Posts filed under 'Marketing'
Welcome fellow e-marketers, bloggers and readers. I’m Carmella Manges, E-marketing Director, St. Edward’s University and your EduWeb guest blogger for the month of July. This is my first post (ever) and I look forward to hearing from you throughout the month.
Here’s a little bit about my background and how web analytics has come to play a key role. I’ve been a marketer for a couple of decades now. Before arriving in higher education, I worked as a financial services marketer, followed by 10 years as a strategic planning consultant to Fortune 500 companies, banks, investment firms, architects and technology firms to launch e-commerce web sites, develop online loan and mortgage applications, calculators, sales tools, online banking and bill payment, and other e-commerce functions. Along the way, using web analytics to measure ROI has been a key factor in helping shape strategy for my clients and, more recently, for St. Edward’s University.
I’d love it if we had a running dialogue on web analytics or other e-marketing topics that you might have questions about. So feel free to add your comments or questions here and I will make every effort to respond in a timely and, hopefully, interesting manner.
If you’re wondering what an e-marketing director does, here’s the scoop. I was hired in 2004 by forward-thinking St. Edward’s University to be the primary strategist for the university’s electronic marketing efforts. Since then, we’ve made wonderful strides in advancing the level of quality and creativity of e-marketing as part of the university’s integrated marketing effort.
E-marketing is one of those things that “takes a village.” Some of the strategic enhancements our village has collaborated are:
- Guiding the e-marketing effort into a direct response marketing model that more appropriately aligns to the purpose of this channel — to cause someone to take an action. (This is a huge leap of faith in higher education, which generally rose out of either a PR or publications business model.)
- Integrating ROI tools into every facet of e-marketing (web, e-mail, e-newsletters and print-to-web) to inform strategic marketing decisions.
- Establishing and maintaining a highly successful partnership with our exceptional IT staff. (We couldn’t do what we do without their support.)
- Implementing the university’s content management system (CMS) and launching three admission recruiting web sites in only 18 months.
- Having the fundraising web site up BEFORE the kickoff gala.
- Continuing to set new traffic records in the 3rd year of the Admission recruiting web site.
- Getting the university’s SEM/SEO strategy off the ground.
Sadly, I will not be able to join you at EduWeb 2008 as planned. However, for those of you who were looking forward to “Puzzling over Web Analytics,” I am happy to say that we’ll cover that case study in my July blogs so that you don’t miss out.
Also, to help you out, I’ll end each entry with a glossary for any new terms that might be used in that post. So stay tuned as we start to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
GLOSSARY:
Web analytics: The study of web site performance metrics to understand whether business objectives are being met.
Content management system (CMS): Content Management is a process used to create, manage and integrate text, images and data for marketing communications purposes.
Direct response marketing: Marketing via a channel (the web, for example) that allows the consumer to respond directly based on a call-to-action that is trackable and measurable.
SEM (Search Engine Marketing): A series of online tactics that, when combined with SEO, help to attract consumers, generate brand awareness and build consumer trust. (Elliance, an industry thought leader on this subject, has some wonderful infographics on this subject.)
SEO: Acronym for “Search Engine Optimization.” This is the process of editing a web site’s content and code in order to improve visibility within one or more search engines. When this term is used to describe an individual, it stands for “Search Engine Optimizer” or one who performs SEO. (Source: http://www.sempo.org/)
Reach me at:
Carmella Manges
E-marketing Director
St. Edward’s University
3001 S. Congress Avenue
Austin, Texas 78704
512.233.1635
carmellm@stedwards.edu
Founded by the Congregation of Holy Cross, St. Edward’s University has been named as one of America’s Best Colleges for 2008 by U.S. News & World Report and was selected by The Princeton Review for inclusion in the guide Colleges with a Conscience. St. Edward’s is a private, Catholic, liberal arts university of more than 5,300 students located in Austin, Texas.
June 30th, 2008
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
Check out our all-new website - www.academicagroup.com
131 Wharncliffe Road South, Second Floor, London, Ontario, Canada N6J 2K4
tel 519.433.8302 ext. 226 1.866.922.8636
fax 519.433.8062 melissa@academicagroup.com
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
Subscribe to Canada’s only FREE daily higher education newsbrief at
http://www.academicagroup.com/resources/Top10subscribe
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
EDIT: With all my talking about how to moderate appropriately, I seem to have forgotten to point out that I am almost always against moderation. That said, we don’t always get our way - and that’s where moderating “appropriately” comes into play. M.
When it comes to social media & content control, I’m a bit of a hippie. I can afford to be because I entered the field as an academic rather than a marketer. After almost two years of working side by side schools as they approach the social media question, it has become overwhelmingly clear that content control is a big concern - and often a very valid one. And sometimes isn’t as clear cut as ideals try to make it seem.
Last year at eduweb 2007, presenter after presenter reported that the dreaded flood of negative comments had yet to happen. The fact that the vast majority of schools who have gone 2.0 avoided comment disasters is not proof, but it does still help to quiet a few fears. Regardless, some institutions will be deadset on moderating. And when it comes down to it, at least they are still thinking somewhat social - even if they aren’t ready to go without content control. It’s a baby-sized first step, but it’s in the right direction.
(And actually, even at my own blog I preview all comments before they are posted, to ensure that nothing violating our terms of use is posted - such as highly offensive content, and the inevitable flood of spam-bots.)
The tips I give when it comes to content control are as follows:
- If you are going to delete material, make sure your users know that ahead of time by publishing your policies (or they will feel betrayed, and will get even more vocal).
