Now cybersquatters are invading higher ed’s social media presence by starting Facebook groups.  Fortunately, Brad Ward at squaredpeg has their number.  If you haven’t already seen it, go and read this article and protect your brand’s presence on Facebook before someone else takes control.

Today I am a web marketer and designer for a small, liberal arts college. erelevant.net was started initially in the Spring of 2006 as a way to explore my profession. I have since realized that being “on-topic” was little better than succumbing to the internet echo-chamber called “higher ed marketing blogs.” There were some good times, certainly. Some good people and some insightful exchanges. Mostly, though, exploring my profession by looking at others in the industry meant receiving someone else’s cold innovation leftovers or, worse, being spoon-fed fads by vendors—these were often sugary and filling but provided little lasting nutrition. (WARNING: Metaphor Change Ahead) There is no “on the bleeding edge.” Electronic marketing bliss will not come from a $19.99, syndicated, podcasted, webinar. Either you work hard and, for a meteoric moment, become the bleeding edge, or you’ve been left behind.

I took a summer hiatus that turned into a year-long absence, and I did allot of thinking.

The best way for me to innovate and enjoy what I do is to go native. Time to slip into the digital tribe and move among its peoples—virtual, 3D hands brushing in the darkness of social networked second lives, a million onymous youth dancing hyper-textualy into the night, the thrumming of drum and bass shared via mapped music genomes, and the twinkling glow of liquid-crystal-pixels offering up the entire geo-positioned world like an altar to a social, multi-cultural, semantic, hive-minded, Mercurial GOD.

avra kehdabra

When Time magazine named “You” as its person of the year in 2006, it was a ham-handed attempt to salute “user-generated content” as the driving force behind Web 2.0. Last year MySpace and YouTube commanded $580 million and $1.6 billion, respectively, because regular folks participate in the grand techno-democratic experiment, baring their souls to the mindhive, each confessional post or exploding-Mentos video a bid for attention and celebrity. But there’s a curious thing about the new Internet fame generators: The most wildly successful clips often feature unwilling participants. According to research by the Viral Factory, a marketing firm that specializes in viral videos, four of the top 10 most-watched online videos ever feature private or semi-private moments that were, like Aminrazavi’s performance at the beach, never intended for a wide audience. Their protagonists are, by and large, regular people who woke up one morning to find that their lowest moments had been caught on camera and distributed to the snickering online hordes.

If you’re not careful, you could be next.

A very interesting article from RADAR magazine. Puts the power of virals in perspective while exploring their unintended consequences.

So for prospective students they offer:
- zany videos, a new one each month
- a chance to use their brain to work out a puzzle
- chance to win an iPod

The current video is really quite good. It’s kind of campy in places, but in a way that will make it more endearing. The use of a teenager cliché in it gives it a forced feeling, and it might make teens wonder if SCAD is taking the cliché seriously or using it consciously for humor. I think most of them will get it. We’ll see if it’s really ‘viral’ or not, but the level of originality in the whole setup is enough to earn my respect.

Since the campaign is being put on by SCAD, you can expect some great design work. The folks at the Dandy Dwarves who put the campaign together did a bang-up job in that respect. The design is incredible–daring, edgy, funny, and relevant. My only complaint was a horizontal scroll bar that appeared at a screen resolution of 1024×768.

The “about the artist” page brings the whole concept back around to the college–the artist, Britt Spencer, is a SCAD alum. You get to read an interview with Britt about the background of the short film and see some of his other work. A problem with this section is that it’s long and you don’t find out about the artist’s connection to the school until fairly far down. That connection should be up top where hyper, scanning teenagers will see it alongside Britt’s incredible illustration work.

On the whole, this is one of the first higher ed viral projects I have seen that has potential for real prospect appeal. With art & design schools leading the way, it would be nice to be able to get edgier with recruitment material for liberal arts institutions. I know any mention of a “third nipple” on our pages would have some eyes (and heads) rolling.

