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Marketing is marketing is marketing is marketing

Higher ed likes to split things into neat little groups.  These people over here do admissions.  The ones over there deal with alumni. That third group way over in the corner deal with current students.  Oftentimes its portrayed like there's no overlap.  But really, for any of these groups the same base marketing principles apply.

1. You have an audience
   
2. You have a message
   
3. You want your message to persuade your audience to take a call to action
4. You want your message to be continually compelling enough to keep your audience loyal.

Any time you send a message to your audience with the intent to get them to take an action, you're marketing.  Period.  

One of the best books I've read in a while was forced upon me by my boss recently (Ok, forced upon is a bit strong...I was psyched to read it): How to Become a Marketing Superstar by Jeffrey Fox. Fox would say that marketing is defined as getting and keeping customers and that ever action a marketer takes should advance this singular goal.  Here are some other tidbits I picked up from this book.  My personal notes on how they apply back to higher ed are in purple after:

• The definition of marketing is simple.  The doing of marketing is hard.  (K: Everyone calls themselves a marketer - that doesn't mean they understand what marketing is or how to execute it)
• Who pays your salary?  A "customer" paying tuition or making a donation. (K: The sooner we start acknowledging that students and alumni are customers, the more efficient our schools will run) 
• The most important part of your business is the customer - everything is about them. (K: Dartmouth Development has three core values - one is donor-focus.  Apply this specifically to the web and you've got user-focus. Think about how that affects the choices you make)  
• If a marketing idea is important, every single detail in the execution of that idea is important. (K: Or, if marketing is important, you'll be proactive about planning your strategy/tactics)
• Smart marketing starts with smart segmentation.  (K: There's no easier thing to segment in the world than email...)
• If the difference is your selling point, then articulate the difference. (K: Lots of schools talk about great academics, a beautiful campus and a tight-knit community...how does that help you stand out?)
  
• Value is a number, not a superlative.  Attach a dollar value to your message to illustrate the benefit of your product. (K: How much more will you take in your lifetime because of the education we provided/will provide?)
• Even in a declining market, you can still attract and retain customers.  Set the bar high and reward people for achieving it.  Do not reward them if they didn't achieve it, even if there are extenuating circumstances.  (K: The reward is important.  If your staff meets the goal you set and you promised them a reward, don't renege.  It just creates poor morale.)
• Teaser ads are worthless. If an ad doesn't sell than ultimately it is a waste of money.  (K: teaser emails are also worthless - why send someone an email to tell them they will be getting something in the mail?) 
• People don't buy products.  They buy what they get from the product (K: think Kathy Sierra talks about helping your customers to kick ass)
• Always put the brand in the headline. (K: Or the subject line, as it were...)
• Selling to customers who WANT your product is better than selling to those who NEED it - those who need it often have to be educated as to why they need it and this costs time and money.  (K: Think about how this applies to prospective students...)

Experiment: List your job responsibilities and requirements

I had a conversation with a friend today that really solidified for me how ridiculous the expectations are in higher ed for people who work on or in conjunction with the web.  We are expected to know EVERYTHING, be really REALLY good at all of it and do it for exceptionally crappy salaries (for the most part...some schools have learned to pay).

I want to get a sense of just out of hand this has gotten, but I need your  help to do it.  Leave a comment listing your job requirements (how many years experience, degrees, etc...), the required skillset (HTML, CSS, PHP, writing, marketing, etc...I'm looking for the REAL DEAL of what your job requires, which may be different than the JD) and if you want to, a salary range.  If you don't feel comfortable posting a comment, shoot me an email at karlyn@karlynmorissette.com.

Thanks for your help!

   

6 Months

So today is the official 6 month anniversary of when I started this blog.  I'm going to follow Kyle's lead and do a bit of reflection.  Unlike Kyle, this was not my first foray into professional blogging.  Some of you know I ran a blog called Interactive Recruiting for a while.  The content was pretty much exactly like this one (except that it focused exclusively on emarketing in admissions) and it had a decent readership.  Then one day, it up and disappeared.  I refer to this as the day I dropped off the face of the earth. 

So what happened.  Some of you know this and some don't.  Long story short, I was yanked into my former boss's office one day and was told that if I wanted to keep that blog up (a blog I was maintaining on my own time and with my own resources) that they were going to require me to run every post through them so that they could edit it and sign off on it before it was posted.  They referred to this as "helping me" and said they could do it because "my job was my identity".  The real reason, of course, is that I'm opinionated as hell and they didn't want me to be (military school mentality - if you're not a sheep, you're asking for trouble).  Now, those who know me know that noting drives me more batty than censorship so I went home that night, had a few cocktails and up and deleted the thing.  I also decided that it was time for me to quit my job and honestly wasn't sure if I even wanted to be in higher ed anymore, the whole thing just left such a sour taste in my mouth.  I didn't tell anyone what was going on (except Matt because I had been scheduled to present with him at HighEdWebDev and needed to pull out).  I don't regret deleting the blog.  To me, taking an ethical stance is far more important than maintaining an online identity and I wouldn't have been able to live with myself if I had allowed the "editing" to occur.  What I *d0* regret is not saving any of my posts from it so when I decided to start this one, I was starting over again from scratch.

So why do I tell this story - when I first started this blog about a few months later, I was scared as hell.  If you look back to earlier posts (and before I had my bio up or anything), you'll see that I never mentioned where I worked by name.  I really liked my new job (and still do!) but still hadn't quite adjusted to the fact that I wasn't working at a military school any longer and that it was now OK to have an opinion.  I didn't want to ruffle any feathers so my posts for the first few months were really quite innocuous.  Eventually, I calmed down.  My boss is amazingly supportive, even when she disagrees or doesn't understand something I've posted.  Instead of insisting that she should be allowed to edit my blog, we have a discussion about it.  We may not end up agreeing, but that's OK.  Now I feel completely comfortable coming on here and expressing a point of view, which I think makes the blog far more interesting than it was when I first started.     

