Late at night last July, I was with my Millennial son when he stopped at a gas station to fill up. As he got out of his car, a supposedly down on his luck stranger approached him and asked for some money for gas. Deciding to pump a couple of gallons of gas in the guy’s car, he put his ATM/credit card into the gas pump. But nothing happened. He then gave him a couple of bucks, but the guy looked suspicious and wasn’t either pumping the gas or leaving the station.
Concerned that his credit card may be vulnerable, I watched my son, in about 5 minutes time, use his BlackBerry to go online with his bank, transfer all money out of vulnerable accounts, cancel the card and order a new one. It was amazing to watch him do all of that so quickly. It was fascinating to watch a digital native at work.
Fast forward to the World Series. After instant replay had exposed terrible performances by Major League Baseball umpires during the playoffs, technology again points out glaring mistakes by umpires in the World Series. Asked about implementing instant replay to correct mistakes, Commissioner Bud Selig, says, “Yes, we had some incidents that certainly need to be looked at…But do I believe in instant replay? No, I do not. Human Error is part of our sport.”
Umpire calls runner safe
Amazing. While this statement could have been stated 30 or 40 years ago without controversy, it’s simply an unacceptable statement today. And the audience baseball isn’t reaching–the under-35 market–isn’t buying it. It may sound right to Selig, but it doesn’t ring true for any brand in today’s market–you’re not going to get it right when you have the ability to do so?
It’s not just that those umpiring mistakes become viral, it’s that the world is different now. We are changing. Or more accurately said, those of us who are not digital natives are changing. Digital natives aren’t changing. They are by definition, connected.
While Selig and others may see technology as an add-on to life as usual, technology is becoming a way of life. It is changing how life is experienced.
What’s this mean for marketing higher education?
1. It is the chief marketing officer’s role in leading his/her team to educate the president, administrative colleagues, and faculty leadership on how and how much technology is changing people and the marketing environment.
3. Your primary consumers–your students–are on mobile devices constantly. What do they see when they visit your website? Your marketing plan needs to include a mobile strategy, beginning with adapting your website for mobile devices. Your students and prospective students shouldn’t have to go online with their Mac or PC in order to navigate your site.
All of us make mistakes, just like major league umpires. But when you’re responsible for marketing strategy for your college or university, don’t pull a Bud Selig and underestimate the significant sea changes happening in the marketing environment that impact your ability to connect with your students, constituents and communities.
Get the right people in the right seats on the bus.
Jim Collins often quoted mantra has worked well for years to describe how the best companies do business. And it’s true. Those of us who have had the responsibility of putting organizations together know just how vital it is to hire the right people in the right positions and have them committed to the same mission and goals.
But for many organizations, their actual mantra turns out to be:
Get the right people on the bus, and make sure their seat belts are fastened.
The need to control. Not exactly a corporate value that reacts well to this new marketing environment of technology empowered consumers. Control combined with senior management not getting the larger picture of what’s happening–that the very nature of how companies do business is changing–leads companies to restrict social media access for their employees.
This reaction to social media reveals a failure of management to understand how their employees are changing. As social media is democratizing the media and empowering consumers, management must realize that their employees are now empowered consumers themselves who may be able to advance their company’s brand in social media communities.
For profit corporations could learn a thing or two from higher education.
Administrative control is an illusion at best in most colleges and universities. Faculty don’t easily hop on the administration’s bus. Shared governance and very basic but significant differences in perspective exist between faculty and administration. Both parties can’t even agree on whose bus it is, let alone who should be driving it. And certainly no seat belts are fastened.
Instead of a bus, an airport hub may describe how higher education works. Our campus is our hub. We may not get everyone on the same plane, but from our hub we connect with multiple and various consumers and communities.
Yes, we connect our employees with our consumers. Our business model depends on it. And we achieve better results with our student-consumers when that interaction happens outside the classroom too. So, we develop programs to connect faculty and staff with prospective and current students, as well as with alumni, donors, community members, media, etc.
Because higher education already has these programs in place, colleges and universities are strategically positioned to initiate social media employee brand advocacy programs.
We already have community mangers across the campus. Think admissions, alumni relations, community relations, corporate relations, etc. These positions are already in place. Why not empower them as social media community managers–your brand advocates in social media–to listen to and interact with your various and multiple communities.
And why stop there? How about having other employees on campus who have professional communities to which they belong represent our campuses in those social spaces. Forrester Research is advocating such an approach for corporations. This is an easy transition for higher education.
Of course, such a program depends on a positive institutional culture where your employees are also your fans, and an effective integrated marketing and branding program that is internal in scope as well as external. By branding your institution internally with faculty and staff, they’ll understand your institution’s branding messages and be prepared to interact with your various and multiple communities out there beyond your hub.
What’s this mean for marketing higher education? Take a look at the following Google image of the impact of an airline hub on communities in the continent and beyond. Imagine those connections being made by your faculty and staff in social media. Imagine channeling the energy of your technology empowered employees to advance your brand with your various and multiple communities out there.
Instead of working to stop this from happening–which is virtually impossible on a university campus anyway–why not work to empower your campus talent to advance your mission and brand in social media? It’s within your reach.
Branding. It’s About Listening, And Then Being Creatively Authentic. Oh, And It’s Not Dead.
As a marketing and branding professional, I am a proponent of social media. The game is changing, and it’s vital for colleges and universities and other organizations to pay attention and to get strategically plugged into social media. But I haven’t drank the Koolaid. A few weeks ago, however, I found someone who has.
Augustine Fou, in his article, Branding Today: Why It’s Ineffective, Irrelevant, Irritating, and Impotent gives us a piece that reads like an argument for a wacky California ballot proposition. Not distinguishing between marketing and branding, or good branding and bad branding; not just being content to distinguish between today’s marketing environment vs. the Mad Men era of advertising, Fou simply declares that branding is dead because of today’s technology empowered consumers who will tell you what your brand is. Talk about overreaching.
Even his examples of brands that do not need branding are evidence of brilliant branding (e.g. Apple). His claim that colors, logos, and the like (for instance, costumes and art direction in the I’m a Mac television commercials) don’t matter to consumers, or make a difference in branding campaigns, flies in the face of research on consumers, media, and on how our brains work. Only someone operating with half a brain (the left side) could make such a case.
But Fou’s overall point about branding in today’s market bears truth. Truly, gone are the days when you could make up things about your brand and expect to get the public to buy it just because you said it. Social media today empowers your consumers to let you and others know how you’re doing with your product(s). The new Google Sidewiki is only the beginning.
Thus, as Fou puts it, you must have or develop a “kick ass product” and maintain it. And I agree. Branding and marketing are muçh more than just promotion. It’s also about your product and organization. And that’s where expert “branding” begins.
Your product must be good. And your branding of it must be authentic. Social media will allow you to find out what your brand is in the minds of your consumers and constituencies, if you listen. And if you listen, you’ll be able to take the information you’ve learned to improve your product and business processes, and creatively craft a branding message and campaign that will resonate with your customers and constituencies and attract more fans.
Because the brand is yours. The message is yours. The logo, colors, and art direction are yours. The words you select to describe your brand and your products are yours. Your customers, students, alumni, etc. are not going to do that work for you. They’ll react to what you present. They’ll let you know if you nailed it or blown it. If you’re really good at branding and building community, your customers may feel like it’s their brand. That’s the goal. But they’re not the ones who are going to do the important work of branding the institution.
Those of us involved in marketing higher education know that social media isn’t going to take away our responsibility to brand our colleges and universities. For years, we’ve had communities of connected and vocal fans and constituents (e.g., students, alumni, faculty, etc.) who have been letting us know what they think our brands are and should be. But that has not killed branding or rendered it useless. Rather, we have found that our branding has the potential to build those communities and to build community, both of which attract new fans to the cause.
In 2005, when I was a university chief marketing officer, we made search engine optimization (SEO) a priority in our marketing plan and became more competitive online. Our web team did a great job improving our ranking and getting our name in front of more people who were searching for college. It was an important move on our part, perhaps ahead of the curve in marketing higher education at that time. But it no longer should be. There are significant sea changes happening in the marketing environment, and SEO needs to be a priority for any college or university marketing plan.
That’s why I’ve asked David Dalka to be a guest author regarding SEO. David is presently a web analytics marketing strategy consultant and marketing keynote speaker. In the following guest blog post, David makes the case as to why SEO is vital to effective University Marketing and Content Success…
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David Dalka
In my post, How University Vice President of Communications and Content Strategy Leadership Roles Are Likely To Change, I discussed the need for the VP of Communications and Content Strategy to have new skills. I stated, the “Individual Will Have World Class Search Engine Optimization Skills.” Put simply, content constructed to meet the way people search is the best way to meet the relevant needs of a customer. Relevancy is the superior, but highly misunderstood currency that Internet search engines provide. Make no mistake, we live in times where mass marketing mediums are declining in relevancy and pricing power, as increasingly relevant and micro-targeted methods emerge. Realizing that you need to think differently–as search is about relevancy/pull and not push marketing–is step one. It requires significant retraining, especially for marketers with traditional skills. First, you have to start to comprehend why search marketing is a strategic leadership issue. Go ahead, please do that now, it’s why you are here. Got it? Good.
It’s time for the “Cult of Volume” to embrace relevancy and better success metrics. Some even go far as to suggest “The False Religion of Branding” is coming close to its final time of worship in response to Augustine Fou’s recent post, “Branding Today: Why It’s Ineffective, Irrelevant, Irritating, and Impotent.”
In these times of lowering marketing budgets, universities need to create more marketing impact with less monetary resources and staff. Currently there is a lot of buzz around social media, but even fans of the medium know that social media can be hard and resource intensive!
In addition to existing perceived value in society, universities currently have a strong portfolio of unique assets when it comes to creating and optimizing content for search engine optimization (SEO):
Quantity of Students — Most universities have thousands of students! All of them are creating content ranging from random user generated content photos on a mobile phone to research projects taking dozens of years. You should not only be leveraging this content to enable and position their personal brands for success, you should be doing it to index useful attribute based content that will be relevant to people using search engines.
Classroom Activities — Don’t have a movie studio in town? No sweat! Use increasingly low cost video cameras to create your video content to give people valuable experience and to enable the creation of personal branding content for entrepreneur enablement.
Alumni and History — This is an almost untouched, but highly fertile area. Alumni stories and lives show prospective students what their potential outcomes are in reality. More importantly, this activity can create value for alumni throughout their lifetimes and change the paradigm from endless offers of secondary education or increasingly insensitive requests for donations from alumni not in a position to give.
