Bob Johnson's Blog on Internet Marketing

Spent a marvelous morning yesterday with the Chicago metro REACh group, people from various colleges and universities who focus on "adult" marketing and recruitment. We met at a suburban campus of Illinois Institute of Technology.

REACh's Scott Pfeiffer and Tim Panfil asked for an ambitious program: cover 8 online communication topics in 2 back-to-back sessions of about 75 minutes each. The major challenge: compress some topics that I cover in 2 to 3 hour sessions into just a few key points to take back home. Since it is easier to let presentations grow than to shrink them, that was an interesting and useful exercise.

To start the day, I asked the people present to vote on which of the 8 topics we were covering were most important to them, the proverbial "if you could only pick one of these, which would it be?" question. These are topics (in the order covered) and the votes for each:

• Web Design... 3
• Search Optimization... 6
• Writing Right for the Web... 14
• Paid Search... 0
• Web Analytics... 2
• Video... 4
• Mobile Marketing... 2
• Blogs, Email, Chat Rooms... 7

I was a bit surprised and very pleased by the size of the Web Writing vote compared to the others. And just as pleased to see that the "old favorites" of Blogs, Email, Chat Rooms retain strong interest at a time when it is easy to be dazzled by new capabilities at the expense of "traditional" online communication that is still in favor with the people who use college and univesity websites.

3 New On-Campus Web Writing Seminars

"Writing Right for the Web" continues to be a popular presentation. Between now and early August I'll be doing on-campus sessions at Fielding Graduate University, Stonehill College, and Dominican University. And look for another web conference with Academic Impressions in October and a CASE V Annual Conference session in December in Chicago.

Whether you start on-campus or online, improving the quality of your web writing is often the most important thing you can do for stronger engagement with your visitors. Ask me about a session on your campus at bob@bobjohnsonconsulting.com

Subscribe to Website Magazine

On a related note, if you have never checked Website Magazine, do that soon. Each issue includes worthy articles on more than one of the topics listed above. The current issue is at www.websitemagazine.com where you can subscribe to either a print or an electronic version. Or both. 

That's it for now.

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Sitting in the Sacramento airport this morning on the way back from a web review report at UC Merced, I got online to check email. That takes me through a first Yahoo "news" page. This morning, the lead story is a tease to learn about "degrees to get you hired" to help you move forward in life at least until 2016.

Since I'm always in favor of moving forward, I visited followed the link to http://education.yahoo.net/degrees/articles/featured_8_sure_fire_hires.html and scanned the list of growing employment areas. Pretty standard stuff. Along with the story "reporting" the list comes a plethora of advertising opportunities for colleges and universities of every type. Hundreds of them.

You can sort by the level of degree or the area of study. But if you're interested in a "doctoral" program, don't expect to have only those advanced fields reported back to you. Whoever programmed this thing really does follow the mantra of "just keep throwing things at people until something sticks."

I tried sorting the alpha list for on-campus programs by zip code, using one from Michigan. That did sort things out to the point where the first programs reported were indeed in or near the zip code. But the list kept right on going, reporting non-degree occupational programs in locations as far as 2,000 miles away.

Does advertising like this work? It all depends on ROI. Cost of leads returned and percent who convert to enrollments. But it sure isn't a direct marketer's idea of how to do things.

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You can't miss it just about anywhere on the web these days: Advertising for adults to enroll in bachelor's and master's degree programs.

And much if not most of this is tightly targeted to people searching for the right career. After all, "career advancement" is one of the strongest terms that students of every age favor in our Customer Carewords research.

Consider this example. Yahoo runs a "news" story on the front page about the "10 stealth careers that are on the rise." That's a fly trap to lure people into a plethora of ads for adult degree programs. Visit http://education.yahoo.net/degrees/articles/featured_10_great_careers_you_never_heard.html and you'll find a story on "10 Great Careers You've Probably Never Heard Of" and the chance to browse for degrees in just about any area you can imagine.

• The advertising isn't just from for-profits like Phoenix and Capella. Search for online Ph.D. programs, for instance, and you'll find an ad for Boston University. Follow that ad and you'll eventually learn that the BU choices are for Doctor of Physical Therapy and a "Doctorate in Occupational Therapy."
• Things fall apart just a bit at this point as much of the information you find with a "Ph.D." level search isn't for Ph.D. degrees. In this case, the BU trip takes you to ads for Northeastern, George Washington, and Norwich universities. Each is offering an array of master's degrees but no Ph.D. level programs.