What I've learned about blogging in the last 6 months: 

1. You need to blog for yourself - not for anyone else.  A blog is a labor of love in a lot of respects and if you're going to do it, you shouldn't even bend to the whim of what you think other people want you to write about.
2. Post often.  It's near impossible to post every day (I tried it for a while!) but you also can't let a month go by without a post if you actually want people to be engaged.
3. Respond to comments.  I'm always amazed when I go to blogs and the authors never respond to readers comments!  Why even start a blog if you don't want to have conversations?
4. People are going to disagree with you - and that's OK.  I actually had already learned this lesson from political blogging.  I joke a lot that I'm the "higher ed web bitch" so expressing further opinions that I know people are going to disagree with is easy.  I'm not threatened when people don't feel the same way I do about an issue, but a lot of people out there are. Still, if everyone agrees all the time, what's the point in talking in the first place?
5. For some people, content doesn't matter.  This was a new one for me and one I'm hoping to move beyond at this point - to some people, the content of what I say actually matters less than how long I've owned this domain name.  I'm not considered a reputable source of information until I've been around for 6 months.  Sad but true. 

My Favorite Blogs from the past 6 months

(in order of date they were posted)

• MIT Does it Right (this isn't really a substantive post, but it is a really fun game that you should all go play.)
  
• Email Basics
  
• Live blogging the Edward Tufte Seminar, Part 1 and Part 2
  
• Show Me The Money!!!!!
  
• The Wired Wealthy Report: Review and Takeaways
  
• Assigning Value to Determine ROI
  
• It's Your Job to be In The Know
  
• Building an admissions email marketing plan, part 1: The Five Commandments
  
• Integrating print, web and email
  
• Segmenting and integrating Facebook Social Ads
  
• An Event Apart, Day 1 and Day 2 and reflections
• Numbers mean nothing without context

And thanks to those who read :-)

I'm humbled by the people who read this blog and the feedback I get from you.  I always say that I do this for myself (and I do) but it truly makes it worthwhile to know that I've helped people to think about things in different ways.  Some people who blog consider themselves to be influencers or rock stars or whatever...I'm none of that.  I'm just a girl sitting in an office or at home on her couch hacking away at a computer and am amazed that people find my musings worthwhile enough to spend time reading.  I hope I can give you another 6 months worth of valuable material (and maybe even a bit more than that if I'm lucky!).

So thanks.  You rock my world :-)

Karlyn

Start with your goals. Then decide your medium.

You have to be impressed with this: I'm was a pig roast on Saturday, which means I've had one or two (or six) beers/fruity girly drinks/whatever by the time I got back to my friend's house and  log onto twitter to see this post by Christopher Schmitt.

And, even being as inebriated as I was, I started waxing philosophical to myself about work while the rest of my crew was watching Child's Play (and we'll ignore, for a moment, the fact that I'm logging onto twitter while I should have been having fun...yes, I know I have a problem).  Here is what I remember of my thoughts that night:  

The web is a marketing tool.  I think its easy to forget that.  You're either marketing yourself or something that you want to sell.  When people think marketing, they tend to jump right to the communications aspect of it, completely skipping over the parts where you plan (set goals) and evaluate (weigh your results against your original goals to determine if you were successful).  

The medium(s) you choose depend on what you want to achieve.  For some things, a blog alone may be perfectly appropriate for your goals.  Same with a website.  For some, a combination of the two is your best bet.  

• My website is a blog.  I don't need (or want) it to be any more to achieve my goal of having a place to write down my thoughts and share them with my community.  I've thought about doing a full-blown site but if I did, the content outside the blog would be superfluous at best.   My measure of success is that people comment, whether they agree or disagree.  If I get feedback of any form, I know I'm provoking thought. 

• If I was selling a product, I might think differently.  With a tangible product, you basically need to provide your customer a way to review the product and (more importantly) and easy way to make a purchase before they have time to second guess themselves.  That's your primary measure of success - a purchase. In this case, the blog could be a distraction from the customer making that purchase.  We could debate things like customer loyalty, building your brand, etc...but at the end of the day, your goal as a business is to show a profit. 

• A service is even more tricky, since it's the most intangible product you can sell.  Your measure of success is still a purchase, but in this case I think it takes a bit more for people to get there.  In this case, a website and a blog may be the most appropriate tools because you need a way to shape the service in the eyes of your customer, which blogging is great for. This is why blogs on higher ed sites are successful - they tell the story of your institution in a way that can illustrate outcomes. 

It's things like this that prove to me that twitter will not be the death of blogging, as some people  have predicted.  There are too many cases when you need more than 140 characters to expound on something. Easy answer: do both. But it gets a bit more tricky when you get into the intricacies of what you want your audience to do and, in those cases, 140 characters just won't do to explain it. 

Live Blogging: CASE Summer Institute session on Integrating Solicitation

Dartmouth is hosting the CASE Summer Institute on Educational Fundraising, so I had the opportunity to go to an elective session on Integrated Solicitation.  Here are my notes.

Quote by speaker: "this is not integrated marketing...this is integrating our solicitation approaches" (this statement scares me - are we not doing marketing with our solicitations?)

Integrated Marketing

• a combination of two or more forms of marketing used to sell a produce or service
  
• a management concept that is designed to make all aspects of marketing communication such as advertising, sales promotion, pr, and direction marketing work together as a unified force, rather than permitting each to work in isolation.
  

Evaluation of 3 primary outreach methods

Direct Mail: 

• advantages: least expensive, mass outreach potential, informative and creative medium, least invasive to prospect.  
  
• disadvantages: least personal, highly competitive, acquisition is expensive, upgrading is difficult.  

Phonathon

• advantages: still relativelsy inexpensive, more personal than mail, best for acquisition, good for upgrading
  
• disadvantages: can be expensive, negative perceptions of telemarketing, trends to consider.

E-communication

Advantages

• Instantaneous Response
• Mass Outreach with high personalization
• Invoke emotions with sound, visuals, etc...

Disadvantages

• Requires Investment in technology
• SPAM

Reasons for Integration

1. incorporates principles of generational marketing
   
2. maximizes results through coordinated efforts
   
3. reinforces your case for support
   
4. promotes teamwork - 'shared' goals
   
5. demands ongoing planning & evaluation
   
6. avoids negative perception of phonathon
   
7. effective management of resources
   
8. provides better service to your donors
   

Generational Marketing

• Civics: tend to be loyal, respect for authority, direct mail responsive
  
• Boomers: Tend to be non-conformist, like to be recognized, mail and phone responsive
  
• Gen X: Tend to be cynical, phone responsive (when reached), online responsive, poor direct mail response rates
  
• Gen Y: Too early to tell, technology competent, fixed phone numbers, online responsive, prefer IM over e-mail?