However, many universities have unique hurdles that make the above advantages difficult to achieve:
Department Silos — Student acquisition, career services, alumni, sports, and faculty all have different agendas and aren’t managed to mutual goals that make sense for students, alumni, and other stakeholders.
President’s Office Can’t Successfully Lead the Change (Even If It Wants To) — Put simply, there is usually a lack of understanding of content strategy and technology preventing content strategy success in the President’s office. Generation gap issues also play a role. Ultimately, this makes it difficult to visualize the drivers of the proper future state, and difficult to lead the organizational, budget, and organizational silos and content process flow mapping necessary to create the success. It’s a severe bottleneck. New leadership needs to be mixed into the President’s office either full-time or via management consulting.
Cat Herding — Many universities have faculty and departments that are allowed to do whatever they’d like with research, and this mentality often carries over to their department’s web site and web content. Universities need a clear, well thought out and consistent content strategy like MIT, Harvard, or Stanford which average more than a million unique visitors a month. Such strategies and universities are few and far between. This needs to change, yet history shows that universities don’t change well or quickly.
The potential to create a search engine optimization (SEO) savvy organization with optimal web site structure that can successfully leverage additional content is quite clear for those organizations determined to put the right leadership in place to capture the change in the way that Tom Peters would. We are moving from a primarily paid media economy to a primarily content strategy driven economy due to the effects of search marketing and social media, and the resulting weakening of traditional media monopolies. The magnitude of this change is obviously large, but it’s still in its early phases. Embrace and explore the possibilities to build meaningful long tail search marketing differentiation from peer institutions. The web often rewards first movers, and it likely will in this situation as it plays out.
The preceding was a guest blog post by David Dalka. David is a web analytics marketing strategy consultant and marketing keynote speaker available to assist the President’s Office or for profit businesses in creating effective content and community strategies. David was scheduled to give a keynote speech in October at the 2009 EMG Brand Manager’s Summit, however it was put on hold until Fall 2010.
I recently listened to an audio interview on the blog, Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang. The post was titled, Three Recommendations for Marketing Leaders. I encourage you to listen to the 11 minute interview. It’s important stuff, and it got me thinking about its implications for higher education.
Based on a Forrester Research report on The Future of the Social Web, Jeremiah makes three points:
Social colonization
“One of the key findings in the next few years is we’re entering an era called “social colonization.” And essentially what this means is that many social networks will span beyond Facebook.com or MySpace or Twitter.com and they’re going to be embedded on your corporate website. And this is going to happen even inside of browsers, so even if you don’t choose to turn on social features, your corporate website, your product pages, will be social, and you cannot stop it. It’s inevitable. Now this should really be making marketers shake in their boots because it means that customers can rely on each other for recommendations, not solely on what you, a brand marketer, is saying to them on that corporate webpage.”
The 80/20 rule for social media
“When it comes to social marketing success, 80% is about the strategy–the process, the roles, the procedures, the measurement and the budget that you’re going to need, and stakeholders internally. Your corporate culture is going to dictate whether or not your social marketing will be successful…So we see roles, like the social media strategist or a derivative of that title appearing. And multiple community managers that have dedicated roles to communicate with customers…Don’t just treat social marketing as an add-on to your advertising or to your marketing. This is a long-term program and you have to put the appropriate resources towards it.”
CMOs have an opportunity to be more strategic within a company.
“You’re going to find that your support organization is doing social–your product development team, your product engineers, your client team, your HR team, your sales team, marketing of course…Every single touch point…is going to be impacted by social and they’re going to start using these different tools. Now that’s both a threat and an opportunity for you as a marketer. Threats are pretty obvious. You don’t have as much control over communications from the tower as you used to. A lot of communications are happening at the edges of the company.
The opportunity here is for you to lead and to set down guidelines that both protect the company, yet empower all these people at the edges of the company to participate and expand the brand. So you should be taking a more active role in ‘how can we use customers in all of these customer touch points to improve the overall customer experience.’”
If Forrester’s research and Jeremiah’s analysis hold true, what are the implications for marketing higher education? Seven thoughts:
1. In a sense, higher ed is ahead of the game. Its consumers to a significant degree already define what our brands are. Think party schools, for example. Or, those brands that are known by their standout programs. Or, those schools with brands tied to religious values and experience.
2. Is higher ed ready for this? Are we ready for unvetted opinions about us to appear with our website? Even though blogs and vlogs are beginning to become the norm, those are to some degree controlled by the institution. Many institutions will have serious concerns about this.
3. Colleges and universities are well prepared to address various constituencies through social media. We have many community managers on our campuses responsible for relationships with prospective students, students, parents, alumni, donors, community leaders, political leaders, church leaders, etc.
4. Clearly, what Jeremiah is describing is well beyond what almost all colleges and universities are doing now in social media. How many from the top-down, involving most departments on campus, have a comprehensive social media policy?
5. Higher ed’s organizational structures preclude it from adopting a top-down social media strategy. Social media will be and is being adopted as other marketing strategies have been adopted: school by school, program by program, silo by silo. The challenge for the CMO is how to get a measure of control of something so democratic and decentralized. As usual, institutional culture will play a huge role.
6. The university chief marketing and communications officer will need to preach the message that social media is more than just advertising. It’ll take this understanding from the very top down to get the financial commitment necessary to fund a comprehensive social media program.
7. Bottom-line? Is higher education really ready to be responsive to student and customer concerns and opinions? Will our colleges and universities truly embrace social media? In Social Media Brand Management, I wrote about how higher ed does not have a good history of doing so. Social media will be pushing us even harder to change.
CONSUMER OR STUDENT?
This is Part Three of a series called, Marketing in the Wonderful and Wacky World of Higher Education.
What a special time of year this is on college campuses nationwide. Student leaders and fall student athletes have returned to campus. The fall term draws near. While summer on college campuses is a welcome break after a long year, by the time August arrives, I’ve always been ready for our students to return. Or, should I say, our consumers? It’s actually both.
In higher education, we have more than just consumers. Importantly and beautifully, we also have students. It is a difference with a distinction–a distinction that produces student learning, but ends up causing some confusion on our campuses.
Our consumers enter college life as students who are expecting to be intensely challenged. The role of colleges and universities is to push these students to think critically and act responsibly, to grow up and think beyond themselves, to listen to different viewpoints, to think through the issues of our world, to find their voice, to excel. Not exactly “the customer is always right” stuff.
In this academic process, students have a power role on campus as they are (should be) the most important part of the core product of the university: student learning.
Students are also involved in education outside of the classroom where they hopefully mature and leave the university as responsible adults and citizens as a result of the community in which they lived and learned. Martin Luther King said, “the function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically…intelligence plus character-that is the goal of true education.”
And true education is vital for society. As Robert Franklin, president of Morehouse College, said on CNN talking about teaching students scripts for success in life, “if the village elders don’t do it, the village idiots will.”
In the case of higher education, the village elders are largely interested and caring professors and student affairs mentors who challenge students to get it right, think it through again, be responsible, so on and so forth. (I’ll let you figure out who the village idiots are.)
But should our consumers be treated like students by everyone on our campus? This is where it gets confusing for our staff.
While it is clear that students have signed up to be challenged by professors and student affairs mentors, they haven’t signed up for others to do the same. Unfortunately, each of our campuses have certain staff who challenge their customers to be more responsible as if their customers are their students and their office is their classroom. These staff members perceive their customers as being just students, who unfortunately are near the bottom of the food chain when they are outside the classroom.
Think about your most customer service challenged departments on campus. While these departments employ many wonderfully committed individuals, a few don’t even think of students as customers. So, with attitude, they challenge them to grow up and be responsible. And why not? Students are immature. They don’t read instructions. They want exceptions. They don’t meet deadlines. They violate our rules. Etc, etc., etc.
In addition to the negative effect on student retention, this behavior becomes a problem as the university desires a long-term relationship with its customers. When we call them, some of our alumni think, “Now you care? What’s changed? Oh, you want a donation from me now?”
In our wonderful and wacky world of higher education, customers are also students, and students are also customers. As leaders in marketing higher education, one of our many roles is to help our university community realize the difference between the two.
Previously in this series:
Marketing Used to be a Dirty Word. Now It’s a Necessary Evil.
I walked my daughter down the aisle last Sunday evening. She married the love of her life. It was an event that she had been looking forward to for months, and well, for her entire life. It was an emotional day for all of us. The wedding held meaning. We were different because of it. It was a rite of passage.
In order to grasp it, our daughter laid aside conventional wisdom turning down an opportunity to go pro in women’s soccer. She was an All American last year at UCLA, and was projected to be a late first round or early second round selection in the Women’s Professional Soccer league draft.
We were stunned to hear that she had backed out of the draft. How could she pass up such a rare opportunity? But our daughter’s decision was driven by a strong internal sense of what she wanted to do and what was right for her. She wanted to get married and finish her degree this year. And we are so happy for her.
Such is the power of love, and the power of a rite of passage that creates a pathway for life.
Such a rite of passage has been the promise of higher education. For decades now, this idea that college is a rite of passage to adulthood has been a tremendous advantage in marketing higher education. We haven’t had to sell the dream. We haven’t had to create the need.
In marketing higher education, we facilitate the college search process. Prospective students and parents come to us to see if we are able to deliver on the dream. We try to distinguish ourselves from one another while the media and college football, March Madness and all the other mythic rituals of college life reinforce what a wonderful rite of passage it is that we offer.
So, it should not be surprising that students and families have been willing to go deeply into debt to experience what they hope will be their rite of passage to adulthood. No matter how much we’ve raised tuition, many have continued to chase the college dream. But the dream’s been fading. And truth is, it’s been fading for sometime now.
The number of students in this country who can afford a four-year degree is diminishing. For years, the college dream has been financed by credit. But fewer are now willing to go into debt. And for those willing, the recession has taken away their options for doing so. In a much more racially and ethnically diverse country, more and more high school graduates don’t look to expensive colleges and universities for their future. It’s no longer seen by as many as a rite of passage.
Now it looks as though the government may no longer oblige four-year institutions to the degree it has in the past. With a realization that the four-year higher education enterprise cannot possibly educate all, and that job training will be vital for our country, a new community college initiative is being pushed by the president (which I’ll leave for another post).
I wonder how these sea changes will affect higher education marketing and enrollment management. What happens when job training becomes a legitimate higher education pathway for many?