But why quibble? If you throw enough ads on the wall, some of them will stick and attract flys. At least that seems to be the theory at work right now for online advertising for adults.

To sharpen your skills in adult student recruiting, come to Carol Aslanian's conference May 29-30 in Chicago on "Adult Student Marketing: Electronic, Mass Media and Print Practices that Work."

• The meeting is at the University of Chicago's Gleacher Center and there's only room for about 100 people. Over 60 have already registered and this one has sold out for the past two years.
• Register soon at http://www.aslaniangroup.com/events/

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This morning I've been getting ready to present the results and recommendations from my review of 12 law school websites that compete with a client of mine. As part of that process, I decided to take a quick look at the websites of the top 10 law schools rated most highly by US News & World Report. That seemed as good a place as any to search for online marketing elements worth sharing.

The overall results didn't diminish my conclusion in an earlier post that law schools in general are not as marketing-oriented as other segments of higher education. At the graduate and professional level, MBA schools in particular have a much stronger marketing approach.

But here are some features worth visiting that stood out for me:

• University of Chicago with 10 faculty and student blogs telling stories that give interested students a special insight into what it is like to study law there. Scan through what's available at http://www.law.uchicago.edu/blog.html
• Northestern University's interactive online viewbook where the video introductions show once again what can be done when imagination and time permit something other than a PDF format at http://www.law.northwestern.edu/admissions/viewbook/
• University of Michigan's easy-to-scan outcomes information that uses a map of the United States to quickly locate where recent alumni have found employment after leaving the school at http://www.law.umich.edu/currentstudents/careerservices/factsandstats/pages/gradgeo.aspx.aspx

These features take obvious advantage of Web 2.0 communication capabilities, Soon, we can suspect, more schools will be adding similar features to help make the visit experience more productive.

And there's nothing here that could not be adopted by other professional school websites as well.

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Right now I'm working on competitive website reviews of 12 law schools for one of my clients. And so far, I'm convinced that I've wandered into a lost segment of higher education that, despite what I read about the competitive nature of recruiting law students, just hasn't done much in the world of online marketing.

Consider this. I've now  made an online inquiry at 11 of the 12 schools. (At one, there was no online inquiry form.) Each of them asked for my email address. That was several weeks ago. To date, I've received an email response from 2 of the schools. That, to be kind, is pretty poor performance.

OK, this is far from a comprehensive survey of online law school recruitment. And I do know from presentations done for the Law School Admissions Council in 2006 that there are indeed some good communication features at law school websites. But I'm still surprised at this response from a mix of private and public law schools.

"Deadwood Report" Adds Marketing Data

Meanwhile, the marketing world is advancing on the law school world. A new "Deadwood Report" is in preparation to rate law schools according to the activity of their faculty in teaching, research, and community services. The originators have hit on this approach to try to test the claims made by law schools on their websites about the quality and dedication of their faculty.

Read more about the new "Deadwood" plan at the Inside Higher Education article at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/26/lawrank

Student Engagement in Law School: Important Marketing Information

And of course, the marvelous people at the National Survey of Student Engagement that ask undergraduate students how engaged they are with their education have a similar instrument for law schools. You can download the 2007 report that lists participating schools from the website at http://lssse.iub.edu/2007_Annual_Report/

In my fantasy world, I dream that prospective students and parents will pressure law schools who participate into making public what students say about them. It hasn't happened yet for the regular NSSE and it likely will not happen soon for law schools. But I can dream. Change might even come to the Lost World of law school marketing.

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Did you by chance think the Washington Post was just the name of a newspaper?

Major newspapers don't survive today by selling papers, subscriptions to papers, and advertising in newspapers. The Washington Post Company has been diversifying for years and holdings now include the college test-prep business of Kaplan, Inc.

And so it isn't a surprise that the Post has now bought a search marketing firm used by a plethora of colleges and universities to find adult students for masters and bachelors programs. The announcement in the Washington Business Journal at http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/stories/2007/10/08/daily35.html reports that advertising in the education sector was a bright spot. Education-related advertising increased 23 percent in the 2nd quarter of this year.

