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The first new listing in a few weeks arrived yesterday from Mike Jung at Saint Mary's College of California. Mike has just been hired there as Web Editor, College Communications.
Congratulations to Mike. You can ask him about his new position at mej3@stmarys-ca.edu or just send your own congratulations.
To see the full list, look under the Web Writing topic for the August 8 entry.
Nancy Schwartz is a smart person who works in the world of marketing for nonprofit organizations. That includes not only the education arena but also extends out to nonprofits of just about any area. You can get a better picture by visiting her website at http://www.nancyschwartz.com/
Right now Nancy is organizing a "Blog Carnival" focused on how nonprofits can get people's attention in a world that's saturated and then some by the constant bliizzard of marketing messages that's out and about the land. And marketers, of course, are always thinking about new ways to increase the density of the blizzard. Keep a close eye on your cell phones and PDAs as they merge together, increase capacity, and start to bring you new marketing messages.
Thinking about Nancy's request... what words of wisdom can a variety of consultants offer to those responsible for marketing success at nonprofits... I decided not focus on activities to get attention directly from new people but instead to suggest paying maximum attention to people who are already engaged with your organization. And using their favorable word of mouth to use your stellar service in the nonpofit universe to recommend you to others with similar interests.
Let's focus on people who donate money or volunteer time. Here are some elements of online communications that come to mind:
One of Nancy's questions was how we might communicate complex new ideas.
The blog approach can give some key marketing answers to that question. First, post a question about the complex issue on your blog, including if needed a link to more information about the topic. Then, ask blog participants to offer comments and questions. Do all this before you do something more formal. And use the answers in the blog to craft the message you will prepare for the broader community. No, it won't be "scientific" but if your blog is reasonably active it should give you some key insight into what's so complex it confounds people and what might be easier to understand than you thought.
Make sure you have a place on your website for volunteers to share stories in their own words about working with your organization. Individual volunteer stories are far better than the usual press releases to send believable messages about good deeds done. Many nonprofits are already doing this. But not enough.
New people are more likely to support with dollars or time an organization that (1) gives prominent attention to others who already support it and (2) gives new prospective supporters an easy way to tap into evidence of that ongoing support. Interactive online communications today is the best way to do just that.
That's it for now. My "Comments" are turned off for now while we puzzle out some spam issues but you can comment direct to me at bob@bobjohnsonconsulting.com
Late on a Friday afternoon is a good time to check on the week's marketing mail... both the print type and the email.
Right now I'm looking at a large postcard from Pinnacle Yachts that's reminding me to remind everyone thinking about buying student recruitment prospecting names from a third party other than ACT or College Board to ask some serious questions:
Yes, those are all legitimate questions that any regular list broker can answer. If your potential source balks at any of them, find another source.
Back to the Pinnacle postcard. This arrived earlier this week to "Roger Johnson." Roger is one of the many combinations of REJ that I use when secret shopping while doing competitive website reviews for clients. The reviews always include completion of the online inquiry form (except in the fortunately very rare cases when I can't find one!). Whoever I happen to be on that particular day ends up in many different databases.
Right now I'm assuming that Roger did not complete an inquiry form for an individual college or university. If he did, that school is making some extra cash by selling their inquiry lists. More likely, Roger's name was sold by a third-party firm that solicits interest in higher education opportunities and then was sold in the general market.
Of course, the Pinnacle Yacht people don't have a very good direct marketing plan. Trust me, Roger never told anyone he was interested in sailing or yachting or anything else that would take him off dry land. But here he is, getting an "All Season, All Inclusive" offer to spend "Just $5,250" for access to a "34 to 42 Foot Yacht" (is that really "yacht" size?) at a marina near him in Michigan. Picture looks like a mid-sized sail boat to me but hardly a yacht.
And so let's revisit the basics. If you are searching for names to contact, make sure they were acquired in the not too distant past (6 months is nice) and that they have expessed a particular interest in what you want to offer them. And that's not just a warning about yachts.
In the past 24 months I've acquired a huge file of email college offers from one third-party provider on just about anything you can imagine in higher education. The email contacts have been coming along now for about two years. Lots of colleges wasting lots of money.
Want to know more about Pinnacle Yachts? Check them out at http://wwwpinnacleyachts.com where "You're the Captain of Your Personal Yacht!"
Is this my moderately advanced age showing?
This week I've been finishing the "Online Marketing Bootcamp" presentation for the University Continuing Education Association meeting next month in San Francisco. When I do presentations for special audiences, I always try to find examples from websites relevant to the audience. And that means I've been looking at a larger than normal number of continuing education and distance learning websites. That's about done now. Just over 100 slides for 3.5 hours on Web Writing, Web Advertising, Search Engine Possibilities, and Continuing Website Engagement.
More than a few websites have discovered podcasts. I presume that these are meant to engage prospective students when they visit.
