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| Your Higher Education Marketing Newsletter |
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30 April 2008 Late spring greetings on a sunny and cool day in Michigan. The May 1 deadline date for enrollment deposits is at hand, so best wishes to everyone that your numbers will match your expectations this year. If, on the other hand, you’re one of the many people focused on adult student recruitment, you might find the best place to be on May 29-30 is at the University of Chicago's Gleacher Center where Carol Aslanian and friends are presenting “Adult Student Marketing: Electronic, Mass Media, and Print Practices That Work.” Check the details at www.aslaniangroup.com/events/ and register soon. We have capacity for about 100 people and about 70 have already registered. I’ll be doing a new presentation, “Mastering Web Analytics.” And now here are your April marketing news and notes. Jakob Nielsen Highlights 3 University Websites Jakob’s most recent Alertbox email is about the perils of “Right-Justified Navigation” that violates the way people scan websites. He’s using screen shots from 3 universities to illustrate his point. The “winners” are Indiana University, University of Michigan, and Vanderbilt University. Read his comments at www.useit.com/alertbox/navigation-menu-alignment.html. Down at the end, don’t miss additional comments on how low contrast text presentation and the use of ALL CAP LETTERS make things difficult to read. If people can’t easily scan and read your website pages, your website won’t have the marketing power you’d like it to have. 2 University Members in Mobile Marketing Association Yes, that’s right. There is an international association for organizations interested in exploring and implementing mobile marketing, with more than 500 members in 40 countries. When you visit the membership list, you’ll see a link to “Academic” members. So far, that’s just two of the total, the Center for Media Design at Ball State University and Northeastern University. Should you be a member? Mobile marketing isn’t pervasive now and it isn’t easy to say how quickly it will become an important marketing force. But now is the time to start paying attention to what’s happening. Visit www.mmaglobal.com for more on the Mobile Marketing Association. New Pew Internet Report on Teen Writing Teens distinguish writing for school assignments from the way they contact friends on the Internet in IM, text messaging, email and social network notes. That’s a major finding in this new report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, “Writing, Technology and Teens.” Teens (85 percent) believe good writing is a key to their future success and most (60 percent) feel that the informal style used with friends isn’t “writing” at all. Nevertheless, there is some inevitable creeping of style points used online into their “real” writing; 64 percent have used online style points in their formal writing. If you have a special interest in online communications, read the introduction and then move to Part 4, “Electronic Communication.” You’ll find details of gender and age differences and much more. Girls, for instance, are more likely than boys to write and read blogs, but the gap narrows quite a bit as teens age. Other differences are noted for race and family income. Read the 83-page report at www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/247/report_display.asp. What Online Ads Get “Great” ROI? Marketing Sherpa’s “Chart of the Week” presents the differences for 7 types of online advertising from a survey of people who do the advertising. You’ll find that “Contextually-targeted ads” lead at 40.5 percent and “Website ads” lag at 7.6 percent. See what’s in between at www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30386. Be sure to sign up to receive your own copies of upcoming weekly charts selected from research underway at Marketing Sherpa. Web 3.0, College Websites, and College Marketing How important will college and university websites be in marketing efforts in the future? In the early stages of searching out colleges, not nearly as important as they are now if a future Web 3.0 trend develops as suggested in an April AdAge article. The trend is an emerging sophistication for search engines that aggregate information on a particular topic from a variety of sources. In addition to your college website, searchers will also have a direct link to your faculty reviews on RateMyProfessor.com, your Wikipedia entry, and blogs and social networking sites that focus on your school. You’ll find links to the article and to a list of Web 3.0 definitions in my blog post at here. Watching Newspapers Change or Die If you’re interested in what’s happening to print newspapers in the online information era, plan to follow a new Advertising Age series at adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=126685. The title of the first article is “The Newspaper Death Watch” and the only thing uncertain about the final outcome is how many of the 1,437 remaining daily papers will not close. Despite efforts to reduce costs by cutting everything from the physical size of the papers to the staffs that produce them, a continuing reduction is inevitable as advertising dollars continue to shrink. Will USA Today be the last survivor? Follow along and find out. Marketing Dilemma for Public Universities University of Vermont has announced new grants for lower-income in-state students that will eliminate tuition and fee costs of attending the university for those who qualify. And not everyone in Vermont is happy about that. The newspaper article here includes the online reactions of citizens who suspect that increasing grants for Pell-eligible students means that money for others will decrease. And that’s the dilemma that public universities like Vermont face. Many if not most “middle class” families feel that the cost of attending a public university is rising too rapidly and don’t want to sacrifice and incur the higher debt needed to earn a degree. As elite universities with high endowments increase grant aid for freshmen at fairly high income levels, pressure will build for public institutions to take similar steps. Eventually that pressure will turn into more demands on legislators for “accountability” efforts that limit tuition costs and therefore the ability of institutions to chart their own course in the higher education universe. Online Alumni Engagement at URI University of Rhode Island features various steps to online alumni engagement at the “Getting Involved” website page at advance.uri.edu/alumni/getinvolved/. URI has started an alumni Linkedin group that so far has 91 members. You’ll also find an online bi-weekly alumni newsletter and an online alumni magazine. The newsletter might help those still struggling to win approval to move away from posting printed newsletters online as PDFs. “In Advance at URI” is online at advance.uri.edu/inadvance/ but past copies are archived as PDFs so you can easily compare the two formats. 