How will we successfully make our case for expensive higher education to markets that aren’t chasing the dream? In spite of all the wonderful programs to reach into the community to traditionally under-represented student groups, higher education has failed to make the college rite of passage a compelling dream and a financial reality for all students.
What’s clear is that the marketing environment for higher education is changing and will become more competitive. Strategies like predictive modeling that tell us who is most likely to enroll will continue be important, but we’ll need to find ways to be successful in bringing others into the fold. Our branding will need to be well thought out and executed for a broader audience. Collaborative efforts with other colleges and by higher education associations may need to be developed to try to keep four-year higher education as the ideal.
Higher education marketing will require even more finely tuned leadership as institutions look for their share of students, new revenue streams and more fundraising in a market that may be absent a national sense that a four year degree is a rite of passage for everyone.
It was 1998 and I was directing the rollout campaign for Southern California College as it was changing to a new administrative model and a new name, Vanguard University of Southern California. The campaign was moving along well with good feedback overall from our constituencies, many of whom we had surveyed.
But then we began to hear rumblings from a new influential community within our college, the History-Poli Sci LISTSERV. This discussion group of history-political science professors, students, alumni and other interested, and in many cases influential individuals on and off campus, began questioning the values of the name change, with some charging that the college was discarding its heritage and decades-long mission.
Following up on a previous invitation from a faculty colleague to join in the various discussions on the LISTSERV, I decided to become part of its conversation about the transition to university status.
Those discussion group conversations were at times enlightening, challenging, satisfying, humorous, ridiculous, and entirely beneficial for me and the campaign. I would simply listen most of the time, taking back valuable insights to the administration and rollout committee, adjusting communication strategies, and sometimes details of the name change.
Other times, I would speak up, writing calmly and clearly that what they said was just not true, referencing the meetings I had been in or quoting documents that would counter their comments. For me, it was invaluable input and an opportunity to speak to concerns.
In the end, the rollout was a huge success by most any measure. Behind the scenes, I know that my participation in that LISTSERV community was part of the reason why the rollout campaign did not go sideways.
I’ve thought recently how that experience was a foreshadowing of things to come with social media and PR. I guess I was a first-generation community manager. But it was much more manageable back then. LISTSERV was one of a few options for communities to be formed online, and the current business environment with technology-empowered consumers hadn’t taken place yet.
It’s a different PR world today. PR is no longer about pushing your agenda onto your communities. PR 2.0 for higher education is about engagement with the many publics that are involved with and impacted by your institution. It’s still about traditional media. But it’s also about monitoring the various and multiple conversations taking place in social media about your institution, and participating in those conversations.
In this recession-era higher education landscape of uncertainty, there are many alumni, friends, students and prospective students wondering how your college or university is doing. Many of them are online asking good questions, making uninformed statements, sharing concerns, and engaging others about your school.
Given what’s at stake, it’s astounding to me that some of you are not there. Their assumptions about your institution go unheard and without a response from you. Meanwhile, your press releases have less of a chance getting printed today, and fewer are reading them on your website because the conversation going on about your institution isn’t taking place at your online corporate office.
Marketing higher education in new media is about more than having a static Facebook page. It’s about engaging your many communities in social media. Your alumni, friends, students, and prospective students are there. Where are you?
My point with this video series is that even today in this environment of videos designed for websites and viewed on computer screens and hand-held devices, taking advantage of the power of the visual media would help colleges and universities communicate more effectively. And while my emphasis has been on visual storytelling, certainly interviews, narration, script, acting, music, visuals, etc. should all work in tandem to tell your story. The best videos and films are very strong in one or more of these categories, and take advantage of the inherent visual dynamics at play.
So, let’s take a look at a few college videos. The first four were produced either for the college’s website or for a television commercial. The last two were created for fundraising campaigns. I’ll comment on each briefly.
The first is an award-winning spot for Robert Morris College.
Well done, but pretty traditional in its production. The spot was designed to be very energetic and uses moving and hand-held shots, as well as students leaning into the camera, to communicate that energy. It gives you an impression that there’s a lot going on at RMC. While it is a television commercial, it would also work well on their website.
Compare that to this: a 2:00 student production that won a video competition at DePaul University. I found this video on Twitter from @debmaue.
I love this video! In only two minutes, you really come to feel like you know what the DePaul community is about. It is heartfelt and the connection with the students grows as the production continues. It does this through great performances by the students, and importantly, tight close-ups for every single shot. Alfred Hitchcock had a rule about visual storytelling that is broken all the time by filmmakers. The closer in you get with a shot, the more energy there is until you pull out again. If you want to increase the energy, feeling, emotion, etc., stay on the close-up. If you want to dissipate it, loosen the framing up. Here, the director of this student production maintained the emotion of the students by never leaving the close-up. The students, framing, and editing took it from there. Very well done.
Next up: Here. Now. UCLA. You may have seen this on television at halftime of a UCLA football game. Having had a daughter at UCLA, I think the spot captures UCLA very well. It was produced by UCLA’s School of Theatre, Film and Television.
The magic here is in the writing and in the diversity of student actors and scenes. There’s really nothing special visually about the spot, except for what they have chosen to show. But the result of the words, actors, and scenes give you the feeling that UCLA is a big-time university near the beach in sunny, entertainment-rich southern California, the university California owns where “nobody at UCLA keeps score on who you are, they just want to see what you do.” To me, that quote (and skate park scene) is a shot at arch rival USC.
The following video for West Point takes a very different approach to telling its story: Developing Leaders for a Lifetime.
West Point uses beautiful visuals along with a very left brain script and narrator. If you are patriotic, it may appeal to your emotions, but mostly this video is logical, which one would expect from a military academy. It’s heavy on words and contains a lot of information for prospective students. The main message definitely comes through that it’s a special place unlike just about any other institution of higher learning.
These last two videos take different approaches for fundraising campaigns. This first one is from Dartmouth, and was produced for their annual fund campaign. I found it on Karlyn Morissette’s website.
Dartmouth has taken a bit of a risk with this video because of its approach to the script, and choice of visuals to go along with it. There’s no doubt that Dartmouth’s alumni are a sophisticated group able to handle the logic of the message of the video. The risk it takes is that it gets away from the standard affective fundraising language, and focuses on the left brain in a logical appeal for funding given its “wacky business model.” What I wonder about is the effectiveness of the very right brain visuals. Because my right brain is trying to figure them out and is dazzled by them, am I fully hearing the appeal and logic of the narrator? Perhaps it will work. I do like this video a lot, and am curious as to how it’s been working. Kudos to Dartmouth for thinking outside the box.
Finally, a fundraising video from Vanguard University, where I was vice president for enrollment management and advancement, and assistant professor of television and film. Vanguard is a private university without a rich heritage of alumni and donors supporting it. And while it is a US News top five baccalaureate college in the West, it is a small college in need of capital improvements. This is a capital campaign video targeted to major donors who are very values-oriented.
doneThe video takes a standard approach to fundraising that went after the affective side of the brain. It was directed by Randy Argue, an independent video and feature film producer/director, and one of my former students. It is beautifully shot, uses music creatively, and takes advantage of very articulate testimonials. The video was well-received by major donors.
Well, that’s it for this post and series on how video can be more effective in marketing higher education.
Previously:
Video, Part 3: Deconstructing the Montage
Montage is the central component of the visual language of film and video. It is the juxtaposition of images to tell a story visually, the meaning of which will depend on how they are cut together. This effect happens because our brain interprets the images individually and collectively.
A good example of how montage works is the first GM Reinvention television commercial. The type of commercial was not a surprising choice for GM and its agency, Deutsch, Los Angeles. Once the car company and agency decided that they could not stay silent during the bailout/government takeover process, a commercial using stock footage set to music with a voice-over announcer was the logical choice because of the short production time required and the potential payoff of a montage approach.
I may be one of a few writing a blog who actually thought the decision to do a national TV spot was a good idea. While ideally GM needs to first prove that they have changed, the longer they stayed silent, the more dead they were becoming as a car company.
So, take 60 seconds and watch the commercial again. I’ve put the commercial in script form at the end of this post so that you may look closely at how the montage was constructed.
As you viewed the commercial, both sides of your brain were barraged with information. It is appropriate that the left side of a script (see below) is the audio/narration, because that’s what our left brain makes sense of. At the same time, our right brain is working to interpret the images on the right half of the page. If a montage is effective, the images will create meaning potentially more potent than the words on the left side.
GM Reinvention begins by setting its current situation. The images used support the words: city skylines, GM building (looking up from ground-level which implies strength), new plants unfurling their leaves in time-lapsed photography, etc.
The second half of the commercial is mostly standard fare for car commercials with multiple shots of the remaining GM makes and models in artistic and performance scenes. Some of these shots and others are there for your left brain, simply communicating concepts like Hybrid and Fuel Cell.
But other images in the second half and throughout are not there for any logical denotative purpose. They are included to give you a feeling; for example, the six shots that occur on the one line, “This is not about going out of business.” These six shots are of astronauts, a boxer, a baseball team, a hand shifting gears, and a time-lapsed city street at night. All American images.
In fact, the entire commercial plays on the sense that GM is an American institution. If there’s hope for GM, then many Americans are going to believe that there’s hope for our country in this recession. So, we get American sports images–baseball and football–both of which are American inventions.
We see a torn USA flag waving violently but still hanging on in a storm, and a track runner with a prosthetic limb, both of which say we’re beat up but not giving up. And you have a shot of a statue of an iron fist with a very fast push into it on cue with music to say strongly WE’RE MOVING FORWARD!
By the end of this commercial, GM wants you to get their key message of reinvention. If they’re successful, your sense of American pride and patriotism will align with GM.
There’s more I could add, but it would take too long for this post. But I wonder. I wonder why some of the shots are in there. I am not sure why two Pennsylvania sports teams were included (although I could guess). I just don’t know what they tried that didn’t work.
But it worked for me. I thought the commercial was well done, offering lessons for using video in marketing higher education. But then again, I have not been angry at GM. I haven’t owned a GM car since 1993. Now if AIG ran spots, you might be reading a different sort of blog post.
Next up: Video, Part 4: College Videos, A Few Examples
Previously:
Video, Part 2: Visual Storytelling
Video: Part 1: Setting the Bar Higher Than Viral
Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window
Film and video have a language of their own. It’s a visual language that combines the principles and aesthetics of shot composition with how individual shots are edited together. It’s a world in which images have power: 1) in and of themselves, and 2) because of where you place them in relation to each other.