I don't fall in either of the above categories, that's for sure. Particularly if I can barely hear the person talking to me. Minimal changes? At least put a picture of the person talking up on the web page. And do more testing of the volume level.
Blogs presented in web-friendly fashion, on the other hand, are pretty easy to read and the act of reading maintains engagement and reinforces memory of what's being read. When there's a photo of the person blogging, that's even better. This just might be why so many more web users read blogs than listen to podcasts.
By the way, so far the absolute champion for number of blogs at a single location must be the Wharton School where 55 MBA students write with varying frequency. And its pretty easy to scan the list and pick a couple to start with based on what they are studying and city or country of origin.
Go along to http://diaries.wharton.upenn.edu/ and see for yourself. Must be a pretty popular way for the MBA folk to take a break from their academic endeavors.
With an absolute plethora of newsletters, columns, blogs and more out and about the countryside telling us how to create better websites, anyone challenged for time needs to be cautious about investing that time for maximum return.
You won't go wrong if you regularly read the columns from Mark Hurst.
Visit http://www.goodexperience.com/blog/archives/001182.php for the archives and treat yourself to some worthwhile browsing. Then sign up to receive future issues by email. And of course, in this time of Internet Interactivity, you'll have a chance to loop back to Mark's column online to read comments and post your own.
When you first visit the Good Experience site, but sure to read through the "This is Broken" section, where each day a new reader example is posted of what people should not be doing on the website.
Be advised that Mark is definitely in the camp of web people who favor attention to content more than attention to elaborate design. In his most recent column, he notes that at a new Girl Scout site with a bright new graphic face he couldn't find the types of cookies that are sold. The solution? A visit to the very plain Wikipedia site where the information was easy to find.
Make a late 2007 resolution. Become a regular reader of Mark's Good Experience column. And pledge to offer a better experience to your website visitors in the New Year.
Can 125,733 people be wrong?
That's the number of people who responded to research by Dynaic Logic reported in Advertising Age at http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=114345
The goal was to find out what features of online video advertising drew positive viewer responses and what features caused ads to flop. If you're planning anything like this for your future marketing campaigns, then make sure your creative folk are aware of these results as they build your ads.
108 ads were tested in categories that included entertainment, consumer goods, and automotive.
For a little more information, including a nice graph that shows the range between high and low performance in several categories, visit the Dynamic Locic website at http://www.dynamiclogic.com/na/research/btc/beyond_the_click_jan2007.html
Most successful online advertising still relies on simple, direct marketing style text in response to searches. University of Phoenix, Regis University, Capalla University and others have been doing this well for some time now. Still, the increasing spread of broadband is making online ads similar to TV ads more practical and therefor worth considering. The trick, of course, will be not to suffer the same pitfalls of so many TV commercials.
Join me in keeping eyes read for the first video ads from Phoenix. Or Capella. Or another college or university coming to a website near you.
Have you explored the emerging 3D version of the Internet World at the Second Life website?
If not, take yourself along to http://secondlife.com/ and start exploring.
Is it relevant to higher education? Go to http://secondlife.com/businesseducation/education.php and sign up for the regular newsletter to keep up to date with what will certainly start to happen in this new version of Internet space.
Note that you can "rent" space in the Second Life world just as you can rent a physical location for your off campus programs. Do this and you can create a new virtual world for potential students to enter and a new way for them to take your classes and earn your degrees.
Is anybody already getting started? Once you join (a process that will take you a few minutes to complete) you can search for "colleges and universities" or the names of specific competitors. I found two university names and visited one from Ohio University. That's about to become the Link of the Week at my website.
When I visited today, there were about 2.5 million Second Life members and about 880,000 had visited sometime in the last six months. Those are not yet huge numbers, but this is early in the Second Life life cycle.
If distance learning is important to your campus, start tracking what's happening here. Too early to say if this is the next great revolution in online higher education, but it isn't too early to note that early adopters are already exploring the new world. So maybe you should be also.
I've just finished updating my next "Writing for the Web" presentation, a 3 hour run in February for Academic Impressions. The session description is at https://www.academicimpressions.com/conferences/0207-brand-messaging.php
One section in the presentation highlights the virtues of employing people with direct marketing copywriting backgrounds to write for your website or to show others using your CMS how to best add new web content. And that took me back to a long series of tips from direct marketer Nick Usborne at his Excess Voice website.
If you're already a convert to direct marketing style or if you're open to conversion, then visit Nick's tips at http://www.excessvoice.com/web-copywriting-tips.htm The 39 vary in length and substance but all are easy to read and you can quickly scan the full list of titles for what most interests you.
From reviewing as many college and university websites as I do, three really stand out:
Title pages http://www.excessvoice.com/web-copywriting-tip29.htm (Follow these tips and you are very likely to increase your search engine visibility.)