21 Google SEO Tips Even if you’re not a tech person, several things in the 3rd installment of “How to Optimize for Google” will help you when the world’s most popular search engine comes to visit your website. If you missed the earlier articles, backtrack from this one here. The second article focuses on links and how to best benefit from them. This is worth a visit for insights into an important but time consuming path to search engine status. Wither Selectivity after 2008 Admissions? The Christian Science Monitor recently focused on an old issue: colleges that reject applicants because of a perceived lack of genuine interest in the college rather than a failure to meet admission criteria. That’s been happening for years now, but the large number of Millennials headed for college in 2008 has increased the practice. That raises an upcoming question that isn’t that far away: wither selectivity levels as the Millennial generation passes from the scene not long from now? With fewer applicants in sight, some colleges that have enjoyed a selectivity boom the last few years will be hard pressed to maintain a similar level. Will marketing resources increase as competition for students increases? No matter how much they do, not everyone is going to win in the new market soon to start. For the CSM review, see the article here. 5 “Fundamentals” of Integrated Marketing Remember when “integrated marketing” was a hot phrase? That wasn’t more than about 5 years ago. It seemed as if everyone had an “integrated marketing task force” or was asking about how to start one. Maybe the reason we don’t hear much about that anymore is that, as Elana Anderson writes, it was “hard, darn it” and required too much change by too many people. But there’s value in visiting Elana’s article on “Five Fundamentals of Integrated Marketing.” She marks a valid difference between the relative success of “integrated campaigns” and the failure of most organizations to integrate the total marketing experience from the perspective of a person outside the organization. I especially liked number 4: “Integrated marketing requires interaction and dialogue” beyond the initial campaign that captures a person’s interest. Her article is at www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3629061. Google Ads for Mobile Marketing To stay up with the early phases of mobile marketing, become a regular reader of Google’s “Mobile Blog” where developers post news they can release and people comment on the pros and cons of what’s been posted. The blog is at googlemobile.blogspot.com. One recent comment made a great deal of sense: what’s the value of a new mobile ad feature designed for impact on smartphones that links back to a website that isn’t ready for mobile viewing? The answer, of course, is “not much value at all.” Mobile marketing isn’t going to come into its own until organizations see value in creating web sites that work well on mobile devices. Smartphones and Barbarians at University of Chicago Now that the Millennials have advanced to law school, some of their practices have advanced along with them. One of these is the use of laptops to wander the web while a class is underway. Civilization as we know it is threatened again. And so the University of Chicago law school dean has banned the use of laptops in the classroom so that students won’t be able to browse the web during a class. Buried down in the middle of the article you’ll find the reason that the move is doomed: students are beginning to use smartphones to surf the web and those can’t be disabled by closing down wireless hotspots. Technology advances faster than attempts to rein it in, even attempts by law school deans. One Chicago law student identified the real antidote: “The only time this group of students uses the Internet excessively is if they feel that the professor does a horrible job of teaching, and know that listening will be of no use. This is very rare, however, given that we have mostly phenomenal professors. Millennials don’t give instant respect but they do appreciate expertise that can help them. In between, technology will give them the ability to ignore what they want to ignore. For more opinions, visit www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/18/laptops. My Upcoming Presentations in 2008 Share questions and answers with people like yourself who are building a competitive edge in higher education marketing. Hope to meet you at one or more of these events! May 29-30, Chicago, IL: The Aslanian Group Spring Seminar: Adult Student Marketing: Electronic, Mass Media, and Print Practices that Work. Session details and registration are online at www.aslaniangroup.com. June 3, Illinois Institute of Technology, Wheaton, IL: REACh Professional Development Day, “Using Technology to Attract and Recruit Adult Students.” July 9-ll, Chicago, IL: ACT Enrollment Planners Conference: “Student Recruitment in an Online World: Creating a Marketing Communications Plan in World without Paper,” (pre-conference workshop) and “Building and Borrowing from the Best: Crafting a Higher Impact Student Recruitment Website.” See the full program and register at www.act.org/epc/. Get a better ROI from your online marketing. Expand the writing, editing, and search marketing skills of people who create content for your website. Host my “Writing Right for the Web” workshop on your campus. Contact me at bob@bobjohnsonconsulting.com. That’s All for Now Be a marketing champion on your campus.
Bob Johnson, Ph.D. (bob@bobjohnsonconsulting.com) Bob Johnson Consulting, LLC Improve your online marketing success with these six services.
Marketing Communications Website Review Customer Carewords Research with Gerry McGovern Content Copywriting Services Competitive Website Reviews Writing Right for the Web On-Campus Workshops Start now at www.bobjohnsonconsulting.com/whatwedo.html. Newsletter Archive
28 May 2008 |