.eduGuru

Inbound School Marketing Slides: Whipple Hill User Conference ‘09

Kyle James — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:45:48 +0000

Today I presented at the Whipple Hill User Conference on Inbound School Marketing. I wrote an introduction to the talk last week: It Doesn’t Matter What You Call It, An Inquiry Is A Lead. The conference was my first dabble into the independent schools environment. So far it has been an amazing experience meeting a whole new group of individuals with so many of the same challenges that Higher Education encounters.

Tomorrow two other prominent bloggers and speakers in the Higher Education space are speaking, Andrew Shaindlin and Mike Richwalsky. You know Andy from Alumni Futures and Mike from HighEdWebTech. I’m looking forward to listening to their presentations and just might live blog one or both.

Inbound School Marketing Slides

So without making you read any more jibba jabba here are my slides from my presentation.

Inbound School Marketing

View more documents from Kyle James.

Win a Stamats SIM Tech registration!

Karlyn Morissette — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:47:57 +0000

Last week, Stamats ran a contest on their Facebook page encouraging users to guess who their keynotes for the November SIM Tech conference would be based on a series of clues. After several attempts, I guessed David Armano was one of their speakers…and won! But since I’m already speaking at the conference (and thus have free registration), they made me promise that I would give it away on here. So here’s your chance to hang out with yours truly, as well as .eduGuru’s very own Kyle James and Rachel Reuben, at this year’s conference.

Here’s the deal. We like t-shirts. To win the free registration, all you need to do is design a kick ass .eduGuru t-shirt for us that we can put in our Guru Gear section.

Submit your T-shirt design by July 17. You can use our basic images (here) and (here), or come up with something completely original on your own. Be creative! Your design can be simple or an artistic masterpiece or anything in between.
To submit your designs for consideration, you can add them to the .eduGuru group on Flickr, or email them to staff@doteduguru.com.
We will open the submitted designs to a public vote through the end of July.
The design that gets the most votes, wins!

The winner will receive a free registration to Stamats SIM Tech conference in Boston this November. You will also receive a free t-shirt with your design on it at the conference. You are responsible for all of your travel, lodging and other related expenses.

A few rules: You can submit as many ideas as you want, but please only enter the contest if you are serious about attending the conference in November! Also, we reserve the right to add and sell any submitted designs through Guru Gear, so please don’t submit if you are unwilling to have your design used in that way (we don’t really make any money off of those, so don’t expect to either). You will always be given full credit for what you submit. Finally, don’t submit anything that you don’t own/have the rights to use. We would rather not get sued for making t-shirts out of it!

Last year’s SIM Tech was one of the best conferences I’ve been to in a while, and this year’s is shaping up to be even better. We look forward to seeing our winner in Boston!

Photo: werkunz1

Doesn’t Matter What You Call It, An Inquiry Is a Lead

Kyle James — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:00:17 +0000

Now granted, I don’t know the situation at every institute, but it seems to be that there is a fairly consistent misunderstanding of the value of a prospective student. Maybe “misunderstanding” is not the correct term. Maybe just the general sharing of this stated value isn’t made apparent to web people who can play a very important part of recruitment without any direct connection. An institute’s website is a VERY, if not the most, important piece of the marketing strategy for recruitment. Prospective students can learn about your institute and enter your funnel before you even know that they are interested in you. So there I go with another business type marketing word… funnel.

So to find out if maybe my understanding isn’t as accurate as I think, please answer the following question:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Why does this matter? Karlyn has taught us quite a lot about measuring ROI and Implementing Technology with an Eye on ROI (slides here). One problem still remains: Do people really take this to the root level to know how much marketing budget they can/should spend on a prospective student? This leads me to another simple revelation.

It doesn’t matter what you call it, a prospective student is a lead!

Let’s Look At Some Basic Math

What is the value of a student?

Student Value = average years for a student * (tuition – average discount)

So what is an applicant worth?

Application Value = Student Value * Conversion rate from applicant to enroll

So taking the above two formulas let’s say that the average number of years a student attends is 3 (a four year institution where students are always coming and going and may not stay the full four years) , tuition is $25,000 per year and average discount is $10,000. By doing some basic math we learn the student value is $45,000! That’s no pocket change. So let’s say that you average 10,000 applicants per year and your school only accepts 2,000. This means your conversion rate is 20%. So every application is worth $9,000!