Landing pages http://www.excessvoice.com/web-copywriting-tip7.htm (A reminder to focus clearly on the single action you want people coming to this page from your ad to take when they arrive. If you're disappointed with website conversions from advertising or "search" efforts, this is a "must read and remember" item.)
Long copy http://www.excessvoice.com/web-copywriting-tip44.htm (Every direct marketer knows that long copy isn't bad copy... only boring copy is bad copy. If you struggle about the best way to present information, be sure to read this one.)
You'll no doubt find other personal favorites here. Read well and write well. Your website visitors will thank you for it by spending more time on your website.
I had an email from someone recently reporting that the new web person at his college was happy. A new CMS had just been installed and the web leader expected that all would be well now in the world of new web content. But will it? How is that content going to be written and presented on the website? A CMS can be a great tool in the hands of someone how knows how write for the web. Or it can be a disaster in the hand of those who don't.
Can people on your campus use help in writing better web content?
Contact me at bob@bobjohnsonconsulting to bring a Writing Right for Web seminar to your campus. In a half-day session, we'll raise the skill level of everyone who attends and get them off to a fine start on making your web world a much friendlier place to visit.
The January 7 edition of the quarterly Education Life supplment to the NY Times seemed a good place to find out if colleges and universities are creating special landing pages to use with their advertising when they include URLs in the print ads.
Special landing pages can significantly increase conversion activities from people who come from an ad to your website. The landing page should repeat and reinforce the main theme of the ad. When you see a good landing page you should have a very good idea of what the original ad was all about.
The issue had 43 ads, including multiple ads by different units of several large NYC universities.
If you used an especially prominent word or phrase in your ad, what happens when somebody reading the ad comes to the front page of your website in search of more information and types the word or phrase into your search engine? Will that lead them to more information about the ad? In the "Google era" that we live in today, many people are likely to do just that.
For instance, one university paid for a full page ad on the back cover of the supplement, not an inexpensive thing to do. The ad highlights high profile academic students as "shooting stars" at the school. The URL takes readers to the university's front page, where there is nothing about "shooting stars" is obvious. And typing those words into the search engine doesn't bring up any content related to the ad.
How about some good examples? I didn't check everyone of the 43 ads, but wandered from front to back and didn't find very many examples of real landing pages. The ones included ranged from good to great. All avoided the cardinal sin of abandoning visitors at a front page with no content related to the ad that brought them there.
New York University
www.nyu.edu/gsas/ma/winter07 (The best example found. The ad is what you see here, a list of available programs, with links to more information about each program and an inquiry form.)
Columbia University
Metropolitan College of New York
Iona College
www.iona.edu (Actually, the front page of the website but photos used in two ads flanking the centerfold are among those rotating on the page and the "Earn a degree that matters" is prominent on the page.)
St. John's University
The overall impression is that there are miles to go before most people are paying careful attention to integrating advertising with website content. In other words, an element of marketing integration that isn't yet being well executed at most colleges.
In this first week of January in the New Year it isn't too late to add additional resolutions... if you're interested in Search Engine Marketing, make a resolution now to visit http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3624359
What you'll find is one person's list (Greg Jarboe) of 12 top speakers in this area (and links to topics they speak about), 11 bloggers that Jarboe thinks are worth following from the legions available (and links to their blogs), and 10 worthy writers (with links to Search Engine Marketing articles they've written). All in all, this is a treasure trove if you have a day or so to set aside to prep for better Search Marketing efforts in 2007.
Search marketing is an easy topic to get lost in. But getting lost in the woods for a while and then finding your way out the other side of the forest can reap rewards in a marketing environment when more and more people expect search engines to take them where they want to go.
Consider this for your second resolution: take a trip through the primary pages of your website and read the title tags for each page. Does each one reflect the primary content on the page? Is, for instance, the title page for each press release you post written to present the content of the press release in a way that search engines looking for new content will recognize and index?
Include this in your resolution: over the next year, every page in my website will have a different title tag. Every one. For a good example of how one university does this, visit http://www.capella.edu and click through on each of the primary section headings and the what's below those.
As 2007 unfolds, start on the relatively simple task of improving your title page tags to create more "opportunity moments" when search engines come to visit your website. When you do that, you're much more likely to increase the pages from your website that the spiders will take back to their nests and add to their databases.
Adding Gustavus Adolphus to the August 21 Master List of colleges and universities using IM as part of the student recruitment communications mix brings the total to 20.
Gustavus lets prospects use AOL, Yahoo, or MSN and provides links to each one for people who haven't started to IM yet. The website discourages IM for "in-depth" answers to things like "personal financial aid questions," and instead encourages email direct to an admissions counselor for more than "quick answers to quick questions."
IM time is limited to an hour a day during the regular work week, from 3:30 to 4:30 PM.
See exactly how Gustavus Adolphus presents IM at http://admission.gustavus.edu/admissions/connect/im.asp
And in this first posting of 2007, a very Happy New Year to everyone!