Examples of Integrated Strategies: 

• Establish a combined goal for your integrated marketing program to include phone, mail, e-marketing/online giving
  
• Back up important calling segments with broader direct mail appeals and eliminate the hassle, and the cost of "sorry we missed you" mailings.
  
• Promote your alumni website and acquire e-mail addresses through phonathon and direct mail.  Promote online payments on confirmation statements and online giving on direct mail reply cards. 
  
• Use e-communication to deliver timely messages about pledge fulfillment and to promote giving opportunities.  Always provide a link from your web stories and e-newsletter to the online giving page.
• Avoid the negative perception of your phoneathon caused by "don't let us interrupt your dinner" appeals in direct mail.
• Examples of integrated marketing to married alumni couples and young alumni. 

I'm not sure that most of this presentation what really about integrated marketing.  There were a lot of marketing tactics discussed....which is fine...but there was just a lot of talk about what other schools are doing rather than how to really plan to do integrated marketing.  I dunno...could have been better. 

Change happens in the room

I got into a pretty heated debate this week with Drew and Kyle.  They contend that, in order to improve efficiency, its better not to attend meetings unless absolutely necessary.  They say there are too many unnecessary meetings and that no one listens to them anyway so they are just going to cut them out altogether.  They'd rather be in their office working on things they can control.  

I couldn't disagree more.  Are there unnecessary meetings?  Yes.  Welcome to the world of rule by committee that is higher education.  But I'd rather be in the room at those seemingly unnecessary meetings than sitting back in my office flitting around.  Why?  

1. Brainstorming: How many times have you been in a meeting that has gone completely off-topic with an unplanned brainstorming session?  What if you aren't there to participate?  Then the web component gets completely lost in the conversation and people end up making decisions about strategy without any consultation whatsoever.  In the long run, missing meetings where this happens will actually cost you time, as you struggle to bring the web into alignment with everything else that was decided.  So much for efficiency!  


2. Big Picture: Cross-medium integration will NEVER happen if you excuse yourself from meetings about marketing strategies on mediums that aren't the web.  How was I able to integrate all of our latest challenge materials? Because I attend print communications meetings every monday morning.  At most of those meetings, I don't say more than two words.  I'm there to hear everything else that's going on.  As I've previously blogged, it's your job to be in the know. 


3. Out of sight, out of mind: Culture change takes a long time at any organization.  Want the web to be viewed as important?  Than it has to be visible.  And yes, people are going to laugh at you and not take you seriously but if you back down and lock yourself in your office, you've let them win.  

Still want to work on your efficiency?  Fine.  Bring your laptop with you to meetings.  If they are talking about something that doesn't apply to you, do other work.  I do it all the time.  But always keep one ear open.  So what's the worst that could happen?  You've done work, but at a different location than your office.  People may give you the evil eye for having a laptop at first, but if you're consistent about it they get over it and it becomes expected.  Besides, brining your laptop is really great if you need to show someone an example of a web page in order to make your point. 

Kyle says I sound self-righteous with this story, but I'm going to tell it anyway: When I first brought up the idea of using AIM for prospective students to my former bosses in 2003, I was literally laughed out of the room. How could I possibly know what I was talking about?  They knew better and they knew the phone was the only way to communicate.  But you guys know me - I like to run my mouth and I continued to do so for the next few years until they finally "got it" and put me in charge of one of the first full blown e-recruiting programs in the country.  Five years later, they'll deny it up and down if you ask them about it ("we were ALWAYS going to make this change....ALWAYS knew it was the right thing to do") but the only reason that change happened was because I was IN THE ROOM pushing the web.  If I had excused myself from those meetings because they weren't important, I'd still be a counselor.   

I'm not the only one that can tell a story like that. A few years before I got to the development office here, the general consensus among all involved was that the web wasn't going to raise a dime.  This year, the web systems set up before I got here processed in excess of $6 million. I'm sure that progress wasn't made by people who sat in their office and refused to attend seemingly unnecessary meetings.  

A lot of us talk about wanting to effect change in our organization but few of us will actually step up and put the work in to get it done.  Change doesn't come easily and it doesn't happen overnight.  Hell, even if it does come, you may not even get credit for being the catalyst!  But if you really want it, then do what it takes to get it done.  

Managing expectations through authentic marketing

I'm a very big book person.  I read a lot and spend a ridiculous amount of money on new books even though I live about 30 seconds away from a library (I'm the type of person that likes to make notes and highlights as I go...libraries tend to frown on that).  The closest large bookstore to me is a Borders so, of course, I'm in their rewards program.  So I get this email from them today that just threw me for a loop: 

So you mean the old Borders.com wasn't a real bookstore online?  And what about Amazon.com? Plus I was a bit annoyed at their email person for using an all image email, typically a no-no.  I've got them set to download images automatically, but what if I didn't?  I would have seen nothing of value when I opened this message.  

But still, the promise of a valuable coupon was offered and I took the bait.  Here's the website I was sent to: 

Ok, so 30% off is kind of ehhh...I get at least 20% off coupons from them on a weekly basis so that didn't totally wow me.  Free shipping...pretty typical of online bookstores.  Plus I'm still not any closer to finding what what makes the new borders.com a REAL bookstore.  So I click the button to take the tour: 

Alright, now I'm getting annoyed.  I still haven't seen the new bloody borders.com, nor have I been entered in any sweepstakes.  Plus on this page, there are things that LOOK like links that you can't actually click, which made it more confusing.  But I've come this far and decide to press on.

So I click the tour option and FINALLY find out what the new borders.com means: 

Apparently being a REAL online bookstore means that your books are displayed on a shelf that you can move up and down and side to side. Not in an easy-to-use grid format, but a "magic shelf" (yes, that's actually what they call it).  Maybe if I could take the book down off the shelf and flip through it like at an ACTUAL bookstore, that would have been something but alas it's just not nearly that cool.  I think I'll stick to going into the real store, thank you very much!