When the folks behind Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim” hired New York guerilla marketing agency Interference, Inc. to promote the cartoon Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the results turned into a pathetic display of “the culture of fear” in Boston. The agency hired people in several large US cities to place signs around town that displayed two of the cartoons characters in a “Lite-Brite-esque” way. Given the sort of ingeniously off-beat marketing campaigns that take place around Manhattan, this was pretty tame stuff. However, when some Boston citizens first saw the lit signs near bridges and in other public locations, there first thought was: BOMBS. After the bomb squad grabbed a few in full bomb gear and found that they were far from dangerous, it became a “hoax.” (Now, pardon me, but doesn’t a hoax require that the person responsible actually make the claim that it was a bomb?)

The men who put the signs up in Boston were arrested, and the mayor has been on hand to make a fool of himself. Fortunately, the two arrested men (Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens–hired by Interference, Inc.) have laughed in the face of the ridiculous situation that they’re caught in. They gave a hillarious press conference, which MSNBC aired a long portion of. Have a look on YouTube.

There you have it. So marketers are more than just liars–they’re often terrorists. Fortunately, these terrorists are far more interested in the effect of ’70s hairstyles on modern culture than in starting a jihad.

In the meantime, higher ed marketing blogland has greeted 2007 with plenty of excellent thoughts! There’s a new blog in the blogroll: The Higher Ed Marketing Blog, and the excellent eduStyle by Stewart Foss. A few highlights from the rest of the blogroll:

Kevin Guidry writes about generational demographics and “Generation We” (one of my favorite subjects) on Mistaken Goal.

Michael Stoner also expounds on Generation We (Wii?) as well as several on social networks.

Andrea Schwandt-Arbogast of Interlectual takes on Bite Size Standards.

Andrew Careaga’s Higher Ed Marketing blogs the CASE conference and puts in a word on social networks (do I sense a theme in blogland?).

The prolific Karine Joly at College Web Editor calls them “Generation Next” (I prefer Millinials) and provides extensive resource linkage. She also shares her most popular entries of 2006, wraps up the cycle on website redesign, starts a higher ed YouTube station, and plenty more.

So in catching up on blogland, it looks like the podcast binge is drawing to a close with maybe a few hangovers here and there, and it seems that social networking is gearing up to become the next trend-du-jour. With yet another new year comes the sense that Web 2.0 (yech) is finally “here” rather than being “new.” In its place is a largely predictable flurry of predictions about the future of the internet (for higher ed and the rest). I sure don’t call myself a futurist, but I’ll make a prediction: whether it be in the next year or the next three, good old-fashioned text and images will still be the bread-and-butter for college websites, but they will still be given the least attention.

Dan Karleen wrote:
First, who is hawking podcasting as a singular cure for enrollment woes?

I’m guilty of trying to be provocative over precise here. Mostly I got this sort of impression from some of the conference/sales pitch presentations I’ve been to. (Ever seen the “Corporate Podcasting for Dummies” book? :)) Now that you point it out, though, you’re right—I don’t think I’ve heard anyone naïve enough to think podcasting was THE solution to a school’s problems.

Dan continued:
Second, in this context, you seem to be referring to programming that’s consumed on an iPod. I tend to define the term podcast more broadly to include virtually any type of media that’s delivered via syndication, i.e. RSS — whether it ends up being consumed on an iPod, a PC, a phone, etc. Quite commonly, the term is used to refer to individual episodes that are part of a podcast series. Furthermore, sometimes the term is used to refer to audio or video clips posted on a web site that aren’t being available via RSS at all. So I would argue that the variation in usage of the term “podcast” makes it difficult to determine exactly who’s using what.

I honestly find it a little frightening that the term “podcast” is coming to be synonymous with multimedia online in general. My definition of “podcast” is multimedia content delivered serially via syndication and most often (though not exclusively) to be consumed on a portable media player like an iPod. In my own surveys, I make this distinction clear and ask separate questions about how many people “view videos online,” “download music files,” or “subscribe to a podcast.”

The PEW folks had this to say about it:

In 2005, the New Oxford American Dictionary declared “podcast” the word of
the year, with the accompanying definition of a podcast as, “a digital recording of a radio
broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a
personal audio player.” Yet, while early podcasters typically distributed syndicated audio
files and radio shows, podcasters now routinely deliver many kinds of digital multimedia
content, including video, images and text.