The new acquisition was founded in 2004 and will continue to operate under its Course Advisor name at http://www.courseadvisor.com/

When you visit, be sure to notice the client mix that ranges from University of Phoenix and Capella University to University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Boston University, and numerous trade schools.

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Writing this morning from the Gleacher Center at the University of Chicago, where 90+ people are exploring marketing communications in the online world at a conference by The Aslanian Group.

One of the surprising nuggets of information has been the popularity of "distance learning" as a frequently used keyword search term. That's a relatively rare example of academic jargon moving out into common use.

You can check just how popular it is compared to terms like "online college degrees" by using the free Wordtracker tool at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

The results don't just tell us that this is a good keyword term. Given the high popularity, consider using the term in your regular advertising efforts.

The term isn't just popular as a key word. In a recent Customer Carewords survey of 5,000 people inquiring about online learning degree programs, "distance learning" received a much higher ranking than "online degrees." Keywords bring people to your website and Carewords keep them there. This is a fine example of words that do both. More on Carewords at http://www.bobjohnsonconsulting.com/customercarewords.html

And so let's celebrate and take advantage of the break out opportunity. The popularity of the distance learning term surprised people here. If you also thought it was an academic term to avoid in your marketing efforts, its time to reconsider.

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If you haven't already discovered the Sloan Consortium's research work on onlined education, then you are missing valuable background information to plan your future marketing efforts in the online world.

Go along to http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/survey/survey06.asp for a summary of the findings from "Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006." If the summary is interesting enough, you can download a free PDF with the full report.

Chief Academic Officers Say Online Quality is Fine

Most encouraging is the news that Chief Academic Officers believe the quality of online education is at least as good, and sometimes better, that the traditional format.

This survey focuses on the Fall of 2005. The great majority of online students, as is the case in higher education overall, are undergraduates. But 443,000 were taking master's degree courses and 39,000 were in "first professional" programs.

Online Enrollments Will Continue to Grow

Looking ahead, a key finding is that enrollment growth online is expected to continue to grow. And that means more undergraduates emerging with bachelor's degrees who might well be looking at online programs as a strong choice to coninue their education while also grappling with new employment demands.

If part of the future marketing success of your institution rests with post-bachelor's education, then online programs are an inevitable part of your future. So far, that seems to favor larger schools over smaller ones with fewer resources to devote to an online effort. The 2006 survey results show that online education is "critical to the long term strategy of my institution" for 65.1% of the respondents, a steady climb from the 46.5% saying that in the 2003 survey.

Carol Aslanian's Online Marketing Conference

Online marketing, including the quality of your website as well as your online advertising and communication programs, will become more important tomorrow than it is today. In that context, time for a plug for Carol Aslanian's upcoming May conference "Advanced Online Marketing: Recruiting Adult and Graduate Students in the Information Age" at http://www.aslaniangroup.com/events/default.asp

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Always hard to imagine ahead of time, but 3.5 hours sure does wiz on by. In this session we covered the basics of Writing Right for the Web, Search Engine Optimization, Persuasive Web Advertising and Continuing Engagement.

Web 2.0 and Audience Content Control

Lots of questions and comments right from the start. Hard to say which topic was of most interest, but there was much discussion on the advent of Web 2.0 and the possible clash between increased generation of content by students enrolled in educational programs and an apprehension that content not generated by the organization might not be the "right" content for the web.

The good news is that most of the 60 or so people in this session are actively involved in preparing content for their websites, either placing it directly on the web or sending it along elsewhere.

2 Basic Design Examples in Continuing Education

And of course there's always the question of time spent on design vs. time spent on content, with design continuing to most often win out.

• I used the example of Ryerson University on Wikipedia to point out that while design isn't unimportant, some of the most popular websites today clearly rely more on content that advanced design features.
• Another example was from the very well designed front page of the Indiana University Fort Wayne continuing education website.

Check the Ryerson example at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryerson_University

And the IUFW front page for continuing education at http://www.ipfw.edu/dcs/

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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.

