It's Not All About Facebook

Facebook has been the go-to platform for institutions to connect with prospective students. The statistics are endless in terms of its scale and the time users spend on there.

Let's not kid ourselves, though; Higher Education is full of control freaks. And Facebook is truly not in our control. Via a coordinated content strategy across Facebook and other social platforms, there is room for a college-owned, private social network within your digital strategy. With the ability to more closely control the experience, you can better align with institutional brand, more directly tie to programmatic, business unit goals and more intimately understand your users' personal interests. But a private social network should not stand on its own.

At today's eduWeb Conference, I presented with colleague Vanessa Theoharis on "It's Not All About Facebook: Define Your Own Private Community". The presentation showcased the benefits, challenges and opportunities of past and current private social networks, including Babson's own Define You portal for accepted students, Cafe New Paltz, MyIthaca, and Schools App by Uversity (formerly Inigral). But first and foremost, we discussed how it was both hardwired to our institutional content strategy AND fit within our undergraduate admission's primary objectives.

At the end of the day, while Facebook is necessary, it can't be everything. You must coordinate a digital marketing strategy across multiple social platforms with intentional, distinct goals and purpose for each platform. And remember, your social strategy can include owned platforms.

Crowdsourcing a Brand Campaign

Today at the eduWeb Conference in Boston, I had the pleasure to present with my colleague and Babson College Chief Marketing Officer Sarah Sykora on "Crowdsourcing a Brand Campaign".

Redefining a word can be overwhelming as can be facilitating an institutional branding campaign. Combine them both with a crowdsourcing microsite at its core and you have Babson College’s Redefining Entrepreneurship campaign. From strategy and implementation to feedback and results, our presentation showcased an institutional branding campaign integrating multiple channels to increase brand awareness, engagement, adoption and advocacy with our target constituencies. 

Crowdsourcing certainly has its benefits, but it also has to be used for the right objective. In our case, we wanted to engage the marketplace in redefining the word entrepreneurship to be a more inclusive term and activity. Historically, and even to this day, the traditional definition of entrepreneurship to many people equals a traditional small business start-up.

The strategic goal behind both the campaign and the presentation is to get individuals to understand that the emotional connection is about "the Cause, not the College". The brand campaign promotes the cause and effect of entrepreneurship, not Babson College. Rallying advocates, old and new, around a cause is much more impactul than simply rallying people around a brand. Starting with the internal community, and especially when expand to our alumni, tactics were aimed at using advocacy marketing as the fuel to engine the campaign. In addition to the definition submissions, social sharing and engagement energized all activity around the campaign.

The presentation shared our constituency map, a  new look at the higher ed consumer decision journey, an overview of our brand campaign channels and creative, and a deeper dive into the microsite engagement hub that served as the core of the campaign, define.babson.edu. Its analysis, impact and transition into V2 of our campaign was shared as well.

View a slideshare of our presentation »

Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy from Scratch

The transition is on. Well, it's been on for a while but I've finally ramped down from my undergraduate marketing activities as much as one can when transitioning to a new role within the same organization.

While there has been some web services support for the College in the recent and distant past, my new role is a strategic shift for the institution. My vision is for the department to be a team who can assist the institution and its business units with one's digital strategy and online initiatives, not just support.While there has been support activities in the past, it has mostly been website content updates and email newsletter distribution.

With a new institutional strategy and branding platform, we must now develop a digital marketing strategy for the institution, essentially from scratch. We have no social media strategy and no mobile strategy; our blogging platform is 6 years old; we use at least a half dozen content management systems; a web governance model is non-existent; our analytics systems are severely lacking and are used with no strategy. And I have yet to mention the core piece that everyone knows most about - our current black hole of a website redesign project. Just look at this quote from StudentAdvisor.com's Top 100 Social Media Colleges regarding our home page:

"Home page is inexplicably a social media wasteland that screams 2002."

And they couldn't be more right. Literally. I actually think the home page design was created in 2002.

The optimist in me says that we were #65 on this list with no strategy. Many parts of the College have been doing some great things, especially within social media, but we have not leveraged any of those best practices effectively across other parts of the institution. At a small college, we should be able to break down those silos. The role and its mission will be a challenge, but I look forward to the rollercoaster ride and have already enjoyed its ups and downs over the past 6 weeks.

More exciting news is that I get to share this ride with peers at the eduWeb Conference in San Antonio in August. I promise those attending that you will see the good and bad of creating a digital strategy from scratch. I don't know if that August 2nd script will be a comedy, a drama, a horrow show or a fairytale ending. My best educated guess is a mix of it all, but that part of the story has yet to be written. I hope you all come along for the ride and hopefully even see some of you in San Antonio.