While this is a little broader than my definition, it does mention syndication and it does mention portable media devices.

I don’t think, for instance, that whether or not “video Podcasts” take off has anything to do with whether or not sites like YouTube are successful. To me, audio and video are the medium and Podcasting is the distribution method. You’re right in that not everyone makes this distinction. My response is to shy away from the more specific, trend-oriented term and stick with just saying “Watch a Video” or “Download Music.” Those that have iPods can always put the content I create there if they want.

Kevin Guidry commented:
I don’t understand how the data mentioned in this posting (the Pew and Warren Wilson surveys) support the stated conclusion that “…most Podcasts, like radio shows on NPR, are going to appeal much more to an older, more educated audience.” The statement may be true but I don’t see support for it in the data. Unless I am missing something (and please tell me if I am!), the Pew survey simply states that growth and popularity of podcasts in the sample of younger persons surveyed is smaller than in the older sample. The Warren Wilson survey only presents views of the current student body and incoming students. No reasons for those growth rates, measures of popularity, or other findings are given. Further, neither of these surveys seem to have much predictive value, a limitation not acknowledged by the stated conclusion. Of course, it’s both of those unanswered questions (”why?” and “what about the future?”) in which most of us are really interested but those are more difficult questions to ask and answer.

No, you’re certainly not missing anything. This is what it seems—a ten minute blog entry. Most of the data I come across (in general here, I don’t have any specific studies to cite) has the younger groups adopting technology at a faster rate. I saw this as an interesting change and tried to find an explanation that was plausible. I’m sure that there are others. I honestly didn’t spend enough time composing the entry to shore up my arguments with adequate supporting data or concessions where they were needed. Then again, this is more than half a “note to self” sort of thing. Unless I’m working on a site audit over a period of several days, I don’t have time to devote to being thorough. I kinda have to go with the gut instead.

As for “why?” and “what about the future?”, I am interested in those questions but not as much as I am in planning my more immediate priorities for the next year or two. I certainly am not qualified to answer them with more than conjecture.

Kevin continues:
I surmise that the perceived divide between young and old is not only a function of culture but also of geography and location. I would guess that those who have longer commmutes may be more likely to listen to podcasts – if anyone knows of data that support or refute this supposition please let me know! I would further guess that traditional college students are much more likely to have very short commutes than older persons; it’s much more common for traditional college students to live on or near campus than for older persons to live on or near their work site.

That’s entirely possible—at least as good an explanation as mine! I walk perhaps a quarter mile to work, so commuting is not something that’s on my mind much. On the other hand, the PEW survey’s young group was 18-29 and their oldest group was 50-64. I imagine that the number of long commuters in those groups is probably pretty close, but that would be another of my guesses. Also, from my poll last summer, 56% of our current frosh own a portable mp3 player and another 26% would like to, and this is a residential campus. Just because they don’t commute doesn’t mean they aren’t plugged into those little white boxes all the time.

I also take issue with the stated conclusion that podcasts are “primarily for an older, richer, more educated demographic.” I read that statement not only as a statement about the current state of events (which is accurate) but also a predictive statement about the future. Again, these data provide little basis for making claims about the future. More research, particularly on the qualitative side, needs to be done to support or refute such claims.

It was predictive to some extent, but predictive statements made in an environment like electronic marketing (on a blog especially) aren’t likely to be true or relevant for very long. What that means to me is that I don’t intend to be putting any effort into Podcasting for at least the rest of this year. Who knows what the class of 2008 will bring! Stay tuned for me to contradict myself (another prediction: I’ll be wrong about student blogs before I’m wrong about podcasting).

Thank you all for the comments! You really help me see the bigger picture.

Michael Stoner pointed out that the PEW Internet & American Life Project has released a new study that throws some doubt onto the efficacy of the Podcast miracle-cure. Some of you may remember the study I conducted internally in August that said:

Fully 56% of incoming students own a portable mp3 player and another 26% would like to. Despite the high numbers, only 26% of respondents said they listened to audio Podcasts and only 15% watched video Podcasts. Of those that listen to audio Podcasts, the majority by more than half said they only listen to music or music-related casts.