One of the masters of visual storytelling was film director, Alfred Hitchcock. In French filmmaker and critic Francois Truffaut’s landmark book, Hitchcock/Truffaut, Truffaut asserts that “Hitchcock is one of the greatest innovators of form in the history of cinema,” and that with Hitchcock, “form does not merely embellish content, it actually creates it.”
In looking at Hitchcock’s body of work, he clearly created content through visual form. Hitchcock mastered the art of the montage in which meaning changes depending on how shots are juxtaposed. In Hitchcock/Truffaut, Hitchcock acknowledged his work in cinema grew out of foundational work on montage by Russian filmmakers, such as V.I. Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein, and describes how they were trained in the art of montage relating it to one of his films:
You see a close-up of the Russian actor, Ivan Mosjoukine. This is immediately followed by a shot of a dead baby. Back to Mosjoukine again and you read compassion on his face. Then you take away the dead baby and you show a plate of soup, and now when you go back to Mosjoukine, he looks hungry. Yet, in both cases, they used the same shot of the actor; his face was exactly the same.
In the same way, [referring to his film, Rear Window] let’s take a close-up of Stewart looking out of the window at a little dog that’s being lowered in a basket. Back to Stewart, who has a kindly smile. But if in the place of the little dog you show a half-naked girl exercising in front of her open window, and you go back to a smiling Stewart again, this time he’s seen as a dirty old man!
This is all right brain stuff talked about by author Daniel Pink in his book, A Whole New Mind, and made possible because our right brains make meaning out of what we see. Other directors have been brilliant in using the language of film to tap into our right brains and “connect seemingly unrelated ideas into something new,” as Daniel Pink puts it. In a recent post, High Concept, High Touch Marketing, I described how director Oliver Stone used the right brain of his audience members to contrast the beauty of nature with the nature of man in his film, Platoon. And Woody Allen, not known as a pure visual storyteller, combined all the elements of the visual language in his masterpiece, Interiors.
But it was Hitchcock who mastered the principles of the montage. And perhaps the greatest example of pure visual storytelling by Hitchcock is his film, Rear Window, a film in which the camera never leaves the apartment of Jimmy Stewart’s character until the end of the movie, but yet allows for all of us to become emotionally involved in the lives played out in the other apartments that we see through Stewart’s window. It’s simple visual storytelling at its best. Of course, as we look into those other apartments, we see evil in the heart of man acted out…or do we?
Hitchcock set up the story using purely visual means in the opening sequence, minus any dialogue or narration. Throughout the whole sequence our right and left brains are working in tandem interpreting what we’re seeing, making sense of it without any narration to distract us. Our minds are fully engaged thereby getting us connected to the story.
Now, let’s see how another filmmaker might have written and filmed this opening sequence using dialogue. I found this next video by whoiseyevan on YouTube. It’s great. It’s title is “How I Ruined Hitchcock’s Rear Window in Just Under 2 Minutes.” Notice how the words take away from the visuals and engage our brains less on interpreting what we’re seeing and hearing.
For those involved in marketing higher education and others, the lesson of visual storytelling is not that we shouldn’t use dialogue, narration, etc. to tell stories. It’s about the dynamics at play with the visual language. The best storytellers in film and video know how to tell powerful and touching stories visually in tandem with words, acting, and all the elements found within the visual media.
Next up: Video, Part 3: Deconstructing the Montage
Previously: Video, Part 1: Setting the Bar Higher Than Viral
In April, I wrote a post titled, Go Viral!, bemoaning the death of high fidelity in music because of MP3s, and how YouTube and handheld devices have essentially done the same thing to video, lowering the quality of what we experience visually.
But because of our mindset when we watch videos on these very small screens, viral videos involving embarrassing situations, dancing, animals, and whatever else are all the rage. The bar is set relatively low, and the potential reward is huge. Thus, it makes a lot of sense for marketers to go viral.
However, it takes more than having access to technology and some online principles to produce a video that communicates effectively and touches the audience emotionally. In marketing higher education, whether it’s a video for an annual or capital campaign, or for alumni reminding them of their experience at their alma mater, or to recruit students, you’re going to need to find ways to communicate meaningful and sometimes complex content for your audience. Unfortunately, many people producing videos online today don’t really know of the inherent dynamics at play visually when they shoot or edit video.
It’s sort of like when I cook. I am able to put ingredients together following a recipe, and even improvise a bit based on taste and what I’ve observed over the years. But even though the recipe may produce a delicious meal, I have no idea how those individual tastes worked together to get to be delicious, and I certainly have no clue how ingredients in general work together or against each other so that I may create my own delicious meal from scratch.
Pointing a camera and editing some shots together of the campus won’t necessarily cut it. What you typically get is a cookie cutter approach that ends up looking like every other college video with shots of science labs and students studying in the library with very little emotional effect. It’s similar to what happens with viewbooks. Those shots aren’t bad necessarily. They may even be shot creatively, and they are certainly part of your college’s story. But how they’re put together side by side doesn’t produce that something special.
What also doesn’t work is relying on words to communicate your concept and brand. We’re used to communicating with words. It’s really the easiest thing to do–write a script, go get some footage to go with it, and you’ve got your video. Done. Piece of cake.
Oh, and forget dialogue. The toughest thing to write in a script or screenplay is dialogue. So, typically, dramatic approaches to videos border on disaster.
Using my cooking analogy, what you should be aiming for is a way to put all the ingredients together to effectively tell a story and communicate ideas and feelings. But in order to do so, you need to at least understand the dynamics in play in visual media.
In my next post, I’ll detail the basic principle behind the language of visual storytelling. Then from there, we’ll look at some examples in the media and in higher education.
For now, your homework for Part 2 is this clip from The Birds, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Pay attention to how Hitchcock uses visuals to tell most of the story, and then try watching it with the sound turned off. That should give you a clue as to where we’re headed.
Next up: Video, Part 2: Visual Storytelling
My daughter graduated from UCLA last Friday. She accomplished much at UCLA, earning a B.A. in Sociology, and All American honors as a UCLA women’s soccer player. So, it was a grand day for us as we celebrated commencement.
In the midst of a joyful audience, the commencement speaker–Brad Delson, guitarist in the Grammy award-winning band, Linkin Park–hit a home run with his speech (comedy routine) which I may never forget. In a PR pickle, UCLA asked him to speak seven days before commencement after a much publicized Facebook campaign by students persuaded their first choice to back out.
Delson, a summa cum laude UCLA graduate, and philanthropist, was quoted about his experience at UCLA in the commencement publication:
From the first day, I had an amazing variety of studies. Not just the subjects I wanted to master but things I never would have known about if I hadn’t pursued a liberal arts education. The magic really happened when there was an overlap–studying something in one class and coming across it in another or, better yet, seeing it out in the real world. Those multiple connections really stick.
Just being exposed to the diversity on campus made the world more interesting. “Hey, we’re going to go hear this kind of music tonight.” Something I hadn’t been exposed to. That was just as important as the academic stuff.
My four years at UCLA were a cram course in cultural and intellectual possibility. They set me up to be successful at what I do; they helped make me an adult…Thanks, UCLA.
For those of us in higher education, such experiences are commonplace. They are a major reason why we stay in higher education. There is nothing like the experience of saying goodbye to graduating seniors we knew as freshmen. Seeing their commencement is an emotional experience for us because we’ve seen them grow before our eyes, and have been a part of that growth.
We know that such positive life-changing experiences are the result of being in an academic community. We’ve experienced it ourselves. We were a part of a college or university community in which we were challenged to think critically, get out of our comfort zone, gain new perspectives, broaden our worldview, take responsibility, make a difference, serve others, and grow up. We were challenged by professors, resident directors, academic advisors, coaches, administrators, roommates, friends, and a variety of staff with whom we interacted. In a very real way, it took a community to educate us.
In marketing higher education, we don’t need to try to create a brand community. It’s there. It’s our role as marketing and enrollment professionals in the community to assess and recognize what it is, engage it on campus and through social media, and develop strategies to communicate what it is to those interested in joining it.
Given what’s on the line for prospective students and their families with their hopes, dreams, ambitions, and finances, it’s our ethical responsibility to honestly communicate the essence of our brand community to them so that they may be able to figure out if our college or university is right for them. We do that through our branding messages and admissions counseling. That’s why we have admissions counselors, not sales people.
And that’s why it’s important to revisit commencement each year to see the joy and pride of students and their families. It reminds us of what this all is really about.
I was on business in Moscow in 1992 appreciating the historic changes Mikhail Gorbachev and Glasnost had brought to that country. Although there were novelties such as the very first McDonald’s, the Russians who were weary from a hard life were not so thrilled, since Glasnost really hadn’t changed their daily lives. There were still long lines for food. Everything seemed old and awash in grey and brown tones. Russian angst was real. Our guide told us an allegory that was circulating that summed up what the Russian people thought Glasnost had brought them.
Before Glasnost, they were like a dog that was muzzled and on a leash five meters long unable to reach the water dish ten meters away. Since Glasnost, the allegory went, the water dish has been moved a couple of meters closer–still out of reach–but the muzzle is off and the dog may bark all it wants.
That sort of describes how some brands are treating their customers in social media: their company culture hasn’t changed–nothing may change–but they are now “open” to hearing customer perspectives and opinions. Or maybe not.
Alexandra Samuel in her blog post for Harvard Publishing has written a very thoughtful perspective on what is happening to some major brands that try-on engagement and authenticity in social media. The title of the post is, Riding Social Media’s Trojan Horse. It should be required reading as it details how social media brings with it risk to brands that are not prepared culturally to handle consumer opinions and perspectives, and not seemingly willing to address those opinions and make changes to how they do business.
This shouldn’t be the case in higher education, particularly at a time when accreditation associations are all about assessment and student learning outcomes. Higher education brands should be well prepared to listen to students and alumni. Social media should be a natural place for colleges and universities to listen to the primary participants of social media: teenagers and young adults.
But those of us in higher education know better. Academic institutions are by nature slow to change. Institutional silos are well entrenched. Student and alumni feedback about what needs to change on our campuses is a tough sell. When marketing hears from young alumni that the business office is dysfunctional, and that they won’t give to the institution because of how they were treated, how does a chief marketing officer foster change? When teaching evaluations say a tenured professor’s teaching is a disaster, what can be done? The challenge of forging change at an institution of higher learning is daunting.
That’s why it’s absolutely necessary in marketing higher education that a chief marketing or enrollment officer to be politically situated with a visible leadership role on campus; to have relationships formed to get things done; to be as concerned about non-”marketing” aspects of the institutional brand as the strategies of advertising, publications and social media. Because let’s face it. The foundation of brand management is the organization itself.
