Posts filed under 'Channels'
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
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
So going with the assumption you have caught the fever and you use social media. One thing to think about is how much to invest in a certain platform.
What do I mean by this?
Simple. There is always going to be a new Facebook. Everyday a new social network is born that may or may not be worth your time. You need to try to keep on top of things. If you were a very early adopter of social media you may have had an account on Friendster. That ship has sailed, ” It’s so five minutes ago”. You need to think ahead and say hey where are the people going. There is a bit of a herd mentality with web users in the sense they tend to all congregate in the same place. Which is actually a good thing because that is where you can focus your efforts. But to say that YouTube is the best ever video website would probably be false. There are hundreds of other websites that do exactly what they do, some possibly even better. Their success can be summed up with the saying “The right place at the right time.” They currently have the critical mass and that helps sustain them. However such as Friendster they may someday be dethroned.
All I’m suggesting here is that you have to keep up with things on the web. As we all know interests on the web change like the wind. And just to say that you are on Facebook today doesn’t mean that you are covered tomorrow.
*Note* I love Facebook (my profile, add me) and hope it never leaves.
So the question I ask is; Do you use social media? Where do you see it in your marketing mix? What do you think will be the next big thing?
- Matt Herzberger -July Blogger
Previous Posts
July 16th, 2007
Anyone faced with the challenge of communicating to perspective students can identify with the words of Charles Dickens: it is the best and worst of times, the age of hope and the age of despair.
We all hope to engage more and better-matched students for our institutions. And yet we sometimes despair when faced with so many choices for how to make it happen.
Linda Stone, writing in Harvard Business Review (2/2007), describes our media saturated world this way: “Continuous partial attention…involves constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities, in an effort to miss nothing.”
Elliance has helped colleges and universities deploy simple and affordable emarketing tools to breakthrough the data noise and clutter and engage students and alumni.
Elliance worked with a consortium of six Atlanta MBA programs that overcame the inherent instinct to go it alone. They used our ennectEvent software to launch and host a very successful MBA information and recruitment event. Six admissions teams, sharing mailing lists and coordination the event from their desktop. Read more about the Atlanta student recruitment initiative here.
Carnegie Mellon University wanted to bring more reader participation to its online version of Carnegie Mellon Today, the school’s flagship publication. They used our ennectSurvey software to gather reader trends across audience segments: alumni, faculty, staff, students, parents and friends.
St. Edwards College, a private, four-year, Catholic, independent, liberal arts university of more than 4000 students located in Austin, Texas, wanted to target email to students based on special interests and other profiles. They used our ennectMail software to customize permission-based e-mail for recruiting purposes, opening the door for admissions counselorskk to begin a one-on-one dialogue. Read more here.
Carnegie Mellon University’s new Qatar campus wanted to raise their brand awareness throughout the region and around the world. They leveraged our ennectSweeps platform to create a worldwide scholarship contest that centered around solving one of the world’s most pervasive problems, hunger, using technology. Read more here.
Each example shows how smart admissions marketers have replaced traditional, labor- and time-intensive processes with smart, electronic solutions. These solutions allow you to deploy marketing campaigns quickly, without additional investment in human resources.
These emarketing tools (email, event, survey, sweeps) can be easily integrated with search engine marketing and web 2.0 functionality. The result is more and better student prospects, measurable return on investment, and the ability to accelerate prospective students through the permission layers.
March 26th, 2007