- Contact each person directly if you delete their content, to explain and offer a chance for them to explain their in return1. This gives the user a way to negotiate, making them less likely to go galloping angrily to their own blog or list-serves.
- If your institution is highly concerned, it is better to moderate comments before they go live rather than deleting them after the fact. AND make sure this is communicated near the comment submission form - rather than buried in a hyperlinked TOU policy.
I can see why any school or company would be nervous about opening the flood gates to student and consumer comments, but even if the dreaded attack does come it may actually serve to engage your supporters and bring out community spirit.
My favourite analogy for this is Virginia Tech ‘07. Obviously a negative comment from a disgruntled student or employee is not the same as a campus crisis but there are a few parallels we can draw. After the shootings at Virginia Tech last spring, there was buzz in the media that enrolment numbers would most likely go down. VT’s numbers actually went up - thanks to the wave of “hokie spirit” that carried the community through and showed applicants a community that they wanted to be apart of.
The key in this situation was that people love Virginia Tech. Its supporters are well known for their feverish loyalty. If you are thinking of going social, it is definitely important to take a step back and ask yourself if you are liked.
For example, Target’s social media efforts went over well but Wal-Mart’s met with backlash (Groundswell). If your school or program has more critics than supporters than you will definitely want to approach social media more cautiously and most likely with a much different strategy than a brand with dedicated followers.
Almost every social media presentation references Wal-Mart and the backlash to its Wal-Marting Across America campaign. Wal-Mart has its enemies and it may have benefitted from a more gradual approach to social media, to test the waters so to speak. Their biggest mistake was thinking like traditional marketers. They saw the splash, they saw the content, they saw the message - they didn’t see the new rules, and they didn’t see the consumers as an active voice (or in this case, reactive). Wal-Marting Across America wasn’t legit. If the company had been upfront that they were financially supporting the trip, the backlash would have been lessened, if not squashed altogether. But because the campaign portrayed itself as something it wasn’t, the community fought back.
On the other hand, Dell was able to turn around its “flaming laptop” disaster by taking a very honest approach on their corporate blog. They started with the appropriate corporate messaging and then when the blogosphere revolted, they threw caution to the wind and honestly admitted that yes a dell laptop had caught fire and no they didn’t know why - other than it was linked to the battery (a battery type that was used by many brands other than just Dell). Was the PR department happy about this admission? Most likely not. But the honesty won over a blogosphere that had previously been very much opposed to the brand even before the laptop ball of flames.
Case Study: The Money Lounge
The Money Lounge is a Facebook community of more than 11,000 users. The community is run by TD Canada Trust, one of Canada’s largest national banks. As one of the first brands to really take to Facebook, TD had to beat its own path in regards to how they should handle an environment where users have so much to say.
Wrong information was quickly corrected by users (the Wikipedia phenom), although TD kept an active watch to make. TD was also an active “host’ and jumped in to post official corrections when required. In regards to negative content, they found that any random attack was disregarded by other users for simply being unfounded and unprovoked. It simply wasn’t given any credit.
I will point out that TD had part of the decision made for them. Facebook does not offer the ability to pre-approve user content before it goes live. Also, with a Facebook Page, I haven’t yet found a setting that will notify you of new user content such as is done for the individual profiles - which can require a staff with time to keep an eye on the page. If you have a strong IT team, you can definitely work around both of these. And as always, there are always third parties with solutions - such as my own pet, SkoolPool.
Case Study: CEO Blog - Time Leadership
To look at the other side of the coin, let’s take a look at an executive blog that keeps an eye on content but still manages to be honest and accessible. Type CEO blog into google and Jim Estill’s blog “CEO Blog - Time Management” is your first hit - and has been for years. Rather than letting everything go live and then moderating if necessary (like TD), Jim has all comments queued for approval before they go live and posts them only if there is value in it. Value meaning for other readers, such as dialogue/questions and thoughtful commentary. Personal notes to Jim and irrelevant content, among other things are read by Jim but not published on the blog. The social media purist sees this as an interruption of the conversation, a violation of the user’s right to speak! The marketer takes a step back and sees that Jim’s blog is one of the most successful executive blogs out there and definitely is setting a strong standard.
While it is not the perfect Web 2.0 ideal, pre-screening blog comments and other user-generated content is definitely the standard in corporate settings. And that’s OK. The fact is that you may not get sign-off on your proposal for a presidential blog unless you include screening. If moderation is a requirement by your higher levels, it does not have to be the end of the world. As shown by Jim Estill, it can be a part of a very successful and active blog. Be transparent, let people know up front how your comments work (right beside the submit form, not hidden in a linked TOU policy), and you should be fine.
If you choose to leave negative comments on your site (which I do recommend almost 75% of the time), it is definitely a good idea to have a rep from the school that acts as a voice and offers a gentle counter-opinion and invites more questions etc. Be friendly, be open, be factual.
I’d love to hear back on how your school handles UGC and comments - and I’m sure others reading would be interested too. It’s one of the first questions I get from every school, so it’s definitely pushing some buttons in higher ed!
Cheers,
M.
Melissa Cheater
eStrategy Consultant, Education Marketing
Academica Group Inc.
Full Cycle Marketing for Higher Education™
Check out our all-new website - www.academicagroup.com
131 Wharncliffe Road South, Second Floor, London, Ontario, Canada N6J 2K4
tel 519.433.8302 ext. 226 1.866.922.8636
fax 519.433.8062 melissa@academicagroup.com
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
Subscribe to Canada’s only FREE daily higher education newsbrief at
http://www.academicagroup.com/resources/Top10subscribe
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.
1 This best practice comes from a presentation by TD Canada, and I swear by it in my own work.
June 10th, 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
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