Because of that data, WWC steered clear of Podcasting because it simply wasn’t going to give us any ROI (yay buzzword), and I also snarked about it some. Now PEW adds to that data and shows us a more representative picture of Podcast use from American Internet users:

Some 12% of internet users say they have downloaded a podcast so they can listen to it or view it at a later time. However, few internet users are downloading podcasts with great frequency; just 1% report downloading a podcast on a typical day.

Now those figures are for all ages that participated. Here’s some numbers comparing an undergrad market to an older demographic:

Reported Podcast use for study participants age 18-29 grew %4, going from %10-%14 from February – August. Not bad, but consider that growth was slowest among those with only a high school education (of all ages) and fastest among participants age 50-64! In fact, the younger age group encompassing the Millenials and Gen X grew at the same rate as the median age group (30-49-years-old).

What does all this mean? It means that most Podcasts, like radio shows on NPR, are going to appeal much more to an older, more educated audience. The undergrad market has an iPod to listen to music. It also means that, no matter what the market, Podcasting is not the ubiquitous, miracle medium that it has been sold as. It is growing, but it is still a small niche and primarily for an older, richer, more educated demographic.

The Devil Says: Podcasts are for your uncle. Give the kids what they want.

Today’s keynote speaker was Nick Fink, founder of Digital Web Magazine, and Director of User Experience for new media company Blue Flavor. Nick seemed like a really nice guy. He got on my good side right off the bat by looking uncomfortable about using the term “Web 2.0″ and then giving us a little bit of real history on the word, conceding that it didn’t really mean anything.

His talk on next generation web was not exactly a futurists drama of what the next fifty years will bring. It was mostly a practical exploration of how today’s leading-edge media will evolve and become more mainstream. He discussed the continuing decentralization of media power (a kind of “the meek shall inherit the earth” sort of idea), and he encouraged us to find a “guru” on a subject and start staking out a niche right now through blogging or participation in online communities. To name a few subjects he touched on: access-anywhere gps-enabled mobile devices, self-publishing moving to media outside of just web, marketing and business turning more and more to people-centric public faces that encourage consumer involvement in the brand, various standards allowing information to be mined and shared through feeds and networks, and non-traditional marketing becoming more prominent.

He gave this very vivid example: the subject of Yahoo acquiring Flickr came up and he mentioned how Yahoo had linked their mapping API with Flickr to allow geo-tagging of images. He got this thoughtful, excited expression and said “imagine going to a restaurant and, using a mobile device, being able to get a detailed map with pictures of any location along the way as well as message the restaurants owner.” To add to that, you could pull up a menu, make a reservation, or just old-fashioned call them. I’m ready to be there—I want that world that’s always on, “tagged and tracked and ambient and pervasive and ubiquitous and geolocative… Jesus, I love those words…” Makes me giddy.

Word of Mouth Marketing

Peter Waldheim is a very engaging speaker. I feel like I could’ve listened to his stories of action in the civil rights movement and rubbing elbows with foreign dignitaries at posh Washington dinner parties for most of the day. An older man with an acerbic, slightly self-ingratiating wit, he gave us a vibrant introduction to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) and the concept of Word of Mouth Marketing.

“Word of mouth,” he said, “is powerful not because it’s new but because it’s old.” Word of mouth marketing, often introduced as this exciting new thing, he argues is easily older than the bible “where the only command given more than ‘go forth and multiply’ is ‘go forth and spread the news.’” He said that the difference, the thing that’s changed, is that now word of mouth is “actionable.” Basically, American society has reached a kind of saturation point at the end of traditional marketing. Americans on average receive over 3000 marketing impressions per day, he said. The result is that we tune them out, we question and disbelieve them. As a result, Americans have turned once again to that most trusted of sources: word of mouth. Suddenly a little time and effort expended generating good buzz easily outperforms the best Superbowl commercials when it comes to generating successful conversions. In addition to word of mouth coming round again, Peter says, it can now be spread and multiplied nearly effortlessly via digital media.