So what is my point with all this: Don't market something as finally being the "real" thing when its just a lame let down.Someone at Borders should have raised their hands and said "are we overselling this a bit too much?"  Colleges do this ALL THE TIME when they try to make their school look like the perfect place for every possible student out there.  It's not.  No school is.  Authentic marketing will help you to zone in on the students that are right for YOUR SCHOOL, which will help retention rates down the road.  Just because you say it on the web or in email does not give you free license to make stuff up!  People are going to find out eventually and they are going to be annoyed at best.  Sell them a false dream and they'll leave and go somewhere else, plain and simple.    

Kyle James admits I'm always right

Kyle James, the .eduguru, has admitted that I'm always right.  I think this is an occasion worth remembering ;-)

Twitter: The next Second Life Syndrome?

Yesterday I started pondering my use of Twitter.  Of course, I use it to promote my blogs, but its more than that.  It's almost a way to break up my day.  I'm the type of person that needs to skip around from project to project and in between, I check twitter to see what everyone else is saying/doing.  My usage typically increases when (a) I don't really have a lot going on at work or (b) ironically, when I have too much going on and am completely stressed out.  I would think that the first situation is true of many people that use twitter (in regards to the latter, I just have an odd working style...).

I would suspect the same is true of most working professionals.  Statistics show that Twitter is overwhelmingly used during the week and the primary uses are as a networking tool or the promotion of content.  All this made me realize that it's probably a misguided venture for colleges to start using Twitter to recruit students.  Many know that teenagers, for the most part, don't use Twitter but they all assume that they will gravitate over to it eventually.  I was the same way.  When I first found out about Twitter at SXSW 2007, I immediately went home and registered a username for the last place I worked at so that I could get the URL I wanted.  I wasn't sure how I was going to use it yet, but I figured it would be better safe than sorry.  But now I'm not so sure of its potential.  I think that assumption that teenagers will eventually come around is kind of like adults in the 17th century assuming that children were just smaller versions of adults and thus fundamentally dismisses what its like to be a teenager.  

One teenager, 17-year-old Will Johnson, has identified quite clearly what he thinks the problems are with Twitter's adoption by teenagers and has developed his own tool based on the concept to appeal to his age group.  As he writes in his blog: 

To examine why Twitter has seen such little adoption among teenagers, one has to be familiar with social structure of an average teenager’s life. A teenager keeps a tight knit group of friends, perhaps more so than any other age group, and has little reason to communicate outside of this group. Tools such as Facebook have seen such success because their founders realized that teenagers want to communicate with their friends and only their friends, not the entire world.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter was built by adults in Silicon Valley, for adults in Silicon Valley. The combined effects of the more open “social graph” of an adult, with contacts spread throughout business and personal life, and the highly open culture of the Valley led to a tool with an ultimate focus on complete openness...

For a communication tool such as Twitter to become truly popular among teenagers, it must be built from the ground up with them and their concerns in mind. It must be entirely focused on small groups of friends, allowing constant and smooth communication between them while keeping outsiders safely out of reach

I feel like we've gotten to the point in higher ed where every technology is viewed as "the next big thing", if not the next killer app, simply because of its existence and because we, as somewhat geeky adults think its cool.  That completely misses the point of why technology is adopted in the first place - it meets a need.  Back in the day, MySpace met a need for teenagers.  Now Facebook does.  I'm not so sure Twitter does now or ever will since they seemed more concerned with getting infrastructure in place than coming up with any sort of business model.  In a lot of respects, Twitter has yet to define what it is and if the tool itself is that far behind the curve, then why would we expect widespread adoption of it? 

This reminds me a lot of Second Life.  A little over a year ago, Second Life was the "next big thing" in college admissions.  I did a presentation at eduWeb on technology and recruiting where I dubbed that the "Second Life Syndrome".  Second Life didn't meet a need and was thus never adopted by the audience that recruiters hoped it would be.  A lot of schools spend a lot of time and money building elaborate Second Life virtual tours, which was proved a waste when no students showed up.  

This stuff really doesn't take a lot of work or research to figure out.  I had an intern that summer and I asked him what project he would want to do if he could do anything.  He said he wanted to build a Second Life campus.  I said "Ok...but before you get started, I want you to do some research on the demographics and Second Life and then come let me know if you think its still a good use of time."  By the end of the day, he had come back to me and said he changed his mind - teenagers wouldn't use it and we moved on to the next item on his list.  

The moral of the story is this: a little research into motivations and demographics can go a long way.  Just because a technology is there and people use it doesn't mean its around for the long haul or is an appropriate medium for a mass audience.  Maybe I'm wrong - maybe teenagers will be flocking to Twitter to talk to colleges over the next few years.  But I really doubt it. 

Numbers mean nothing without context

I have an interesting exchange on Twitter yesterday and it brought up several good points about basic marketing strategy that I thought would make for a good blog.  It all started when Brad Ward posted stats from his website...

Basic point number 1: Know your audience

There is a huge difference between what your POTENTIAL audience is and what your TARGET audience is.  Obviously, anything on the web has the potential (though not very likely) of being viewed by anyone on the Web.  But that's not Brad's target audience.  He works in admission, so his target is prospective students and their families.  I work in development so mine is alumni and anyone else that wants to donate money.  By identifying and focusing on your target audience, you can really hone in on their needs and how to appeal to them. 

Also, I want to make sure that everyone understands what I'm talking about when I ask how many kids are in his funnel.  This is an admissions funnel:  

I think it's pretty self-explanatory, but it is basically an illustration of the admissions process and the fact that you start out with a really big inquiry base but as you move through the cycle, kids drop out along the way.  

The conversation continued...

Basic Point Number 2: The numbers are never too hard to extrapolate and if you don't do it, you have no basis for assessment.

All I was looking for here was a basic context for the original numbers I was seeing, and for that the numbers are extremely easy to look at, which I expound on below.  In fact, they are vital to the assessment process.  What does it tell me that 51,000 people looked at his blogs?  That is just factual information but not an assessment of good or bad.  It is what it is.  You can only assess good or bad when you see it in relation to other numbers.  

Basic Point Number 3: Your competitors numbers aren't an indication of your success.  Do you and your competitor have the EXACT same target audience?  Do you have the EXACT same marketing strategy?  Do you have the EXACT same goals?  I doubt it.  And therefore, they are not a measure for your success or failure.  To me, it's only distantly relative what a competitor does - I'm more interested in if my strategies match up against my goals for success.  Brad even said it himself - Ball State is larger but they have a similar applicant pool, which means that Ball State probably has a higher rate of admission and is therefore targeting a different type of student.  Also, if they have a similar applicant pool then the ultimate size of the school in relation to views of blogs geared at PROSPECTIVE students is irrelevant.  

