Posts filed under 'Content'
What do you do when someone else walks their dog on your yard? Twice in just the last week, I’ve been presented with situations where a competitor school is promoting themselves on another school’s web/social media. They were both very different situations, and both took a bit of sitting back to figure out - and as always there’s no “right” thing to do.
Traditionally, community colleges have a history of serving their local areas and the relationships between colleges were collegial and in many systems the territory of each school was even strictly defined. However, these boundaries are fading in today’s post-secondary sector and we are seeing more and more schools cross the lines to market aggressively in communities that had been traditionally owned by their competitors.
Even though social media is global and wonderful and laughs in the face of geography and distance, competitors are still finding ways to sneak onto your lawn. The new social Internet opens all kinds of doors for students, staff and prospects to air their opinions loudly, and publicly. This is scary enough for some traditional marketers to grasp, so add in the fact that your competitors can just as easily use all the same doors to push their own programs and it becomes terrifying.
About 2 weeks ago we had a school come to us because one of their key competitors had posted a list of their own equivalent programs on their SkoolPool profile. (School A said that School B was promoting School B’s programs on School A’s page). Maybe this is sharp thinking by School B - I mean after all, it’s free right? School B’s strategies hopefully considered how cross-posting like this would make them look, because I would be a little concerned about that…
School A has so much more to worry about, all thanks to one quick little post that took School B all of 30 seconds to submit. First, SkoolPool runs on Facebook which puts all user content live without the option for moderation before hand (although there are many new features designed for PSE marketing in the Fall 2008 SkoolPool v2, hint hint). School A has to decide if it will ever delete any of the user-submitted comments on its page - and it is best if this decision is made before a controversial post presents itself. If you are going social any time soon, make sure you pencil in time to decide your comments/moderation policies. And make sure these policies are available to users before they submit posts.
Most conversations about content control and moderation tend to focus on content submitted by the audience. Some say that both positive and negative content should be allowed to stand, as long as they are respectively said and are constructive to the ongoing dialogue. Outrageous slander, as well as socially unacceptable content such as promotion of crime, racism, etc, should be deleted without hesitation. But where does competitor content fit into this equation?
The majority of the happy, ethical blogosphere isn’t worried about competitors. They are issue blogs, knowledge blogs, life blogs, news blogs. Blogs and other social media platforms owned by schools, companies and brands cannot just as easily throw caution to the wind. We have competitors and consequently our moderation approach just got a lot more complicated.
The gut instinct is to delete competitor comments. Get them out of there. Be gone. Before you hit delete, stop and ask yourself on what grounds are you deleting this comment? Refer to your comments policy. Did it include a statement on competitors? (If it doesn’t, you’ll probably want to go add one because this trend is not going to go away anytime soon). If it includes a statement on competitors, then you’re gravy. You obviously thought about this before hand and you already have your answer. Congratulations.
For those of us who didn’t see this coming, we’ve got to figure it out and fast. Your website, blogs and social media profiles are your marketing pieces. You can’t control the message the way you can in a broadcast campaign, but it’s still marketing. It would be unacceptable for your competitors to paint over your signage with their own logos. And it is frowned on to slam a competitor’s product outright in a television ad. Taking this approach, your competitor was out of line and you are welcome to go ahead with delete. Just make sure your new decision is added to the comments policy.
Normally I recommend that you contact a user before deleting their comment. In this situation, I’ll leave it up to you whether you let them know that you nixed their post.
I’ll just throw this out there for spice - depending on what your competitor posted, you might actually be able to redirect the negative light on them for poor behavior - by leaving their little attempt at attacking you up for the world to see. Your community might also put this person in their place before you even get a chance to see the comment. This depends on how much traffic your page gets - and how active its visitors are - and whether your visitors are supporters, critics or undecided. If you’ve got fanatics, I’d say leave the comment live and let them start shredding it to bits.
The other situation we looked at this week was when a competitor advertised one of its grad programs on a community that was related to your school, but run by a private individual rather than yourself. This is where leaving it live gets a little more likely. First, you can’t delete it. If the comment is going to come down, you’ll have to ask the page’s owner to do it for you - and they might say no. Second, whether or not the owner goes along with the whole deleting thing, your request says that you feel threatened by the post and that possibly you are making requests like this on how many other websites as well? You may not be threatened, you may just be offended, but the page owner doesn’t know that. All they know is that you want that content out of there.
