more tool in your arsenal for reaching that often unreachable audience.
Lance Merker
Guest Blogger, May 2008
CEO
OmniUpdate, Inc.
lance@omniupdate.com
May 27th, 2008
Offering site visitors the opportunity to subscribe to RSS feeds is one feature of a winning website strategy. Assuming your RSS feed is integrated into your web content management software (CMS), every time your staff updates important information on your website, an applicable RSS feed item can be created and sent to your audience. RSS is fantastic because the message is sent in virtually real-time, and isn’t filtered or blocked because it’s delivered to willing recipients… you can’t beat that messaging strategy!
As I mentioned in my last post, RSS feeds can be directed by the student to his or her preferred medium and accessed on a variety of devices, such as Facebook, RSS readers, email and portals. This alone can be huge. Think about it, how many other opportunities do you have to get right on your student’s Facebook?
In addition, RSS can be automatically converted to SMS and rapidly delivered to all subscribing cell phone users.
Now, how effective could RSS be when used for crisis communication? Well, based on a recent Newsweek report, approximately 97% of your target audience keep their cell phones “on stand-by” at all times. These people will get your message, whether they are sitting in a lecture, or on their way to class. While in class, their phones are in silent mode, but many students are still getting text messages discretely during lectures. Other audiences could include prospective students, parents, media, faculty, administrators and alumni.
Combine RSS with your web CMS and you’ve got an extremely powerful and cost-effective way to make updates from one central hub — your website! If subscribing to an emergency RSS crisis feed is integrated into the student enrollment process as part of a crisis notification plan, nearly all students and their affected family members could be registered automatically.
With a little planning, RSS can play an important and crucial role in both marketing and crisis communications.
Lance Merker
Guest Blogger, May 2008
CEO
OmniUpdate, Inc.
lance@omniupdate.com
May 23rd, 2008
George Bernard Shaw once said, “The problem with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.” Such is the case for traditional forms of advertising when it comes to prospecting a student population. High school students just aren’t getting the message because they are becoming unplugged from TV, radio, print, and even email. They TiVo or DVR past commercials, and get their news, sometimes inaccurately, through online social communities like MySpace and Facebook. Information, both good and bad, spreads like wildfire via blogs, RSS feeds, chat and private email sent through social networks.
What’s a college to do? Embrace the change!
Your website is still your most valuable marketing asset. And, when used in combination with some truly amazing Web 2.0 technologies, one of the most powerful as well. Consider for example:
1. RSS feeds are an extremely effective and easy-to-add form of communication. Feeds can be directed by students to their preferred medium, such as a cell phone (through text messaging) or to a Facebook account; these can even be used to communicate urgent messages in a crisis situation. I’ll expand further on the value of this feature later.
2. It’s never been cheaper and easier to record and post video to a college website. Rich media is engaging, commonly shared, and expected by your audience.
3. Online chat gives your staff the unique opportunity to speak one-on-one with a student, perhaps providing that nugget of information that might just be the key to influencing his or her enrollment decision.
A content-rich and well-managed higher education website will contain some, if not all, of these features. If your website has not progressed that far yet, you’re not alone–most sites aren’t there yet either. But, keep moving forward. Remember the old saying, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.” Start a pilot today of just one new Web 2.0 technology!
Lance Merker
Guest Blogger, May 2008
CEO
OmniUpdate, Inc.
lance@omniupdate.com
May 20th, 2008
The phrase “Content is King” has been around for a while, but it still holds true. While website design is intrinsically valuable, visitors aren’t searching for design—they’re looking for information. They arrive by typing in a URL, choosing a bookmark, or clicking on a link. The aesthetics of the site has no bearing on their initial arrival. Once there, of course, imagery and graphics help. But, lacking the “right content,” a visitor will quickly leave, and perhaps never return.
For your college or university, the need to provide prospective students with quick access to current and relevant information is intensified. This generation moves fast, thinks fast, and wants their information fast. According to a recent study by Noel Levitz, James Tower and NRCUA on the E-Expectations of high school students, 66% and 61% of A and B students (respectively) rated website content more important than the multi-media experience, and 73% of all students wanted their desired information to be just a few clicks from the home page. These findings are significant when you consider that another 2006 Noel Levitz study on institutional E-recruiting practices found that according to 40% of campuses, 20% of their electronic applicants had made no prior known contact with the institution before applying.