And it continues...

Now here is where we start to get into some specifics.  I threw a basic example out there that I use as an indicator regarding if an idea is sticking with an audience.  Now I want to be clear, but numbers I asked for do not really give me a valid indication of whether the blog was successful or not - just an indication. I have no idea if Brad's numbers were unique or total views or how many of the views where comprised of return visitors or how many of them where from prospective students/families, current students, alumni or other misc. readers that our outside of Brad's target audience.  So comparing his numbers to his total prospective audience may not be the most valid method that something is working.  I do think, however, that it is a VERY valid way to tell if something is not working.  If Brad had an audience of 500k and only 51k views, he would have a problem.  

But at least now I can make my indicator calculation: With 51K views and 52K in his funnel, and we make the (poor) assumption that all those views came from prospective students, most of them have seen the blogs at least once.  Is this good?  We'll get back to that in a sec...

Basic Point Number 4: If you've got a worthwhile tool, market the hell out of it: Brad also gave me a piece of info I didn't ask for - that there had been a large email blast of 19K marketing the blogs.  My question is, with 52K in his funnel, then why is the largest email blast to less than half of that?  I don't want to get into an email discussion here, but stuff like this just begs to be consistently marketed to a mass audience.  These blogs are not just appropriate for one stage in the funnel - they are relevant to ALL stages.  They are a cultivating tool for younger classes and a decision making tool for accepts.  Email, as a rule, should have one call-to-action per message.  I wonder how many views he could have if there had been more than one large blast of 19K?

Now here's where Debra pops in and brings up some great points as well.  

I think I've already covered the first few twits in this group, so I'm going to skip down.

Basic Point Number 5: Measurements of Success Depend on YOUR BUSINESS GOALS.

If there's any key point to take out of this blog, I think its that one.  Success doesn't depend on what your competitors are doing and the numbers mean nothing if they are not brought back around to help meet the business goals of your institution (I suppose one exception to this is if your business goal is to get more market share than your competitor, but I think any college that strives for that needs a new set of managers.  A better goal is to meet a certain number for enrollment, based on the total operating cost of the institution and the size of the community you want to maintain).  So yes, success metrics would have to differ from school to school because another school does not have your business goals. 

Ok, so lets get back to Brad's blogs for a second.  What was the original goal of the blogs and how did that tie back overall goals of the institution?  Maybe views aren't the right success metric.  What if the goal of the blogs was to ENGAGE prospective students?  You don't get that through views - you can get that through comments.  At that point, the total views of a blog mean nothing, unless you are talking about them in relation to the comments.    

All of this really goes back to a basic framework for building a marketing strategy that I blogged about a while ago: 

• Plan what you'll do
  
• Do It
  
• Evaluate what you just did
  

Planning involves coming up with higher level strategy that aligns with business goals and setting goals for what you want to implement.  Doing it is the execution of the strategy.  Evaluating involves crunching the numbers against the business goals you set in the planning stage.  We all tend to be very good at the execution stages, but not so good at the other two, but it doesn't make them any less important in the whole process.  

Finally, I want to be clear that I'm not picking on Brad in this blog - I'm just using this as an example.  I have no idea how much work Brad has done on this that he didn't Twit about, since its hard to express everything you do in 140 characters.  

Key Takeaways: 

1. Know your Audience
   
2. Without context, numbers mean nothing
   
3. Your competitors strategy is not a measurement for your success
   
4. If you have a worthwhile tool, market the hell out of it
   
5. Measurement of your success depends on the business goals of your institution. 
   

Simple things can equal lost sales

This is a post about managing the expectations of your users.  Maybe better put, it's delivering on the promises that you make your users.  I think customer service is the most vital part of any "business" relationship (any relationship where I'm giving someone money to obtain a product or service).  In this case, I'm looking for a hotel for a bachelorette party I'm giving for my best friend so that all the drunken women attending it will have a place to crash instead of driving home.  I've enlisted the help of her fiance, because he travels a lot and has hotel points.  I've got a few options and all I'm looking for is how many points it will take at this particular hotel to get a free room.  Now, there's going to be more than a few women at this party so the chances are we are also going to  have to pay for rooms above what the hotel points will provide.  

So Holiday Inn's website doesn't give information about how many points each hotel costs without logging into their system (maybe their first mistake?).  I'm a member of their club but have long since lost my membership card so I can't log in.  But then I noticed an option on the left hand side of the screen that says I can chat with a representative.

Perfect!  I can find out the answer to my question without logging in if there's a live sales person!  So I open it and type my question....

But when I hit submit, I get an error message!!!!

Alright, this is just unacceptable.  Now I'm annoyed and I still don't have the info I was looking for and I'm strongly considering taking my gaggle of drunken women to another hotel to crash for the night because my expectations have not been met.  

So how does an experience on a hotel website relate to higher education?  It's simple - you need to come through for your users.  If you give them an option to do something online, make sure it works otherwise it's very easy to turn them off and you'll lose the sale (and yes, an enrollment or a donation is a sale).  Give them what you promise them and nothing less.  

I'll give a specific example - a friend and I were on an admissions website the other day.  There was a link that said when a user clicked on it, they would find out what GPA and SAT score they needed to get into the school.  However, when you clicked, you didn't get any numbers at all.  "We take everything into consideration."  Well, that's really helpful.  It doesn't meet the expectations that the websites have laid down for the users.  They could have just as easily edited the specific text in the link to be more accurate, but elected not to.  So now the user, having anticipate receiving the information they were looking for, aren't any more knowledgeable about the admissions standards at that school.  

Meet expectations.  Keep promises.  Have good customer service.  These are basics that are all too often overlooked.  Make sure they aren't overlooked on your site so that you don't give users an easy excuse to walk away from their purchase.  

How blogging has impacted my work

So Kyle James wants to know how blogging has impacted my work. I honestly don't think that it has. Isn't that kind of like the tail wagging the dog? I would be doing the work I'm doing regardless of whether or not I blogged about it later. I almost view work as separate from blogging. My job is to advise my "clients" on their web, email and e-marketing strategy and to produce collateral material to help them execute their strategies. My advice and execution of my job functions are not going to be affected by whether or not I think it will make for good blogging later.