In answer to this, WOMMA was founded primarily as an advocacy association that worked across marketing disciplines, taking a little from CS and a little from blogging and several other sources, to form the concept of word of mouth marketing for new media. “The key is motivating people to get involved,” he said. “It’s about instigating and facilitating discussion about your products.” Consumer-generated media is quickly outstripping corporate-generated media in dominating the mindspace of the consumer. It’s the cry we’ve heard for quite some time: brand awareness is dead, now it’s all about engagement. In response to those that have balked at the idea of fostering conversation about their brands and products, he responds: “the conversations are going on, you’re just not taking part in them. You can’t be a bully, you can’t control them, but you can participate.” There it is again: authenticity.

His advice is to get involved and get started now. He says to grab students, grab faculty members, and start facilitating that conversation internally first and then let it move out naturally. He pointed us to a book, The Influentials by Ted Keller and John Barry. He said that about one of ten people are “influentials,” or experts of some type that have some platform of knowledge and respect in the community—whether small or large—that can be harnessed and used to generate buzz and discussion. Whether it’s a world-renowned celebrity or a kid looked up to by a small group of folks, provide the influentials at your school with a platform like a blog and connect them to the world.

If you’d like to get the lowdown on Word of Mouth, then check out this document from WOMMA.

If I don’t go to bed now, then I’m going to end up sleeping through tomorrow’s sessions. Until next time.

To catch up with yesterday’s sessions, I attended one on Mobile Applications, one on Managing a Redsign, and one on … “Feature Feast.”

Mobile: A Technology Going Nowhere Fast

Webster Lewin, a Mobile Marketing Strategist for the company VML, put on the Mobile Applications session. I sure hope Webster isn’t in charge of hooking new clients for VML, because the message he sent the clearest was: mobile technology is an immature technology, prohibitively expensive, and horribly crippled by a tangle of proprietary barriers. Where once I thought that mobile would the next Big Thing, I now am much more skeptical. If manufacturers, software developers, and service providers can’t work together towards creating a set of standards and working on making the mobile world more accessible to smaller businesses and individuals, it’s not going to go anywhere with anything approaching the speed and saturation of the internet.

Now when I say mobile, I’m not talking about just talking on the phone—that’s already everywhere. Webster broke things into three categories, which are mobile applications (programs), SMS (text messaging, multimedia messages), and the mobile web. In brief, mobile applications are actually programs written to operate on a mobile phone. Mobile applications cannot be created to work on all phones, or even a majority of phones. They have to be written in one of five or six operating systems that these phones run. To make matters worse, different handsets have different capabilities that must be taken into account, and the distribution of these programs is largely up to the abilities and cooperation of the network service providers. The end result, says Webster, is that the “cost of mobile applications can easily reach over $100,000.” Now at this point I stopped and thought, what institution has that kind of money to dump into a kind of experimental, fringe marketing avenue? And why did Stamats invite this guy to talk exactly?

Webster went on to detail SMS-based add campaigns that, while a little cheaper than mobile apps, had even more 3rd party barriers to work through. Basically, it looked to me like the only thing colleges and universities could hope to work with is the mobile internet, which was the area he focused on the least. At least it’s free for developers, doesn’t require you to program for some obscure environment, and is something that all phone providers seem to be supporting more or less.

Redesign and Miscellany

The Managing a Redesign session was not one that I took extensive notes on. The presenter, Cori Merritt with Stamats, went through a set of procedural steps towards a successful redesign. She moved pretty quickly, which was great to listen to but not conducive for note taking, and her system seemed geared towards larger schools. Allot of what she covered dealt with committee-building and the politics of college websites at large universities. It assumed a CMS. A few of the suggestions were good for anyone, such as getting sign-off on a design while it’s still in the draft stage and before the work has been done to convert it to HTML/CSS. She recommended a book that sounded good: Web Redsign 2.0: Workflow that Works by Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler.

The last session of the day was entitled Web Feature Feast by Adam Blyth of Stamats. Adam went through very topically and covered several website features common to college websites while giving examples (mostly of Stamats’ work). Adam, avowedly a Mac user, had problems with the PC hooked to the projector while the internet again flaked out with the result that we missed several examples. On the whole, the session was too topical to be useful. If you’re reading this blog, then you already know more about what Adam presented than the information he provided.

The keynote speaker today was okay, and there was a really great presentation by Peter Waldheim of WOMMA. Stay tuned…