Do you even have the right to request a delete? In my first case (School A/B), one school was promoting its undergrad programs on the page of another undergrad institution. In this second situation, School B is promoting related graduate programs on a community of undergrad alumni. Obviously you want your grads to continue their education with you, if you have grad programming available, but students don’t always do what you want and a lot of alumni choose to experience another campus for their graduate degrees - whether for change, or just because the program happens to be more attractive than your equivalent. Your alumni may actually find your competitor’s post interesting. All they are concerned about is making yet another decision between schools, and knowing the available options is definitely part of that. Also, your school might not even have an equivalent grad program for them to consider - so is the competitor even actually “competing” with you?
After sitting on this for a few days, I can tell you what I would do - but I won’t say it’s the right answer, because the social media rulebook has yet to be printed. If your school has an equivalent program, consider adding your own post to the community - and even contacting the community administrator privately and seeing if they will consider adding their own voice to your school’s information (it looks so much better from a peer …). If you have no equivalent program, and your competitor’s post was respectfully written - and possibly actually helpful to the community members - then I’d say bite your tongue.
The spice approach is to go one step further and even submit a post that says very graciously that yes, School B has this program and that your grads tend to do well in it (if that is the case). Then add relevant information about your own graduate programs and encourage the community members to talk to you about the possibilities. Confident, polite, open, professional.
How is your school handling these types of situations? We’re all learning as we go here, and the rules are changing every day - it would be great to hear about your experiences.
Thanks for staying with me through the long read!
Melissa Cheater
eStrategy Consultant, Education Marketing
Academica Group Inc.
Full Cycle Marketing for Higher EducationTM
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Academica provides market intelligence and marketing expertise to institutions of higher education, particularly in the areas of student recruitment and alumni relationship management. Our annual University and College Applicant Surveys, the UAS and CAS, are the largest and most comprehensive in North America.
June 20th, 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
In my last post, I left with the idea that stimulating regular visits to your blog can be about “wanting more.” The cliffhanger approach to blog posting is certainly one method that works. The fact that you are reading is proof itself. But there’s more. And, last time I promised you three more tips to keep your audience coming back. So, here they are…
Tip #1
Give them what they want!
If your institution is blogging as a means of communicating with prospective students, current students, and others of the “millennial generation,” don’t force institutional messaging into blogs. Create an environment where students themselves can participate (in a controlled manner) in the blog posting. Believe me, your student bloggers will know what topics are most interesting to their peers. Now this might seem very obvious, but it’s not as simple as it sounds. The software and contractual controls you put in place should ensure that you can monitor and veto blog posts before they are live on the web (as marcom professionals it’s your responsibility to the institution). But, don’t get trigger happy with the veto button. Work with your student bloggers to ensure they know where you must draw the line, yet let them be creative with the subject matter to ensure it’s
relevant and interesting to the audience you’re trying to reach.
Tip #2
Embed Videos
The popularity of plopping YouTube videos right into blog posts should come as no surprise. Blogging is very much a Web 2.0 phenomenon and mixed media is a big part of the equation. Offer your bloggers a way to add videos — and if YouTube is just not acceptable (I’ll talk more about that later), then offer ways to convert and upload video files directly to your server. Don’t be afraid of video, embrace it.
Tip #3
Use the 1 in 5 Rule
For every five bloggers you recruit, you’ll only get one that keeps it going. Believe it or not, for all the concerns your administration might have about “appropriate” content issues, the biggest problem you’ll have is a lack of content. Most of your bloggers will disappear on you. And, worst of all, you won’t know which ones until it’s too late. The most enthusiastic, the best writers, or the ones you’re certain will be great are the ones you’ll probably lose first. The solution is to get lots of bloggers. If you figure you’ll have one in five who make it, you won’t be disappointed later.
Ok, let me get off my blogging horse, and get to one of the biggest issues of online communications!
Ah, but for that, you’ll need to wait until next time…
Lance Merker
Guest Blogger, May 2008
CEO
OmniUpdate, Inc.
lance@omniupdate.com
May 7th, 2008