• What I'm wondering (haven't yet seen any research on this particular point) is how many people sit and stare for several minutes at a small round circle moving slowly along a line on an otherwise blank web screen while listening to a voice talk to them. And how many people are focused enough to remember what that person was talking about when its over?

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.

• AdAge uses photos nicely for podcasts of an interview... each time a different person is talking, the photo changes. For me, at least, that plus the different voice every so often keeps me listening longer.

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.

Wharton School MBA Blogs... 55 "student diaries" online

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.

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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.

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Not nearly as many people listent to podcasts as read blogs but the number is growing... one projection says 10 million people by the end of this year.

With that in mind, I spent time today using Yahoo and Google search to roam through lists of professional schools to find out who was using this relatively young communications technology to provide a more alive experience for prospective law school, MBA, and medical school students. Results were slim but interesting.

MBA programs in the lead

MBA programs seem to be out in front. Nothing came back for law schools or medical schools where the admissions office was using podcasts to help recruit students. I suspect that with more time and more combinations of search words, more results might have come back to me. But check out these three examples at University of California - Berkeley, University of Notre Dame, and Stanford University. Mix and match what you find here for a good initial guide to a new way of speaking to potential new students.

University of California - Berkeley at  http://mba.haas.berkeley.edu/ 

University of Notre Dame at http://www.nd.edu/~mba/admissions/index1-podcast.shtml 

Stanford University at http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/mba/admission/more_resources.html 

News and lecture podcasts for business, law, and medicine

What did come back in relatively large numbers from schools of every type were podcasts of faculty presentations and class lectures. Most of these are intended for either internal use by current students or available as general news announcements for the media. Of course, podcasts like this make excellent connections for future students as well. Let's hope that the admissions websites of these same business, law, and medical schools have clear connections to the podcasts.

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What makes law schools more amenable to adopting marketing techniques? From a lunch time conversation today, competition is a motivator. That what one person at today's LSAC meeting described as the motivation for Hamline University... the arrival of a fourth law school in the relatively small Minneapolis area. Makes sense to me... why invest in new communication plans and marketing capability when the marketplace isn't driving you to do it?

Website applications increasing

Most if not all of the law schools have had a rise in applications direct from the website with no previous record of the person making application. In other words, a confirmation that law school are experiencing the same trend as undergraduate admissions people... Millennials are using the websites to learn about possible law schools and getting enough information to at least decide on an initial application pool. And that seems a powerful reason for law school admissions folk to check websites of their competitors and plan how to gain competitive advantage. I'll ask the same question next week to the much larger group headed for the D.C. presentation.

Millennial parents come to law school

Are parents of Millennials involved in law school decisions? Indeed, from the comments of people here. Parents are often joining their children on campus visits and in at least one case, cast a veto for one child because the parent didn't like the location of the school. For the next several years, this involvement is will continue and create new challenges for law school admissions staffs.

Another person reported that parents are asking for information about students progress in law school that privacy law prevents them from revealing. Unless, as another person noted, the parent has a permission note from the student. People are reluctant to encourage this, but at least one felt the trend was inevitable.

Internet marketing not widespread

Overall, law schools measured by the ones present here have not yet added interactive marketing features like blogs, podcasts, and IM contacts to the marketing mix. We'll see if the larger sample next week brings more examples of this. Internet marketing has room to grow.

Bob Johnson

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At last... the first entry in my long planned and often delayed Internet Markting blog.

I'm here in Los Angeles to speak tomorrow to the Law School Admissions Council Summer Workshop on how to best communicate with the Millennial generation students who are now entering law schools. Brian Niles and I created this presentation... I'll do it again next week in Washington, D.C. and Brian will do the last of the sessions in Chicago the week after that.

Website marketing, podcasts, email communications... everything is coming to law school admissions. Can IM be far behind? I'll write more about the topics of highest interest after tomorrow's meeting.

And this question for anyone working with marketing programs for graduate and professional schools that recruit students right after they earn their undergrad degrees. What challenges have you faced in adapting your programs to the Millennial Generation? What experiences have you had with parents who are still helping their children?

How can podcasts can help law schools communicate on the web? Check the Hamline University School of Law "Meet the Experts" page at http://www.hamline.edu/law/admissions/experts

No doubt we'll be seeing many more interactive pages like this before 2006.

Bob Johnson

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