Social media is not going away. It may look different years from now as traditional and social media morph to meet the market. But customer engagement will continue to increase in importance as new media continue to empower consumers, and hopefully motivate brands to adapt to new ways to do business.
Like the Russian dog and its owner, for brands that are not willing to truly engage their customers in a transparent way, social media may sound to them like a barking, howling dog that needs its muzzle to be put on again. Too late.
In much of undergraduate education, enrollment management is where the heavy lifting for marketing takes place. It is the unit responsible for undergraduate enrollment revenue, which is usually the largest revenue stream for a private college or university. The marketing focus of enrollment management is on the “admissions funnel,” the model that visually describes moving prospects down through the admissions process and into the university’s enrollment.
Marketing as an organization in higher education provides branding and marketing leadership for the institution. While the functions of marketing may be decentralized, there typically is a central marketing department that is focused on supporting enrollment marketing units campus-wide, helping to drive prospects into and down the various admissions funnels at the institution through advertising, publications, and the Internet.
While I am a believer in an integrated marketing program for colleges and universities that combines enrollment and marketing leadership–I led such a program as chief marketing and enrollment officer–it is not usually the case in higher education. Enrollment management has the leadership role of driving enrollment revenue, with support from marketing. This common model elevates the position of chief enrollment officer and makes it vital for a college or university to have a healthy and effective enrollment management program.
After 20 years as a chief enrollment officer, I’ve come to believe there are seven essentials for a successful enrollment management program:
- RESEARCH: on best practices, your competitive set, who you are as an institution (your dashboard plus dozens of other data), trends, SWOT, etc., etc., etc.
- PLAN: marketing plans that cover mission, SWOT, goals, target markets, marketing mix, and action plans. (See Planning for Changes in the Market. Marketing. It’s More than Promotion. The Marketing Plan: Navigating Your Way.)
- SYSTEMS: Your organizational charts have to make sense. Your admissions, retention, financial aid, and records systems have to be efficient and effective, and they have to allow for communication with each other and with other units outside the enrollment management division.
- PEOPLE: Quoting Jim Collins, “Do you have the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off of the bus?”
- POLICIES AND PROCEDURES: You may have the right people in the right seats, and may have good systems in place in your departments, but if your policies and procedures are not student-oriented, your recruitment–and especially your retention efforts–will be impeded.
- PROMOTIONAL STRATEGIES: Do you have enough of a left brain to put into play the very best enrollment management, admissions, and marketing strategies, and enough creative right brain to find that something extra to put you ahead of the competition?
- STRONG LEADERSHIP: This is about being a strong leader on campus to represent enrollment management. It’s about securing resources for your team. Being a strong enrollment leader is more than just being effective with the six parts listed above. It’s about your enrollment leadership being more than the sum of those parts.
Of course, these seven essentials won’t be effective and productive if you have brand reputation problems, you have an inconsistent message and visual look, your academic programs are not competitive, your location is not appealing, etc. In the end, marketing higher education is much more than just promotional strategies, and is deeply impacted by the perceived quality of your institution, programs and people.
This is Part Two of a series called, Marketing in the Wonderful and Wacky World of Higher Education.
UCLA spends $1.2 million on an advertising campaign targeted to lawmakers in Washington, D.C., and the University of California system sets aside $4 million for a campaign to get the word out about the value of all the UC campuses. When questioned, a strategist for the UC President says,
“Marketing is not a dirty word.”
Wow. In just six words, the UC President’s office has summed up the history and status of marketing higher education; which leads me to title Part Two of Marketing in the Wonderful and Wacky World of Higher Education:
Marketing Used to be a Dirty Word. Now It’s a Necessary Evil.
In higher education it’s the faculty who hold the political power, or think they should. Historically, faculty members in the arts and sciences–the core of the university–are the ones who have had that power. They ruled absolutely when the academy was about a liberal arts education, not professional preparation; when a liberal arts education was an end to itself, preparing one for life. Colleges and their faculty held an attitude of “teach it and they will come.” There was little concern about market because there were plenty of students, especially with the GI Bill. But things began to change.
Over the years, because of societal changes and the increasing cost of a college education, professional preparation invaded universities, and liberal arts educational ideals were relegated to the core curriculum. Competition increased for sometimes dwindling numbers of prospective students, and colleges began to tap into marketing activities. Glossy viewbooks and videos became the norm; enrollment management began as a profession.
Now, competition on all levels is fierce, and marketing and branding activities are considered normal at universities. But these activities still aren’t always held in high regard by the academy which is by nature very slow to change.
It might be said that marketing is to faculty what American Idol may be to Kanye West: beneath him, but necessary to launch his new album. But this attitude raises issues of control. Faculty may see the need for marketing, but their beliefs about higher education (it’s their brand), coupled with their skepticism regarding marketing, may lead to policies and procedures requiring signficant input into marketing and branding decisions. On some campuses, this means committee approvals.
An internal marketing environment like this creates a need for a strong marketing leader who is able to help the university find its brand and to refine its marketing activities; define for the campus what marketing is (see earlier post, Marketing. It’s More Than Promotion); and help the institution develop a market perspective throughout the university. Importantly, it requires a marketing leader to create positive faculty relationships in order to successfully collaborate and navigate university systems.
The UC strategist was right. Marketing is no longer a dirty word. But because of its history and power structures, higher education remains a challenging profession for marketing leaders.
Part One of the series: Shared Govenance. Management is not strictly top-down.
In my last post, I raised a question I have not seen elsewhere in response to recent studies showing increasing participation rates in social media marketing by colleges and universities.
My question was simply, what in the world are the 39% of marketing and admissions leaders thinking who are not doing any social media marketing, either on a social media network platform or on their website? Don’t they get it?
Given that teenage and young adult prospects for higher education live in social space, it is inexplicable to me that a college would not have a presence in that space. Rather than applaud leaders who get the obvious, I think we should question the ones who are stuck executing pre-web 2.0 marketing plans. Call me in this case a glass is half empty guy, I guess. But I wonder in which markets are these marketing leaders competing?
I wonder because while we pat ourselves on the back for “participating” in social media, the most competitive colleges and universities are going beyond the current social media conversation and are beginning to address other emerging media.
Take Azusa Pacific University, for example. APU is a private university in Los Angeles County with over 9000 students. It is one of four universities in California that I’d point to as shining examples of how to market higher education; the others being USC, Pepperdine, and Biola University.
As the picture above indicates, APU is now accessible on mobile devices. APU is an early adopter of emerging media. They’re heavily in social space (Facebook, iTunes, Flickr, You Tube, Twitter e.g.), and they blog and videoblog on their website, which has just been beautifully redesigned. Now, they’ve entered mobile media. It is a power branding move by them that positions APU very well for students desiring a highly competitive university, and who are either seeking or would welcome a “God First” academic community. But more importantly, they realize that their students and prospects–like their competitors’ students and prospects–are on mobile devices constantly. Other institutions in APU’s market will need to follow suit (expect that soon from APU’s chief rival, Biola), or eventually risk looking smaller, less high tech, and more provincial than ever.
In the 1990s, when the Internet happened upon all of us, we had to reinvent our marketing plans to respond to the new ways in which our prospects and applicants were searching for colleges. We constructed websites, reconstructed them (remember “under construction” web pages?), and changed our promotional strategies to address new prospect behavior. If we hadn’t done so, we would have failed miserably.
The current marketing environment requires a similar proactive response to new technology and changing consumer behavior. Today’s crop of social media are only the beginning. This new era of marketing higher education requires strong leadership to adjust marketing plans and to secure university resources for emerging media. Colleges and universities with marketing and enrollment leaders who get it will be ahead of their competition as new media and new prospect behavior continue to emerge in the years ahead.
My background includes media and the arts, so it occurred to me: a higher education marketing plan is not theatre. It’s more like film in how it’s executed.
In theatre, the play is the thing. Once it is blocked and rehearsed, the actors take center stage to perform it while the director stereotypically stands in the back of the theatre or goes across the street to the bar until it’s over. There are no changes on the fly. If the play, staging, direction and performances are not connecting with the audience, well, it’s too late. Not exactly a way to run a university marketing program.
Marketing higher education should be more like film. The CMO or chief enrollment management officer should be like a film director who plans, storyboards the screenplay, rehearses, and then executes it shot by shot making changes on the set as he/she and the actors synergistically sense that a change would be better.
For university marketing, these changes are shifts in marketing strategy and reallocation of budget made by a creative CMO or CEMO. Judging from surveys on the use of social media by admissions offices, nearly four out of ten of these university leaders are apparently asleep at the bar across the street.
Last week, the National Association of College Admissions Counselors (NACAC) announced findings of a study commissioned by NACAC on the use of social media in college admissions. The study analyzing 2007 data was directed by Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, professor and director of the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. But a study using 2008 data published by the Center provides more relevant results. The data show that the use of social media strategies by colleges and universities has grown significantly between 2007 and 2008.
There are certainly encouraging signs in this data, especially with the percentage of colleges blogging, videoblogging and podcasting. But given that one must fish where the fish are, why are 39% of colleges and universities not on a social network platform? And why are 39% not doing any social media strategies at all? These two stats are astounding.
As studies have shown, higher education is adopting social media at a faster rate than for-profit corporations. But of course. Given how social media is woven into the fabric of the life of a teenager and young adult, last week’s findings should have indicated nearly 100% involvement in social network sites and social media strategies. OK. I know, there will never be 100% agreement on anything. There will always be about 10-12% of people who defy reason. But 39%?
As a university CMO/CEMO, you must be on top of your game. You must research the market, plan thoroughly, and manage the execution of that plan creatively. You must be a strong leader able to reallocate budget to meet market needs. You may need to adjust staff portfolios. You will need to adjust website strategies to be competitive. Your competition is going to take full advantage of social media. You should be doing more in social media than just having a presence on Facebook. But at a minimum at this point in time in 2009, Facebook should at least make the final cut of your marketing strategies.
It was one of those movie moments I will never forget. I was at the cinema watching the movie, Platoon. Director Oliver Stone had just put me through what seemed like hours of the hellacious climactic night battle with the Viet Cong, told ground-level in tight shots from the perspective of U.S. soldiers trying to hold off the enemy. The sequence was brutal, terrifying, and unrelenting.