I wrote a manifesto a while back about why I blog. I think a few of the points are relevant here. I primarily blog as a way to wrap my head around a particular thing that I'm working on at the time. In that way, I suppose it has affected my work because it's my method of preparation and assessment. But I could just as easily do that in a private forum. I choose to do it this way because I believe in free sharing of information within my professional community will ultimately benefit the group as a whole. I would kill for there to be a true aggregater of ALL blogging content produced by higher ed web practitioners. If you work in higher ed on the web in any form and you are daring enough to write about what you do publicly and your opinions on it, you're in no questions asked. At that point, it becomes a tool for all of us to learn from each others experiences and maybe question our own perspectives. What an amazing resource that would be for everyone.

I don't know if I answered Kyle's question (I suppose I kind of nullified it within my first few sentences), but that's the best answer I can give as to why blogging is important to me professionally.

You may have disabled my ad, but not my middle finger!

Dear Facebook, 

Why do you hate your users?  I feel like I've tried to maintain this relationship through thick and thin, but you just don't seem interested.  First it was the credit card.  Dartmouth is a pretty credible place, don't you think?  Have you ever heard of the Ivy League?  So why don't you want to add our credit card to our account, telling us time and time again that we have the wrong billing address when we've confirmed it with the bank?  We scoured the Internet for some sort of support phone number to reach you at (which we figured you surely had in cases like this) but alas, it seemed you just didn't want to talk to us.  But we forgave you.

Then you deleted our account, expecting businesses to use their employees personal accounts to place ads.  Have you ever worked for someone Facebook?  Would you want to give them access to your personal, private accounts to run ads?  We thought you would understand this because you have so many privacy options on your site.  Some employees don't feel comfortable letting their employers into their personal lives, nor by your own admission should they have to.  So we created a separate account with a separate email address strictly for the use of advertising and when you found it you deleted it along with all of our ad data.  We had a hard time overlooking this one, but still we came back.  We created another stealth account (though refuse to send help requests from it for fear of deletion) and used someone's personal credit card to fund it and everything seemed to be working fine. 

But then you betrayed us yet again by disabling our ad.  Look, is this ad really so bad? 

It went through fine and looked like it was going to go in the queue, but then you decided it just wasn't up to your standards. What was so offensive? 

A right angle quote.  Apparently you're too good for that.  Ignore the fact that it works with what our users are use to within the conventions of our website and that's the audience we're targeting.  Those crazy Ivy League grads....really your team of outsourced experts run by a 23-year-old ultimately know better than they do.  

Then you wouldn't let us make a quick edit on the ad, instead requiring us to start from step one.  Would a simple edit button on rejected ads be too much to ask, particularly when all that is needed is one stroke of the delete key?   

But worst of all Facebook, you didn't even bother to notify us that you had rejected us. You let us think that it was running and everything was well and good, when in fact you were plotting against us the whole time.  

I just don't know how much more we can take, Facebook.  We consider ourselves pretty forgiving and flexible but you may have crossed the line this time.  Why do you hate us so?  Why don't you want us to give you our money?  I guess we're just not good enough.

Salaries: The Ultimate Indication of Value

Whenever someone declares the "death of print media" in the higher ed blog world, usually a discussion about financial parity of the web and print in the budgeting process is not far behind. People try to use this as a measuring stick for how much institutions value the web versus their value of print publications. I've previously argued that this notion is naive at best. 

I think a better indicator is salary.  I touched on salary as a motivating factor for employees a bit yesterday and have been pondering it ever since. I don't think it's the only motivating factor, mind you - a great boss, work environment and buy-in to the core values of an organization goes a long way.  But let's be honest - we all have rent or a mortgage to pay and money doesn't grow on trees. 

Let's look at some background.  We all have different titles and job responsibilities so here is a sampling of national average salary ranges from Salary.com for the following positions: 

Web Designer

Web Producer

Web Content Manager 

Website Manager

If an institution truly values its web presence, then they will do their best to bring salaries more into line with national averages.  This is the only way to attract high quality employees.  The old adage "you get what you pay for" holds very true.    

Now, to be fair, I think that we all know that higher education is not going to pay as much as the corporate sector. I view it as a trade off for better benefits and job security (for the most part) and eliminating the cognitive dissonance of working for "the man." But I think reviewing our salaries within the context of national averages is very telling.  

As with many blogs I write, here is my personal story to illustrate the point: When I started as interactive recruitment manager at my last school it was a brand new position and the salary was pegged ridiculously low - mid 30s.  I could say that of the descriptions above, it was a hybrid of content manager and designer.  I found out a year later that it was so low because it wasn't pegged as a technology position at all - it was pegged as an admissions counselor position even though I had no caseload.  I fought them on it and got a modest raise out of it, but the situation really left me dumbfounded.  This is a place that would go on and on about how much they value the web and how powerful it is...but they didn't want to pay their employees to actually develop it.  That really showed me a lot about how much the institution ACTUALLY valued the web or the people they had managing it.  It was the first thing that really got me hemming and hawing about whether I would stay in that position any more than a few years.   

Fast forward another year and I'm interviewing for my current job.  In my first phone interview, I was asked what salary I was looking for.  In my head, I'm thinking "my salary is a joke now and I'm looking for a substantial increase" but I didn't think that would go over well and refused to answer, explaining that I had been forced to fight for my current salary and that their initial offer would really show me how much they value their web employees.  They respected that and a few weeks later, after an in-person interview, I was offered the job.   I had already made up my mind to accept if it was offered but the fact that I also got a very decent salary offer that was in exactly the range I was looking for put me over the top.  This was a place that wanted me and valued what I could bring to the web team!  It just starts it off on a great foot.  They don't have to prove to me anymore that they put value into what I do - they've already shown it.  So now, if I run into problems with other employees that are still stuck in the "print as the only meaningful tool" era, I know its not a matter of my office valuing or not valuing the web - it's really more of a call for me to present the case that the web is just as powerful and back it up with numbers.  Attitudes won't change overnight but I don't go home at the end of the day feeling like I'm viewed as a superfluous employee.   