Updated: My Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy from Scratch presentation from the eduWEb Conference can be found on my slideshare.

Role 7 in 2011

Today, I formally resigned as Marketing Director for the Undergraduate School at Babson College.

This has been one of the most enjoyable roles I've had here at Babson. It's timing was perfect for me and has helped shape me as a marketing professional. I was lucky to acquire this position at a time when the program was able to make great strides due to a strong leadership team and unified effort. A LOT of marketing activities have been accomplished during these past 4 1/2 years. Even more importantly, I've worked with some amazing individuals to help positively impact the undergraduate student experience in a way that has led to great success...in external rankings, by internal standards, in admission gains, etc. Any marketing success that could be attributed to that was really just a small part of the enjoyment of this role. I've worked with amazing peers, a phenomenal centralized group of creative experts, and an epic staff in the most recent year and a half.

Working with undergraduate students - as my most important customers, as my best marketing strategy, as my word of mouth marketers, as students in my class, as friends - has been so dam fun. I've always said I was perfect for this role because I have the same maturity level and sense of humor as some of the younger audiences I'm marketing too. That doesn't give them enough credit. The students here are so dam smart. My connection to them has grown over my time in this role and it really impacts you positively. If you are in higher education and you have not worked with undergraduate students, find a way to do so. Volunteer. Teach. Transition into a new role. Whatever it takes. It's worth it. Not even just at Babson. I'm sure this is true at other institutions. But DEFINITELY here.

Where am I going? Drumroll...I'm going nowhere. I'm staying at Babson. For those of you that didn't know already, I hope you didn't just say letdown. If so, you'll probably not going to want to read the rest of this.

Prior to resigning, I formally accepted an offer to become the Digital Marketing Director for Babson. Living within the centralized College Marketing function, this role will have responsibility for creating, managing and promoting Babson's digital presence. Those of you close to me know this is where my heart is right now and has been for a while. And it brings me back to my roots! My excitement and ideas on taking on this challenge could fill up even more pages of a blog post. That will surely come in the weeks ahead after I formally begin the role on March 28. In the meantime, I really want to give my current position its full due and help transition the undergraduate program. It continues to have some unprecedented success and would do so without me, but I hope I can continue to be instrumental in its success going forward...only this time with a digital marketing focus.

I'm going on my 10th year at Babson and this new role will now be my seventh one. Unbelievable. I've been blessed with great bosses for every single one...a benefit I can say many peers who have come and gone have not been able to mirror that luck. I truly feel lucky being able to say that with all honesty.

And the Babson Community (capital c) is special to me. It's like family. And like every family, it can be challenging. It can be a whole lot of fun. It can also have its sad days and it certainly can be dysfunctional. It can also be there for you when you need it most and I have certainly seen many of those instances during my time here. So many that it could actually be a great, cheesy Lifetime movie. That's another movie I'll have to script now.

Anyways, the caring, intelligence and humor that I am surrounded with here every day in terms of faculty, staff and students is unique. And that doesn't even include the great relationships I've made with alumni and parents. I'm excited to be able to stay to connected to that - both with the undergraduate school and the campus and external community at large - in this new role.

Timeliness vs. Quality

When it comes to producing video content in 2011, there are many factors that help drive your decision-making process on an individual video project - goals, objectives, format, technology available, etc.

First and foremost, there are many options on how to even record your video, with much of the decision-making process depending on your end goal. You can put a flip camera in the hands of your customers. You can record an event or speaking engagement and post it after the event. You can even live-stream a show like my new addiction, HigherEdLive, and still archive the content. You can produce a high-quality informercial for your product or service. Or as we recently did, you can parody an existing video.

Recently, we ran into a timeliness versus quality debate for a video project where our end goals were community-building and building awareness of our mascot. Upon seeing the Bridgestone Beaver commercial during the Super Bowl, a colleague and I joked about finding a way to get our mascot, Biz E. Beaver a.k.a. The Biz, into a future Bridgestone commercial. I even reached out to their social media manager via Twitter and half-jokingly told them we have their talent for any future commercials. After not hearing back for a couple days, the idea finally popped in my head to film our own "commercial" with The Biz, a parody on the original.



We tried to mirror it as closely as possible to the original, but injecting some of the personality of our mascot, our institution and our dean. Unfortunately, it still took us a week to get this posted due to schedules and the fact my idea came 3 days later than it should have. Ideally, we would have filmed and edited this the day after the Superbowl.