So, what’s the takeaway here? When it comes to your website, content matters! And, when it comes to recruiting, you need to make sure that the really important stuff like academic programs, tuition tables and financial aid—the stuff that decisions are made from—can be found right up front. Good content, complemented by helpful navigation and attractive design and imagery is the foundation of a great website. Add to the site marketing mix some social networking tools, such as the previously discussed blogs, and you’ve competitively spiced up the offering.
Other tools such as RSS and rich-media add real content value too, but we’ll save that discussion for another day…
Lance Merker
Guest Blogger, May 2008
CEO
OmniUpdate, Inc.
lance@omniupdate.com
May 13th, 2008
Movies once did it well. Daytime TV still does it well. Some of the biggest budget shows ever aired on TV do it amazingly well–for example, The Sopranos and Lost. I’m talking about the art of the “cliffhanger.” So, why is it that blog posts rarely give you a reason to come back for more?
I’ll come back that that question in a moment…
The purpose of my first post as guest blogger for the month of May is to introduce myself, so I’ll start there. My name is Lance Merker and I’m the CEO of OmniUpdate, Inc. Of course I didn’t start my career as CEO, and fortunately for you, I also didn’t start off in finance as many CEOs do. No, I paid my dues in Marketing for many years, and I can relate well to the efforts you make every day promoting your institution’s brand and identity. I’m here this month to help you with a few ideas, practical tips, and suggestions to help amplify your on-line efforts and make you more successful in your job!
Ok, enough with the formalities. Let’s get back to the topic of cliffhangers…
Blogs are used is so many ways today. They’re used for news, gossip, politics, marketing; the list goes on and on. Not surprisingly, blogs that are wildly popular offer some reason for the reader to return. Sometimes it’s just to read the latest “happenings,” but even those are only popular when readers know something interesting will come next. Regular frequency also creates expectancy in the readership, and helps stimulate more visits. In a nutshell, keeping blog visitors “wanting more” is a huge driving force to successful blogs.
So how can you keep your blog visitors “wanting more”? I’ve got three important tips that I’ll share with you. But, in the spirit of cliffhangers, please tune in next week for these and more…
Lance Merker
Guest Blogger, May 2008
CEO
OmniUpdate, Inc.
lance@omniupdate.com
May 1st, 2008
If your school is suffering from image problems or you know that people have a hard time finding your campus you may have tried just about everything to get people to notice. TV spots. Print ads. Mailings. Hip interactive web sites. You may have even gotten desperate enough to make some really bad videos (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVENWl8uBeg). Let’s face it: brand recognition is a tough thing to buy. But if you’ve been through the ringer trying to get prospects to notice you don’t despair…try flogos!
What’s a “flogo?” A flying logo! (
http://www.flogos.net/) Inventors and special effects gurus Francisco Guerra and Brian Glover have discovered a way to make simple shapes out of a mixture of soap and helium and can send them flying just about anywhere you want. They last up to an hour and can be sent flying into the air from just about any location as long as its a location that can house their super-secret “flogo generator.” And considering that these babies can fly as high as 20,000 feet, you can only imagine the impact that they’d have at your next open house, sporting event, or homecoming day!
What kinds of flogos can they make? They claim to be able to make just about any shape, but the examples (
http://www.flogos.net/downloads.html) they provide on their site seem to indicate that this is a keep of “keep it simple, stupid.” But even if you can’t get your complicated heraldic school crest “flogoed,” think about the possibilities for getting your initials in the sky, the shape of your mascot, or even a simplified version of your President’s head (provided that he or she has a distinctive enough shape).
At this point flogo’s seem like they’re in the “beta” stage, and pricing isn’t available. Even if there are a few bugs to be worked out, I’m sure that we’re all going to see flogos flying over our heads in the pretty near future.