Salary isn't everything, but it's definitely an indicator. Higher education is all about politics and like any good politician, higher ed administrators can pay lip service all day long to calm their uppity constituents down.  But they show their true colors when it comes to the numbers.  If they truly value the web, they will value every part of building and maintaining it - particularly the employees they've brought on to manage it.  If they don't truly value it, they are going to undervalue you and the work you are doing.  

So why are web standards important?

Many years ago, I could roughly be characterized as a standards nazi.  And then I started working in higher education!  All of a sudden, it wasn't important anymore.  What was important was banging stuff out the door and making sure it looked decent - not great, but presentable. And, yeah, I'm aware that it's better to use really clean code and make sure all of it validates and separate your presentation and content and write beautiful CSS-layouts instead of tables-based ones, but frankly I'm making crap money (compared to the corporate world) and working way too many hours and not being respected because all I do is "play on the web" and just don't feel like going the extra mile to write code that will make geeks go "ohhhhhhhhhhh....."

I would be shocked if I was the only one who could tell that story.  In fact, I know I'm not as I've heard similar ones from more than a few web people who have somehow stumbled into higher education.  But as professionals, it's time to start holding ourselves to higher standards (no pun intended).   

The problems: 

1) Marketing is about the message, not necessarily about the back end of the technology that's conveying it.  I don't think its wrong that the web is located hierarchically under marketing/communications at many colleges/universities.  In fact, I think that's exactly where it SHOULD be located.  What irks me is that the people who end up managing the people responsible for the web usually have no idea what goes into using it as a tool to convey a message.  Not only that, but many have little desire to learn - they've got their print stuff down and that's all that really matters.  I remember sitting in a former boss's office circa 2004 and trying to explain the W3C and why its important and got a lot of blank stares and nods.  It's not that I think managers should know every in and out, but I think that if you're going to manage something, you have an obligation to bring yourself up to speed with the basics and for that, your employees can be your most valuable resource (assuming you've made good hiring decisions!)

2) Standards aren't rewarded.  We're all stretched to the limit in terms of how much time we have to dedicate to projects and its just human nature to want to spend that time working on the things that are going to get us the raises and the promotions and the accolades. Standards aren't going to do that, precisely for the reasons I outlined above - higher ups don't understand them or why they are important.  So you can spend hours working on them but what they are going to see is a website that, outwardly, basically looks and functions the same and think that you haven't dedicated your time wisely - no raise for you!

Frankly, I don't know how to solve either of those problems.  Ultimately it comes down to a mindset shift in higher ups and we all know that that's something we have little to no control over.  I think continual education (and a little prayer if that's your thing) is really all we have.  Maybe some of the arguments below will help.

So why are standards important anyway?

Way back when many of us first started building websites, we had to muddle our way through getting our pages to display the way we wanted them to because HTML was suppose to be a presentation language.  So we used lots of nested tables and font tags to make everything look pretty.  Then standards came along and those that embraced them found it was like the clouds opening and the hallelujah choir playing.  

It makes your life easier: Separating presentation and content makes it infinitely easier to maintain your content.  This is one possible argument to use with your boss - it may take some time now but down the road when you decide you want every link on our website to be bright red in large font and blinking, I will only have to change that in one place instead of in 5,000!*  It also makes your content degrade as well as possible, given the fact that we have no idea if the pages we create today will be able to be read 100 years from now

It makes your pages more accessible: It doesn't make your pages completely accessible, but it gets you towards that.  How would you like to be the first school sued by the ADA for not allowing people with disabilities to surf your pages?  Potential lawsuits also make good arguments with the bosses....

It makes things load faster: Ok, so maybe this is less important than it was in the days of prolific dial-up, but whether you want to believe it or not people do still use it! 

Improve search engine rankings: Search engines like well-structured, clean  markup, which means more visitors to your pages. 

Better user experience: You don't know what type of device your users will be viewing your pages on but standards can help you be pretty sure that it's going to work on the largest number of devices.  

It's the professional thing to do: You may think "who cares....my salary is a joke" now**.  But ever want to move out of higher education and into the real web world and double (if not triple) your salary? Well you better know standards because you're going to have a tough time getting  your foot in the door at any design reputable shop without them.  

Alright, I'm convinced.  Where do I get started?!

An important thing is to make sure you are referencing reliable content when you're looking for information.  There are tons of books out there at your local Barnes and Noble and loads of useful links out there.  The biggest thing, I think, is that you need to be honest with yourself that this is not an overnight "quick fix" and will probably involve quite a bit of frustration.  And you'll need to weave it into banging the time sensitive stuff out the door.  But I'm confident it can be done and I'm embarking on it here as an example of that.  It's not that I don't have my fair share of things to do....I think it's something that I'm professionally obligated to do.  So look for more blogs on this topic in the future, as I prepare to spend the next several months looking like this at my computer: 

*to be clear, my boss rules and would never make me make every link on a site large, red and blinking

**any references to salary are not a reference to my own being poor...i'm pretty cool with it in fact...moreso a reference to broader higher ed thing of not paying web people very well.

Well that was interesting....

So I just got a call from Shelley Wetzel.  Obviously I was more than a bit taken aback because I had posted a rant the other day that used the eduWeb conference as a example of what I feel is a very broken system of web development in higher education.  Shelley took issue with a few things that I said (and frankly, I probably would too if I was in her position) but I stand by my original post.  But then she gave me an interesting offer - come up with a track for the 2009 conference.  And all I could think was good for her...not that she made me the offer specifically...but that she would make that offer to anyone.  "Here, come up with a way to deviate from a thing that is currently running (at least outwardly) relatively smoothly."  Her current formula seems to be working just fine so potentially changing it on her part is taking a risk that I don't know if I would take if I were in her shoes.  

So I've been running my mouth about a broken system for a while and now I've got a cool chance to try to affect some change, at least on a small scale.  For those of you who read my rant, I hope you took away that my problem is not with eduWeb specifically (as I said, I think its fine for what it is), but rather with this idea that managers just don't "get it" and that things that focus too much on the glitz and the flash that have infiltrated the imaginations of many colleges without regard for practicality, results orientation and user experience just perpetuates the problem. And have perpetuated it for the last couple of years now.  I should have done key takeaways just to make sure, but alas.    