We definitely feel filming and editing quliaty was sacrificed some, even with the one-week timeframe between the original's first airing and our video posting and promotion. We obviously wanted to capitalize on the timeliness and popularity of the Bridgestone commercial, including their success in  #brandbowl feedback, and I felt that timeliness was most important. With that being said, time will tell if the quality holds up over the months ahead as the commercial becomes less popular and searched on.

We're happy with the community's response to it these first few days and The Biz has even made a dozen new friends!

The Structure of Success

About a month back, I caught via Twitter a blog post by a former Twitter employee, Alex Payne. He shared his thoughts about the #newtwitter, the site's role changing in users' lives and that it would be his last post about Twitter. Great read, but what really caught my attention were two quotes about decentralization.

"Twitter needs to decentralize or it will die. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even in a decade, but it was (and, I think, remains) my belief that all communications media will inevitably be decentralized"

"Decentralization isn’t just a better architecture, it’s an architecture that resists censorship and the corrupting influences of capital and marketing."

Both statements may be a little foreboding, but they are grounded in aspects of reality. While Alex was focusing on the decentralization of Twitter as a business versus a medium, the centralization versus decentralization argument has been going on within organizations for decades. In my world, the debate has been within the marketing function of a business.

A centrally shared services group allows for collaboration and consistency. They can streamline messaging and branding. The group can identify and leverage best practices, maximize efficiencies in operations and resources, and minimize any duplication of communication efforts and service purchases.

The decentralized units hold the knowledge and expertise for their respective business and most understand their audience. They are product experts and market specialists. They truly own the content and marketing programs that can deliver on meeting business goals.

I've been in marketing organizations that have been centralized and in ones that have been decentralized; and in an organization that has been both at different times. You can find success in either, but the ideal organizational structure is a hybrid model. It can provide the benefits of each without many of the cons. This is where I have seen the best of both worlds come together.

It is difficult to deliver on though. Much of it depends on the culture and the people within the organization. Both need to be collaborative. If successful, a hybrid of centralized and decentralized services leads to a coordinated, yet empowered organization. It will be the structure of which most organizations will need to be to succeed in the near future.

A Successful Tagline in Higher Education

A recent blog post by Bob Johnson asked if taglines were important in higher ed and whether finding one that resonated internally and externally was an impossible task. I think that you can certainly find one that fits for all of your audiences. It takes a lot of research - primary, secondary, quantitative, qualitative, anecdotal; and it takes a lot of energy. But it can be done.

Making it resonate internally with current students, staff and faculty may in fact be more important than having it resonate externally with prospective audiences. My marketing philosophy tends to lean towards making your current customers happy first. They are in fact your best marketers. If they enjoy, use and approve of your tagline when they are messaging with your audiences, there is your reward.

Our previous tagline, while working for our prospective audiences, was turned into a negative by students and did not have approval by our entire staff. It also was not quite working for a new student experience philosphy, which included shifting programs and initiatives to be more student-led and initiated. Using this feedback from internal audiences, combinining it with branding market research from our prospective families, and understanding the new vision and strategy of a new college president led to the development of a new tagline that has been used for our undergraduate program for the past few years. The tagline and messaging framework are currently being used across the undergraduate school - during the admission cycle, at orientation, by our service departments and through career development programs.

To me, it has been successful. I may be baised.

Credibility

At my institution, we have seen a lot of activity from admitted and deposited students over the past month on our Facebook Fan page. In comparison to past years, the number of unique page views and the number of interactions during these first three weeks in April have doubled.

What I am seeing more of this year are the process and deadline-oriented questions. It has led me to truly expand our customer service efforts and build a model to lean on a variety of departments to help with the responses. During these conversations with my peers, I came to the realization that the credibility pendulum has swung a little bit at this stage of the admission cycle.

Our admitted and deposited students are no longer searching for current student feedback, but appear to be looking for staff or college-sponsored answers to their questions. In prior months, they had been asking students and their peers for their opinions on questions related to campus life, clubs and organizations, dining, etc. Our current students and admits were the credible source. We were just facilitating/hosting that conversation. What is great is that our students are phenomenal advocates and tend to monitor these online platforms on their own. When a post did go unanswered for a little while, I’d simply ask a student to chime in if it was in an area of interest/expertise for them.

At this stage of the game, we need to be more customer-service oriented with our Facebook use and staff need to be their key source of information. Credibility is a powerful marketing tool. Understand who your sources of credibility are and when to properly use them. The prospective student responses and the conversations that have taken place there have been such a great source of public enthusiasm for the incoming class - both when students are leading conversation and when staff and faculty are leading the conversation.