Mercifully, the battle was over. It was morning. From ground level, the camera panned the landscape showing the carnage of what had taken place in the darkness. And then it happened. The camera revealed and held on a doe standing alert in the steamy jungle clearing looking like it was trying to figure out what this was all about. The innocence of that deer took my breath away as the shot contrasted the beauty of nature with what men had done to each other. In that moment, I comprehended in a new way the destructiveness of man compared to how things should be. It blew me away.
This moment of clarity was a combination of the director’s brilliance and my brain comprehending it. It worked on a poetic level for me because the right side of my brain performed a “high concept” activity seeing not a literal doe standing in a field, but rather a statement that connected “seemingly unrelated ideas into something new.”
Such is the subject of the 2006 book that I read last year, A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule The World, by Daniel H. Pink. Affirming and describing right brain functions, Pink talks about how we are leaving behind the Information Age and emerging into the Conceptual Age. He focuses on six essential aptitudes “on which professional success and personal satisfaction will increasingly depend: design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning.” The book spends its time defining these senses and giving exercises for the reader to sharpen them.
It is an age animated by a different form of thinking and a new approach to life–one that prizes aptitudes that I call “high concept” and “high touch.” High concept involves the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, to create artistic and emotional beauty, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into something new. High touch involves the ability to empathize with others, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one’s self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning.–Pink
Since beginning this blog, I’ve been wanting to write about this book and this conceptual age when design and story become more important than ever. Think about what’s been happening in marketing. Think Target doing a brand makeover and becoming “Targét.” Think Kleenex setting up couches on busy street corners for people to tell their story. Think Chrysler selling the 300 as though it’s a work of art.
Think Ford. On April 4, in his blog, The Social Media Marketing Blog, Scott Monty, head of Social Media for The Ford Motor Company, wrote “Everyone’s Got a Story.” In this blog post, Monty describes Ford’s campaign, “Mustang Stories,” and includes the winning essay from a U.S. soldier in Iraq. Monty’s right on. Storytelling connects with people, just like cars connect with people. Having customers talk about their love affair with their car is more than effective, it’s meaningful.
BJ Birtwell
I’ve found this to be true in affirming history and shared values in a university community. In revamping our quarterly magazine for alumni and friends, we determined that we would tell our university’s story through the stories of our alumni and students. Many university magazines talk issues and news. Some do it really well. Our decision to tell stories, however, created an award winning magazine that was a hit with alumni and friends. We told compelling stories and our readers made the connection that the university helped make that life story possible. We told stories of older alumni who sacrificed to make the world a better place, and we told stories of young alumni success. One of those stories was of BJ Birtwell, who was behind the marketing of the Chrysler 300.
I’ll be writing more about this book. For those of us marketing higher education, its messages are worth noting.
You’ll be hearing the term, “opt-in,” quite a bit more in the future. As technology and consumer behavior continue to evolve to applications such as mobile communications, it’s a concept that is key to all of us “opting in” to new ways to behave. When those consumers are non-traditional students who are in their mid-20’s to mid-60’s, opting-in to new media communications and marketing is the future starting now.
In January, the Pew Internet and American Life Project published its findings on adults use of social media. Pew found that 57% of adults age 25-34 have at least one online profile on a social network website. While the stats decrease by age, by all measurements, adults age 25-65 are rapidly adopting the use of social media.
Pew Internet and American Life Project by Amanda Lenhart
The data from Facebook is in a word, stunning, with the social network adding over 500,000 new users each day. According to Inside Facebook, the majority of the over 200 million Facebook users are now over the age of 25.
Looking at Facebook US audience growth over the last 180 days, it’s clear that Facebook is seeing massive increases in adoption amongst users 35-65. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook is still women over 55 – there are now nearly 1.5 million of them active on Facebook each month.
The biggest growth in terms of absolute new users over the last six months came amongst users 35-44. Over 4 million more US women 35-44 and nearly 3 million more men 35-44 used Facebook in March 2009 compared to September 2008.
Beyond the ubiquitous name of Facebook, it’s a popular site for older adults because of its brand as a social networking site, rather than an entertainment portal like MySpace. Because of its previous life as an .edu network, the privacy controls for Facebook are appealing to adults. And they are taking advantage of them: the Pew study found that the majority of adults utilize privacy controls for their online profiles; which brings me back to adult students “opting-in” for new media communications.
Your adult students just don’t have the time to be overwhelmed by social media. They are most likely working adults. They have families. They use social media to stay connected with family and friends. It’s personal. But when an adult goes back to school to get their undergraduate or graduate degree, your institution becomes part of their life. Given a choice, many of them will want to opt-in to hearing from their university and/or their professors in new media space. So, in addition to your your degree completion/graduate/doctoral programs being on Facebook and LinkedIn, how about using social media as a communications strategy? How about student cohorts on Twitter and Facebook? How about communicating to them on their mobile devices, if they opt-in?
In marketing higher education, strategize and then ask your adult students to try out some of your new media experiments. Engage them online about it. See if they’ll be willing to communicate with you in new media. Adults use of social media is increasing at an insane pace. Are you prepared to respond to this growing opportunity?
Photo courtesy of David Riley Associates
It’s the place I’ve called my career home, this wonderful and wacky world of marketing higher education. For the uninitiated, there’s another world behind the student experience curtain, and there are a few things you should know if you are interested in being a marketing and enrollment management leader in higher education.
Part 1: Shared Governance. Management is not strictly top down.
A college or university is an academic community. Faculty own the place. Well, at least that’s their perspective. While the degree of that perspective will vary by institution, make no mistake, it’s at play at every college or university. The political power of the organization lies with the faculty. They own the academic curriculum, the core product of the institution. This sense of ownership is made credible by accreditation associations that promote the idea of shared governance, which basically means the faculty should play a key role in the life of the university.
In that way, a college or university is less like a for-profit corporation and more like a hospital or news organization where there is a professional core that understand their role as being central to the mission of the organization. Think doctors, journalists and professors. Their roles at their institutions are really quite similar. They perform the core function of their organizations and they have to deal with administrators or editors whom they tolerate at best. I know. I’ve been on both sides as a faculty member and an administrator.
So, what’s this all mean for a marketing and enrollment management leader in higher education? You’re going to have to deal with committees–a lot of them–composed of faculty from across disciplines. At some colleges, there will be a shared governance expectation that a committee will sign off on your marketing and branding strategies. Implementing anything comprehensively on a university campus takes political savvy and a network of productive relationships with faculty leadership and administrative colleagues. Once you develop a solid network of leaders on campus, they’ll be your partners in the good times, and will be able to vouch for you during those challenging times.
So, excellent interpersonal skills are a huge plus. Use them as you develop those faculty relationships, which I’ve often found to be the most interesting. And here’s the positive in all of this…Where else in a work environment would you be able to have a conversation on Monday with an artist, on Tuesday with a political scientist, on Wednesday with an economics professor, on Thursday with a filmmaker, and on Friday with a psychologist? Of course, you may then have deal with the dynamics of having them all in the same room for your committee meeting.
If you don’t have good interpersonal skills to navigate shared governance? You may want to schedule more time with that psychologist…
Next in the series:
Marketing Used to be a Dirty Word. Now It’s a Necessary Evil.
Higher Ed. Where Consumers Are Also Students.
“Social media marketing is free, right?” That was a question from the audience at the OC Ad Federation’s social media panel discussion on April 16 (see post, Building Your Brand Through Social Media). Andy Wiedlin, VP for Sales at MySpace, responded, “No, social media is not free. It costs money to do great things.”
But of course. Even though social media may be free to use, it requires both tactics and design just as other media. For-profit and not-for-profit organizations are trying to figure out where the budget for that work will come from.
In a blog post titled, Developing an Appropriate Social Media Budget, author, Lisa Braziel, gives an answer that would have more fully satisfied that audience member’s question. She says that a social media campaign budget is likely to be funded by a reallocation of a company’s digital marketing budget. “The other approach,” Braziel says, “is to develop a social media budget from additional funds in the overall marketing budget–usually an amount that is set aside to ‘test this social media stuff out.’ Either way, very rarely does a company rally for additional funds for a social media campaign, so it is likely for a company to pull a chunk of traditional budget out to dabble in the space of social media for a period of time.”
The post resonated with me because it accurately describes how as chief marketing officer I took the plunge and decided to invest in social media marketing. It was early 2007, and I had been hearing and reading a bit about social network marketing. I was meeting with my friend, Josh Mooney, from Juxt Interactive. Juxt had already built an award-winning website for us, and he was relaying to me how ad dollars were increasingly going to social media, and that I should carefully think about it because our university’s prospective students and students were hanging out in social networks.
At that point, there weren’t very many examples of universities formally wading into the evolving social sphere. Remember, this was early 2007. It was pretty much MySpace alone that was the social space for high school students. As our marketing and enrollment leadership researched and discussed it, we saw that social media was the future, and that we had a chance to get into it before our competitors. So, I made the call that some of our new ad dollars would go to MySpace–instead of traditional advertising–as a strategic first step into social media marketing.
Importantly, we saw this exploration of social media marketing as not about having our university’s corporate and recruiting side represented in MySpace. We realized that authenticity was crucial, and that this space had to be by and for our students and prospective students, which fit the MySpace experience.
So we reserved some budget for small stipends for three students who would commit to making the university’s MySpace their own. We gave them carte blanche, and they proceeded to blog and use widgets, video, etc. on the site. It was their site about the university, not ours.
Many universities have waded into social media marketing by creating a corporate presence in Facebook. That’s fine. But doing that won’t work as well on MySpace, and if that’s all you do, I question just how much you’ve really invested your institution in social media.
In order to create a competitive MySpace presence, we hired Juxt Interactive to create a cool site for students and prospective students; really a template for our students to create our university’s MySpace presence. Juxt created an award-winning site for us that went online in August of 2007.
Although I am no longer at the university, I know the site continues to be successful. While it’s a model I would still recommend for marketing higher education, there is so much more that’s creatively possible given what’s happening today. But the intelligent tactics and creative design of those possibilities will not be free. It takes a financial commitment to do great things in social media, and a willingness to give away control of the content for the sake of engagement and transparency–two payoffs not seen much in traditional media.
The OC Ad Federation presented a Social Media Panel Discussion with Matt Jacobson, Head of Market Development for Facebook; Andy Wiedlin, VP of Sales for MySpace; Gustavo Alvarado, Partner, Group Media Director for MEC:Interaction; and Jessica Payne, Social Media Specialist for PainePR. The moderator was Jonathan Good of Greenwala and Wondermarx/PR
I attended the OC Ad Federation’s event at Sutra in Costa Mesa last night. It was a panel discussion, the first in a series of events titled, Building Your Brand Through Emerging Media. It was great.