So how do I use this opportunity to try and effect some change?  I've got a few ideas that I want to flesh out but if you've been to the eduWeb conference and have suggestions on what you think is missing, please comment or email me!  I've got my opinions but I'd be the first to say that they are mine and I could be completely wrong so I would love any thoughts or input that anyone out there in blog land would like to give.   

Email personalization is bad? Hmmm....not quite the whole story.

So there was a post on ReadWriteWeb yesterday about a new study that says too much personalization in email can backfire.  Now, I'm convinced that technology pundits are never happier than when they are decrying something so I went to the original article on the study they cited and found the following: The level of personalization had LITTLE to do with people's reaction - instead, it depended on the VALUE the message offered them.  

Gratuitous personalization + value = good!

Gratuitous personalization + no value = bad!

No personalization + value = good!

No personalization + no value = bad!

This isn't rocket science, folks. 

All this study is really saying is what good marketers should have already known - speaking to the interests of the users is the way to go.  I think that sometimes, this may come from personalization.  More often though, I think it comes from segmentation. Instead of overloading an email with content that is irrelevant to the user, why not use that information to segment your campaigns to better target the  message to the user's needs?  For example, for you admissions email marketings out there - send different segmented messages to your inquiries, applicants, accepts and deposited students instead of one blanket e-newsletter.  For development, use class  year to segment messages with different iconography that is familiar to the user depending on what era they attended your institution.  This can make them feel like you know them without being overt about it, while at the same time offering the value this student actually recommends.  

Update on Facebook Ads

When I posted on Segmenting and Integrating Facebook Social Ads a month ago, I promised an update on the results, once the ads had stopped running.  I was satisfied with the overall results, while not being ecstatic: 

Maybe its the fact that when I do email ROI, I get a marketing ROI in the thousands, it not tens of thousands?  So 237%, while still good by any standard, was a bit depressing for me. 

The most interesting piece of information that came out of it was that the only ads where clicks resulted in transactions were the ones that were based on the year the person graduated and directed them to our honor roll (to guilt trip them into giving if their name wasn't included on it yet.  So while I wasn't sure if it was a good idea in my original post, when I let it run its course it was the only one that worked.  As a reminder, here is what those ads looked like, followed by the GA e-commerce stats: 

I found it very interesting that the main ads, which led the user to the challenge landing page, didn't result in any gifts.  Next time, I think I'll test leading them to the challenge landing page versus leading them directly to the gift form.  All the stats tell me that people are much more likely to give if you just send them directly to the gift form - they don't even have to think about it.

I also have to wonder if there was just over-communication during this challenge - I really noticed that both the email stats and the Facebook stats started to pitter out as it went on.  Maybe taking a closer look at the user experience next time will be helpful.  Maybe being more clever in what we deploy and when we deploy it next time.  

But back to Facebook ads, I'm not jumping up and down over the results, but am I satisfied.  Anytime you get an ROI of over 100%, you're in the clear.  Plus, since we used this as an opportunity to test strategies we hadn't used before, it's great information to use for next time.

(And yes, I understand the irony of posting a blog devoted entirely to web marketing directly after posting one that took a harsh line with people only being interesting in marketing.  But now I'm going to go work on a web style guide and revamping my properties to make them more standards compliant so I'm OK with that ;-)

Ok, so here's my thing with EduWeb...

I was talking with Kyle James (:-P) and he said that he wished I would stop trashing EduWeb.  Here's the thing - I don't feel like I'm trashing it.  I think that EduWeb is fine for what it is and that its a great place for people who don't have a lot of experience doing these sort of things in a higher education environment to become acclimated and to meet other people who are doing the same thing at other schools.  There's a place for stuff like that.  I also think that EduWeb is only giving people info on subjects they THINK are important and WANT to know about.  Nothing wrong with that either.  

My issue with the conference (and many many others like it....) is that it perpetuates everything that is wrong with the current higher education web mentality and it drives me bloody batty.  Let's spend 3 days talking about glitz and flash and call it a web conference.  The problem is that's not all the web.  Talking about social networking and admissions cycles and admissions videos and case studies from colleges (aka "look at how cool we are! :::pat selves on back::::") and topic tables (aka sell me your product) and what teenagers want and that bloody ridiculous study the purports to rate the top 100 college websites but the only websites that are included are the ones from the schools with the most PHYSICAL WIRE in the ground IS NOT THE REAL WEB.  IT'S MARKETING. 

Now, there is nothing wrong with marketing.  Heck, I'm presenting in November at the American Marketing Association Symposium just to make sure.  Marketing is a vital aspect of this thing and I think that any web person worth their salt will have a familiarity with the subject and its basic principles.  But the web is so much more than that and conferences like this do very little to go beyond it.  I see a few presentations on the EduWeb schedule that I think will go beyond fluff - the ones on usability testing (though they look to be roughly the same presentation based on the description), the one on AJAX looks OK, the table topic on microformats is intriguing and I would definitely hit Dimitri Glazkov's presentation on information architecture.  But that's it.  So for a conference with "Web" in the title (and no mention of marketing), 90% of the presentations your getting are about marketing and not about the web.  Maybe call it EduWebMarketing and I'd have less of an issue with it. Not as snazzy I realize, but much more authentic. 

So what does this perpetuate in the minds of higher ups (and in the minds of budding practitioners too)?  That marketing is the only thing that is really important.  Not design.  Not usability.  Not compliance.  Just marketing.  So when hiring decisions are made, who do you think will get the job?  Here's an example - I love the person who filled my former position to death but he has literally no web experience.  None.  A few HTML lessons with me.  That's it.  Yet based on his admissions (marketing) experience, and the fact that he knows how to use MySpace and Facebook, he was hired do to a job were success depends on a more technical skillset.  But the people that hired him only ever focused on the marketing part so they ignored what he didn't have.  And I worry for him - again, love him to death and I think he's extremely smart - but I had 8 or 9 years of web experience when I took that job and you just can't build that overnight.  And I know this is not the only place where a hiring decision like that has been made.  Ultimately, stuff like this is why higher ed websites will continue to be the bastard children of the web.  

Plus at EduWeb, there are too many damn vendors.  Vendors are fine too - I occasionally like giving my money to them.  And I like talking to them at conferences on MY terms, because you'll occasionally find one that will be really helpful.  I just don't like paying money to attend a conference were I should be learning and instead am being sold one product or another at every opportunity.