I originally titled this post “authenticity”. It’s a word that is overused when referring to marketing activities and even more so when referencing social media. It wasn’t really what I wasn’t trying to get at either so thank you http://thesaurus.com/ for being my vocabulary source when my intellect could not come through late on a Friday afternoon.

Networking is Conversation

Networking.  At certain stages in one's life, it's a necessary means to progressing to that next stage in your life. Some enjoy it; others despise it.  Some excel at it; others do not.

Well, I'm not really into networking but I do like to talk.  I've learned to really love conversation lately; especially about things I truly enjoy - becoming a dad, sports, higher education, social media, pop culture, entertainment. I guess that brings me back to why I started this blog.  I like to converse and share..even if no one's listening :) - and continue the conversation if someone actually is.

I've been in some situations over the last couple months where a serial networker would have been ecstatic.  Traditionally, I would have hated these opportunities but they've actually been enjoyable! I think I historically have not enjoyed networking more so due to my negative reaction to the word. I've had the word and the necessity of the action drilled into me through my undergraduate and graduate business courses and through then working at a business school for ten years.

It's time to change any networking situations into opportunties for conversation.  It's much more enjoyable. With conversation and engagement, good times will follow.

CASE Conference and Social Media

I was lucky enough to speak at last month's CASE Conference.  After being connected through a mutual past colleague, I was even luckier to co-present with Tamsen McMahon of Sametz Blackstone Associates on the Why and Why Nots of Social Media. The presentation was jam-packed as social media was definitely a buzz topic over the two days I was at the conference. There were many questions and much interest and I only wish we had more time for both the presentation and taking more questions.

This was my first time presenting at CASE and Tamsen certainly set me up for success.  Presenting has always been somewhat of a high for me and this was no exception.  Presenting can be nerve-wracking; and it can be a whole lot of fun.  Going in to every presentation I do, I try to promise myself three things: 1) Be relaxed; 2) Understand that I won't hit every point I prepare; and 3) Try to interject some humor.  Now, not everyone will get every joke you make as that is typicallly the case for me, but it at least keeps you making yourself laugh.  That is my #1 rule for not only every presentation, but every day. :)

Our presentation can be found on Slideshare. I am actually not a client of Tamsen's or Sametz, but it's amazing how similar our approaches and philosophy on digital media are despite being new acquaintances.  At the end of the day, there are variety of organizational structures, policies and strategies that can work, but they've developed a method that will help determine how social media will work in any organization.

When it comes to any space within social media, I feel that you need to be a consumer first. Your plan has three simple steps.

1. Learn -  Learn your way around the space and discover how other users are utilizing the platform.
2. Interact - Now that you have a sense of the space, use it more frequently and understand its intricacies. Communicate and be a part of the conversation.
3. Engage - Now that you've built relationships and have become knowledgeable of the space, share content and conversation that will engage your new connections.

If you follow these three basic steps, I ensure that you will become a more comfortable and engaged user of social media.  And this method works for both personal and corporate use. For any marketer or communications professional, I feel that you should learn, interact and engage as a consumer first to truly understand the space.  You can stagger these steps in parallel for each and learn about your product, service and market while engaging as an individual user.  After all, your audience is your brand and to quote Tamsen from another session during CASE, "social media allows you to understand your brand."

It's All About Current Customers

I have had a lot of marketing conversations lately that have led me back to sharing my foundamental marketing belief - it's all about your current customers.

I don't care what industry you are in.  The core of your business are your current customers and they always need to be an audience of focus. They are your brand. They know your value proposition better than you do. They are your best marketing strategy.  Their referrals, their word of mouth, and even their bad reviews can make or break your year. 

In thinking of my current industry, this has been a weakness in many higher ed institutions for many, many years.  The focus has always been on the prospective student, the alumni base, recruiters, the foundation, etc. At the end of the day, what are each of those audiences looking at? The current student experience. It all comes back to the current students. Are they happy? Are they thriving? Are they valuing their investment? Are they worth an investment?

So why do so many businesses and institutions ignore this important audience? Why do they refuse to focus any marketing efforts on the service provided to and the experience of their current customers?

It's understandable to want to move forward and look for that next big sale and grow your customer base. At the end of the day, it obviously needs to grow.  It just cannot be at the sacrifice of your current customers.  Losing one current customer with that bad experience can have a far more negative impact than the benefit of gaining one new customer.