Lessons learned from the panel for marketing higher education? Well, I’ve been blogging about some of them. Embrace social media because that’s where you’re prospective students, students, and alumni are; do your research on where your students, etc. are in social space; be transparent and learn from those who are committed to your brand; engage your fans and develop campaigns to reach them; understand the differences between social media platforms. Now, a paraphrasing of the panel discussion:
Q1. Good from Greenwala: How should brands embrace social media?
A. Wiedlin from MySpace: Some brands like Adidas more easily embrace the transparency of social media. Others like Chevy Tahoe surprised us with their campaign in the MySpace green section.
A. Alvarado from MEC: Which social media depends on brand. Embrace it. It’s happening. How will you be a part of the conversation about your brand?
A. Payne from Paine PR: Do your research. Get to know Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. Find out which social space your customers are in, and use the right tools to communicate in that space to them. Keep a conversation going so that you don’t have to “go back to them” to find out what’s happening.
A. Jacobson from Facebook: Listen! Listen without fear. Your customers will tell you how to shape your product/campaign, e.g., Chase.
Q2. Good from Greenwala: Whose responsibility is it to keep content current in social media?
A. Alvarado from MEC: Depends, but take advantage of your friends on a network.
A. Payne from Paine PR: Think transparency. Brands should manage content, e.g., Drucker Institute on Twitter: agency got them started, Drucker took it over.
Q3. Good from Greenwala: How do you measure/assess social media?
A. Wiedlin from MySpace: Advertising measures impressions, but this is wrong for social media. Measure instead return on engagement! The value of social media is that you get to engage your customers! What’s that worth?
A. Jacobson from Facebook: Measure awareness. You get to reach influencers.
A. Payne from Paine PR: There is no magic answer; traditional measurements for advertising don’t fit in social media and no one has come up with the alternative. So take a holistic approach; find out from your customers in social media what they think about your brand; track changes in conversations.
A. Alvarado from MEC: No one answer; use campaigns to get your customers engaged about your brand and measure it; e.g., Indiana Jones promotion Battle of the Bands with 10 universities that received 2,000,000 votes on micro site.
Q4. Good from Greenwala: What are the pros and cons of engaging in social media?
A. Wiedlin from MySpace: Social media are not going away. Be transparent! At first, HP had an objective to control the conversation about their brand. They have come to see it differently now.
A. Alvarado from MEC: Be transparent; win fans by participating in it. Running banner ads on MySpace is not participating in social media. Take advantage of having people who want to talk about your brand.
A. Payne from Paine PR: Maybe for the first time connect with customers who want to talk about your brand. A negative side to social media is that brands have not yet developed rules for employees on social media: what about negative tweets or comments in social space? Do you try to stop that?
A. Jacobson from Facebook: If you get in social media and it works, more of your customers will participate.
Q5. From an audience member: Social media is free, right?
A. Alvarado from MEC: Relatively free, compared to traditional media like television. The medium is free.
A. Wiedlin from MySpace: Social media is not free. You must build a site and a presence. It costs money to do great things.
Q6. Good from Greenwala: Where’s it all going?
A. Jacobson from Facebook: Facebook is a technology platform for all of us. So, where are we headed?
A. Wiedlin from MySpace: That’s the brand difference between Facebook and MySpace. Facebook sees its brand as a technology platform. MySpace sees itself as an entertainment portal. We’re a content provider by and for people.
Photograph by Caleb Coppola (Flickr)
I often have to travel the freeways in southern California. This comes as no surprise to anyone who lives here. Traveling on So Cal freeways is a challenge. So I do two things. First, I do my research online to see what’s happening on the freeways since I have route choices to make along the way. Second, I bring all of my years of experience in navigating those highways with me. I know the shortcuts, detours, back roads, etc. in case there’s an accident, or traffic looks to be stop and go for awhile (the norm). Although I will prod along in traffic, I just don’t sit well there taking my lumps. I like to find a creative way out of the situation, if indeed there is another way to get to my destination. Planning and experience–a required combination for successfully navigating the freeways here in the greater LA area.
Planning and experience are also vital for leading higher education marketing and enrollment management. My blog post on April 13 gave the basics on doing marketing plans for a college or university and its programs. Now, here’s one example of how it has worked for me.
Marketing teacher education programs in California during this decade has been similar to trying to get from point A to point B on southern California freeways. Education deans and marketing directors have had to navigate a turbulent teacher education market impacted by varying market conditions, changing teacher preparation requirements by the state, and demographic losses. For a chief enrollment officer, that creates a challenge to forecast enrollment and revenue numbers for the following year or for years to come.
When I took over as vice president for enrollment management and university advancement for Vanguard University of Southern California in 2001, my team and I began meeting with the dean of the graduate school and the director of the graduate education program to write the marketing plan for the education program. It was a small program, but growing in a market that was exploding with a need for teachers. The program had an excellent reputation with local school districts, one of which was one of the largest districts in the state. These districts loved our students. Additionally, the program was garnering a reputation as a leader in the state in being among the first to be accredited under new state requirements for teacher credentials. Enrollment rose by 46% to full capacity in two years. So, it was all good. For the moment.
Changing state requirements were only part of the market picture. In the midst of the growth, school districts were authorized by the state to grant emergency credentials to new teachers who had not been through a teacher education program. Then, the demand for teachers dissipated. The enrollment bubble that was going through our elementary schools was gone. (This is the same group of students that has been fueling enrollment growth at California colleges and universities–referred to as Tidal Wave II–that will exit undergraduate education in 2011.) Added to the end of this enrollment bubble was a movement of young families who were choosing either to leave the state or to move inland away from coastal communities because of cost of living.
Due to thorough planning, all of these changes were anticipated by the director of the grad education program. Thus, we were able to develop promotional strategies to address market shifts, the graduate program could shape their program to meet market needs, and the graduate education director and myself could accurately project enrollment and revenue for the university.
Our journey on that graduate education highway was much like my freeway travels, and it is a great example of teamwork between an academic program and marketing/enrollment management. We planned where we wanted to go, anticipated trouble, and had the experience to make adjustments along the way. As a result, the program’s enrollment dipped only one year. It held steady overall due to an excellent academic program and smart work by both the academic program and enrollment management/marketing.
Marketing plans aren’t academic exercises. They are collaborative, creative, illuminating and practical. They are absolutely necessary to be successful in marketing higher education.
Yesterday, April 14, the Harvard Business blog, “The View by Harvard Business,” had an entry by Sean Silverthorne titled Twitter Is/Is Not a Serious Marketing Tool. The blog entry and its responses, as well as the original argument posts, should be required reading for higher education marketers.
I’ll flip the post and first sum up the view held by Thomas Davenport, the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College. His quote is, “do serious marketers spend a lot of time and energy on Twitter campaigns? I doubt it. Sure, go ahead and play around with it–it doesn’t cost much. But I defy you to do serious brand management in 140-character messages. I defy you to prove that Twitter users are your typical customer–unless you sell bubble tea or something similar–or that their tweets are a true reflection of their relationship with your company.”
There are a few responses to Silverthorne’s blog that agree and list some of the technical flaws that pose risks to Twitter and its users.
The positive view is from a Harvard Business Publishing blog post by John Sviokla who writes that Twitter may very well be a serious marketing tool because it’ll be scooped up by Google or Microsoft and be integrated into their offerings. “Starting now will give you a jump on your competition.” He encourages marketers to ponder three questions before embracing Twitter:
- What are people saying about my brand? There are many tools that can help you track how people are talking about your company, customer complaints, or other issues your customers are thinking about.
- How can I connect and build a direct communication between my firm and all the customers who want to follow our tweets–on their phone, computer, or other device? There is no downside, as long as you put thoughtful effort behind the initiative.
- What capabilities should my firm have so that we can use the right tools to track topics and conversations being tweeted about in my industry, product or service area, and target market?
Good questions for higher education brand management, marketing, and public relations.
In marketing higher education, I think it’s unwise to ignore Twitter right now. There are so many possibilities for marketing and communications with prospective students, students, and alumni. Twitter is built to be organized around common interests. Think of alumni relations and communication with and between students who majored and graduated together. Or, student cohorts in graduate programs. Or, athletics with updates about recruiting, team news, scores, etc. Or, prospective students.
As I wrote in an earlier post regarding social media marketing, you should be thinking about social media like Twitter. If you need to, get away from the office to spend time strategizing. Being an earlier adopter of these new media for marketing may be productive now, and will give you valuable lessons for your marketing strategy next year and beyond.
The marketing world is abuzz about new media and how the marketing rules are changing. Did you anticipate these changes? Are you on the leading edge of adapting to these changes?
Are your enrollment management, marketing, public relations and university advancement organizations fluid enough to make changes to your strategies? Do you have the right people in the right seats on the bus for this new marketing world? How are you going to shift?
Do you have a plan–a marketing plan–that addresses these market shifts? Do you have multiple plans, i.e., plans for your programs?
Building marketing strategies for higher education is really the process of building marketing plans for a college or university and its academic programs. A marketing plan is a distinct planning document from the institution’s strategic plan. It flows from it. As chief marketing/enrollment officer, your stamp of approval should be on the marketing plan, because it will set the course for the coming year (and beyond), and will largely determine whether or not you will be successful.
Constructing the plan is an illuminating, step by step collaborative process. A marketing plan should not be written by one person at their computer. If we’re talking about an academic program’s marketing plan, academic leadership must weigh in and own the plan as well. If we indeed define marketing as being about both product and promotion, there’s just no way around it.
Informing the entire process is research–a lot of it about market forces, competition, and your customers, be they students, prospective students, alumni, donors, community leaders, etc. This research, if done thoroughly, will suggest many of the decisions you make in the plan.
The basic components:
- Mission Statements–keep marketing tethered to them
- Situation Analysis
- Background–what’s been going on with the program and the marketing of it?
- Normal Forecast–All things being equal, what may we expect to happen?
- Market Opportunities–anticipate current and future opportunities
- Market Threats–what threatens the program’s well-being?
- Institutional/Program Strengths–list them all
- Institutional/Program Weaknesses–be honest, but not politically naive
- Goals and Objectives
- Marketing Assumptions–e.g., tuition will increase by no more than 3%; predictive model will be tweaked
- Objectives–e.g., enrollment will increase by 2%
- Marketing Strategy
- Target Markets–primary, secondary, tertiary
- Marketing Mix
- Product–what are you going to do to create a better product for your students?