April 17th, 2008
A few months ago, I attended the EduWeb conference in Baltimore as an expert panelist and my agency, WebAdvantage.net, exhibited. For those of you who are not yet acquainted with my firm, WebAdvantage.net is a nine-year-old Maryland-based agency, and we’re one of the Mid-Atlantic’s premier search marketing and online advertising firms. Our strategic online marketing services include search engine optimization, paid search campaign management, social media and online public relations, lead generation and online media planning and buying. Our high-touch, collaborative, results-centric approach to client solutions has consistently garnered awards and a loyal client following, including such education clients as Johns Hopkins University, George Washington University, Towson University, Harford Community College, Connections Academy and St. Timothy’s School.I’m a Cornell Arts & Sciences graduate with a major in Social Relations and a concentration in Communication Arts. The SBA recently named me 2007 “Small Business Person of the Year” for Maryland. I frequently write, speak or comment on the subject of online marketing and advertising for trade media, business publications and conferences. I author a bi-weekly column, “Online Media Buying Agency Strategies,” for ClickZ.com, a leading Internet advertising and marketing publication. I’m also the “resident” online marketing and advertising blogger for CityBizBlogs’ “Business Perspective on Online Marketing,” hosted by citybizlist, currently serving Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston and Atlanta. Perhaps you’d find my “How Some Football Stadiums Remind Me of Bad Web Sites,” posting amusing…and informative?
While attending the EduWeb conference, my team and I asked attendees to complete a comprehensive survey to get a clearer sense of the state and challenges of online marketing planning and execution for higher education. Shortly after the conference, I shared the results and my conclusions in my biweekly ClickZ column, and with conference attendees via email. What’s your reaction to my analysis? Please post your comments or send me a personal email.
As October’s guest blogger, I’ll try to cover some ground that hasn’t been touched on in a while. Recent guest bloggers have done a pretty thorough job of discussing Web 2.0 and social networking, so I think I’ll stay away from this topic. Are there any particular topics you’d like to know more about? Search marketing or paid lead generation perhaps? Cost justification of online marketing tactics? Overcoming limited resources and budgets? What else is on your mind? Please let this be an interactive dialogue where you voice your questions and concerns, and I can try to answer them. For the month of October, I’m here to help.
Hollis Thomases
President & CEO, WebAdvantage.net
hollis@webadvantage.net
October 1st, 2007
It sounds weird that my last post for the month is about the beginning. But you have to start somewhere. You’ve heard it many times that the site that you are helping to manage is larger than most on the internet. O’hare air traffic controllers have an easier job at times. So when and how do you know it is time to overhaul the site, redesign the site, or just make a few tweaks to improve the site. Too many times, a site is completely redone only to end up similar to what was there before.
Here are a few tips in identifying where you stand.
- Does the design represent your institution initiatives. If you have a brand in place, does the site follow that brand in tone, message, and look? If not, you may be looking at a simple face list and content adjustment. If you are not hearing complaints about the site, then massage the presentation and message, and the site is ready to go.
- Is a favorite phrase on campus, “I can’t find anything on the site”. Your content may not be bad, but your search mechanism and/or navigation labels may be out of whack. Time for some simple usability testing to identify how severe the situation is. Pull some site visitors in and have them run through key tasks. You need to understand what a site visitor wants to accomplish before you can really hop into a redesign. Download my Ten Minute Usability Test and watch about 30-50 visitors to get a good gauge. Also, reevaluate your search tool. See if the results pages are pulling outdated content, too many results, or irrelevant links.
- Has the site become jumbled chaos? With open authoring, many times so many people have open control of the site without an understanding of audience need or institutional direction. If it is time to reign in the management of the site, start with the people involved. Again, an overhaul may not be necessary, but some general guidelines and training programs may need to be put in place. Identify the people that need to be involved in the site first, then determine how messy the situation may be.
You may get the hint that I am trying to avoid an overhaul. There are universities that need to start from scratch. But this should not become an every-three-year occurrence. Plan for long-term management of the site. Adjust community involvement. Make the starting point an evaluation of the absolute minimum that needs to change on the site.
It has been a fun month of contributing to the eduWeb Buzz blog. Thanks for reading
Eric Hodgson
Independent Consultant
hodgson.eric@gmail.com
September 28th, 2007
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