- Place–delivery systems: status quo or are changes being explored?
- Promotion–develop your strategies, list new ones, e.g., social media campaign?
- Price–tuition and financial aid: how much and how communicated?
- Action Plans
- Implementation–when, by whom, how much?
- Assessment–how and when will we know that the strategies were successful?
As you can tell, the traditional SWOT analysis has been turned upside down, per the recommendation from Robert A. Sevier in his 2001 book, Thinking Outside the Box: Think Strategically, Act Audaciously, Communicate aggressively. (What a great title!) Its principles and consideration of some of the systematic and organizational issues that affect higher education marketing set this book apart from others. Sevier’s belief that a SWOT analysis ought to begin with market opportunities and threats and then proceed to university or program strengths and weaknesses is a practical recommendation to keep us focused on shaping our institutions and programs to meet the needs and wants of the market. I think this reversal is helpful in marketing higher education.
By the time you are finished with this research and planning process, you’ll have your marketing strategies for the coming year. The game will now shift to the important phase of executing your plans and managing them–a phase in which your interpersonal and political skills will be required for your plans to be successful.
Jack in the Box feeds the social media beast
What does Jack in the Box have to do with building marketing strategies for higher education? This article from the LA Times last month deals with the awesome social media viral campaign for the fast food chain that launched its brand makeover. I’ve been holding onto this article for my blog. Check it out.
Next check out the Skittles “website” that asks for your age, and then gives a clear disclaimer that you’re about to enter another site that is not under their control. Click on that and you’ll go to Skittles’ Twitter site with real time comments on their brand. The LA Times article will tell you what adjustments they’ve made to this campaign.
Although these stories are a month old and ancient by new media standards, their lessons are significant for higher education marketing and branding. These two major for-profit brands decided to throw caution to the wind and embrace the social media world because of the potential reward for doing so. Their gains came with setbacks. Well, setbacks for traditional marketing. Both companies sought authenticity through interaction with the social media audience. They got it, sort of. Because in social media, a brand must be authentic, but that doesn’t mean that the authenticity is reciprocated. Check out the comments.
Colleges and universities should have always been about authenticity. Whether it’s been practiced or not, it’s kind of built into every brand of higher education. We seek truth, for goodness sake. When a university doesn’t practice it, there’s a sense of violation.
Now we understand that to be a player in social media, a college must be authentic. The reality is greater than that. The requirement for authenticity spills over to all forms of promotion and market engagement. The same prospective students who live in social space are also receiving your printed promotional materials, direct mail letters, telephone calls, and emails. Why authenticity? Well, if we’re talking about traditional students, we’re talking Gen Y’ers.
Bea Fields, an author on this millennial generation, says Gen Y’ers don’t “waste time on people or companies that are not being real with them. Authentic is cool. Authentic is dorky.Authentic is hip. Authentic is truthful…So while other experts are out there giving you “tricks” to market to Gen Y, I’m here saying STOP marketing to them and START listening to them. Hang out with them. Experience life with them. Respect them.”
Sounds like the makings of a successful student affairs and residence life program. But authenticity must also be present in the classroom and in how our administrative departments relate to students. We must have authenticity in marketing higher education, in our social media marketing, traditional marketing, and in how our admissions counselors relate to their applicants. We must be authentic to undergraduates and graduate students. To our alumni and our donors. Authenticity should be a core component of our brand–a value we aspire to–owned by the entire campus community.
As I waited to get my haircut a few months ago, I read an article in Rolling Stone magazine called, The Death of High Fidelity. It was rather depressing. I grew up in the age of high fidelity. Large speakers with overpowering amplifiers were the norm for some of us attempting to get the very best sound from our records. Now, because of signal compressed MP3s, record companies and producers aren’t as concerned about high fidelity as they are about volume. Why? Because of consumers like me who mostly listen to our music with our earbuds. Unbelievably, some artists are producing records once again because the quality is better.
It’s been similar for video. I used to produce and direct videos. I used to teach television and film. The power of the visual image wows me. The storytelling language of film and video is still a passion for me. But after all we’ve learned about the importance of visual quality, we get YouTube and its videos that we view on our computer screens and cell phones. But that’s the way it is now, and that’s great news for all of us as we build marketing strategies for higher education. Think viral.
The idea of viral marketing has been with us since the mid-1990s with the advent of the Internet on general society. But with the changes in technology that allow everyone to be a video producer, and with the explosion of new media, focusing on viral marketing makes more sense than ever for colleges and universities.
I was watching a recent episode of Celebrity Apprentice, which is killing me because of the lack of fair play since Donald Trump rules. On this particular show, the two competing groups were producing viral videos for All Detergent. The two detergent brand managers seemed to be basically clueless with what they wanted. It could certainly have been how the episode was edited, but nonetheless, the brand managers strikingly represented the state of affairs in advertising today when there are some brands and out of touch brand managers who are seeking to be more relevant and spend less money on advertising by going into new media. Both videos that were produced were rejected by the brand managers because of what they felt was inappropriate content for their customers. While both celebrity groups could have produced better and “cleaner” videos for All Detergent (ha!), how exactly was All planning on using the videos in the first place? Where in the virtual world are their customers? Perhaps the celebrity groups should have used funny pets in their videos.
On the other hand, higher education marketing is a perfect industry for viral marketing. The demographics are perfectly aligned for new media. It is the customers of higher education who have been fueling social media. Think of it. Your university has on its campus hundreds or thousands of “video producers” who would jump at a chance to go viral about their school. They’ll spend time in social networks circulating your student-produced video or video game, they’ll share photographs on Flickr, and they’ll talk authentically about their school. This is a no-brainer.
But it will take some intelligent planning. You need to talk to your students about how they would do it, and you’ll need to get up to speed with viral and new social media marketing. For instance, check out the blog, From the Head of Zeus Jones, and the entry on the best social media marketing being done today. And this blog entry by Seth Godin, a thought leader on viral marketing.
Marketing higher education today includes a shift to viral marketing and social media. You’ll need to adjust your marketing plan, and allocate your budget dollars differently. You may need agency dollars for micro websites. There will be more dollars for student wages. But you need to look at it carefully. You need to go viral.
iTunes Podcast - 4.2.09
Last week, I was tuned to the Los Angeles PBS radio station and was listening to Larry Mantle’s popular and well-respected morning show, AirTalk (Larry is a long-time friend and campus radio broadcasting partner from college days). Patt Morrison’s show followed, and I heard that one of her subjects was about college admissions during this recessionary period. I stayed tuned. Her guests were Katherine Harrington, dean of admission and financial aid at USC; Mae Brown, director of admissions at UC San Diego; and Rick Shaw, dean of admission and financial aid at Stanford. It’s an interesting discussion. All three institutions are in peak demand, and do not anticipate that the recession will negatively impact their final admissions numbers. On this point alone, they are unlike many institutions this year that have adjusted their tuition revenue numbers because of concerns about families’ abilities to pay for college right now.
Stanford offered admission to only 7% of its applicants this year. Their aggressive financial aid policies, announced in February 2009, almost guarantee that the recession will not have a negative impact on their freshman class. This from the Stanford website:
Zero Parent Contribution for Parents with Income Below $60,000. For parents with total annual income below $60,000 and typical assets for this income range, Stanford will not expect a parent contribution toward educational costs.
Tuition Charges Covered for Parents with Income Below $100,000. For parents with total annual income below $100,000 and typical assets for this income range, Stanford will ensure that all tuition charges are covered with need-based scholarship, federal and state grants, and/or outside scholarship funds.
More Generous Method for Determining Family Contributions. Our methodology for calculating the expected family contributions for all applicants has been revised to be significantly more generous, while remaining true to the principles of need-based, equitable distribution of funds. Changes include: capping the amount of home equity in the parent asset calculation at 1.2 times the amount of total annual income; increasing the portion of total parent assets that are protected against assessment, for most families; adjusting the parent income calculation to reflect the higher cost of living in certain parts of the country; dividing the total calculated parent contribution evenly among multiple siblings in college; decreasing the assessment rate for student assets from 25% to 5% per academic year.
Students Not Expected to Borrow to Meet Educational Costs. Students are no longer expected to borrow student loans as part of their financial aid packages. Instead, students can cover their expenses by working part-time during the academic year, with a standard earnings expectation of $2,500. The typical hourly wage for student part-time employment on campus is $11 per hour. At this rate, students would need to work an average of 7.5 hours per week to meet the earnings expectation.
Aggressive. Demands our respect. Great marketing move.
Even though this decision by Stanford to aggressively use its endowment and fundraising campaign to aid its students should be commended for its ethics and its higher education policy implications, it is a marketing power move by a major player in higher education. Long known as the Ivy League school on the west coast, Stanford gains all that positive press as a moral leader in the world of student financial aid, keeps in step with Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth; gains political points in government relations at a time when the cost of attending college has been gaining more government attention; becomes more appealing to the nation’s top prospective students; etc., etc., etc. In other words, a shrewd marketing strategy.
Obviously, financial aid is a major component and concern of any university’s CFO. But like Stanford and USC, over the last 15 years, more and more universities have placed their financial aid operations under the enrollment management umbrella because it is a key tool in marketing higher education. It is the most important piece of the recruitment game. It plays a huge role in how students make their decision on where to go to college.
Earlier in the adoption cycle, after much research on the subject, after multiple debates with colleagues at national conventions, and after persuading senior administrators and the finance committee of the board of trustees, I was able to get our university to shift to a financial aid leveraging program with a certain, well-known vendor. It was a controversial decision because of the program’s emphasis on students’ willingness to pay, which depends on where financial need and academic ability intersect. It’s also controversial because it takes a detour from the financial aid purist’s point of view that aid should be awarded for calculated financial need and not on merit alone; a view that is more easily held by those institutions that meet full need in their financial aid packages. However, in our situation, we actually offered more need-based aid–and more aid overall–with the financial aid leveraging program than we previously offered.
Since that decision to go to financial aid leveraging in the mid-1990s, we were able to grow the enrollment, raise the academic profile of the freshman class, more accurately project tuition revenue, and be much more competitive with our aid offers. The branding implications cascade from there. Since that time, many more institutions have followed suit and have adopted a leveraging model for financial aid. But that decision back then was a marketing decision. Sure, it had financial and educational policy implications. But it was at its core a marketing decision, and another example of the impact marketing decisions have on an institution of higher learning.