What if there were ways that you could leverage the web to increase the application levels? What if you could be more selective, with a larger pool of applicants to pull from, by being able to leverage and spend money on some online channels because you now have a baseline for the value of these conversions? While we are at it how about some more questions. What is a student visit worth? What is a catalog download worth? What is the email address of a prospective student worth? If your web people don’t know this and aren’t working very closely with your admission people to accomplish these business goals then you need to wake up because we are quickly closing in on 2010!

Where Am I Going With All This?

Next week I’ll be presenting at Whipple Hill’s UC ’09 in Boston on the subject that an inquiry is a lead and ways that Higher Education really should be doing a better of job thinking about this in more of a business like perspective. Let’s be honest here…even schools that are not for profit need incoming students to survive, and if you aren’t bringing leads, aka prospective students, into your admission funnel then your school will be shut down. Guess what? Your website has become a VITAL part of this process, and today I’d be willing to guess that 90%+ of applications are processed completely online.

So I ask you again: What is a lead worth to your school and are you appropriating the correct resources to acquire or increase them?

Photo: DS Prospective Students by Shane Pope

Twitter: WIIFM? Ask @TechSmith.

Nikki Massaro Kauffman — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:00:22 +0000

Last week at Penn State’s Web Conference, I was reminded once again of the value of Twitter. If you are following Mark Greenfield, you may be thinking this is another blog post about the #smsummit; it is not. (Sadly, I missed his session to present a workshop on screencasting.)

On the first day of this two-day conference, I attended a one-hour screencasting session similar to mine to find out what the audience would have already heard by the time they get to my session. I was actively tweeting notes and thoughts during this presentation, when the following tweet got some unexpected attention:

…which got this reply:

So I after a few rounds of tweets, I explained that I was in a session preparing for an upcoming presentation, and that’s when my interactions with TechSmith began to payoff for both of us:

Prizes?!? Oh yeah. Thanks to TechSmith and Twitter, one lucky winner from our session get SnagIt 9.1 and another one left with Camtasia Studio 6.0. Thanks to NikkiMK, & Twitter, TechSmith’s getting a whole lot of publicity for those prizes and a few tweets.

Easy ROI on Facebook Ads

Karlyn Morissette — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:19:28 +0000

I love Facebook Ads. They’re easy to set up, targeted, and give you free visibility among your audience, since you only pay for them when they click on the ad and go to your website/page/whatever you have set up. They’re also relatively easy to figure out your Return on Investment for using a few simple (and free) tools.

This post assumes that you already know how to set up Facebook Ads. If not, visit their site for more information.

ROI CALCULATOR

You don’t need to know a lot of complex equations to calculate ROI. I really like Marketing Today’s ROI Calculator for things like this:

To use the ROI Calculator, you need five key pieces of information:

The number of pieces
Total program costs
Response Rate
Conversion Rate
Average profit per sale

The first three are easily correlated to a standard Facebook Ad metric:

Number of pieces = Total impressions on the ad. Facebook will give you this info.
Totals program costs = What Facebook charges you (plus if you wanted to add in a calculation for the staff hours it took you to create the ads, you could do that too)
Response Rate = The click rate on the ads. Facebook will give you this too.

The next metric, conversion rate, takes a bit more work. For this, you need to integrate Google Analytics with your Facebook ads, by using a campaign URL and a Goal that you have set up in Google Analytics. Let’s take these one at a time:

GOALS

The Goal feature in Google Analytics allows you to measure how many of your users complete a specific task, such as completing an online application, registering for an event, or making an online donation. You are allowed up to four goals for each Google Analytics profile (if you want to track more simultaneously, just create duplicate profiles). To create it, go into the profile settings section and select “edit” beside a goal that has not been configured. It will take you here:

From here, you set the “Goal URL” as the thank you page your users will land on when they have completed your call to action, as well as give the goal a name for easy identification.

You can also set up a “goal value” for non e-commerce goals (if you’re tracking fundraising, that’s e-commerce so you don’t need to worry about that), which will correlate to the number you’re going to assign for the average profit per sale. More on that in a second.

CAMPAIGN URLS

The next thing you need to do is create a campaign URL, which will be used as the URL in your Facebook Ad. To make it easy, you can use Google Analytic’s URL Builder:

First, you enter the website URL you ultimate want your users to end up at. Next, enter a source, medium and name for your campaign.

Source is like a general category, so that if you run multiple Facebook ads, you can use “facebookad” as your source for all of them and Google Analytics will aggregate that information together in your reports
Medium in this case will be “cpc” since they are pay per click ads
Name is the most important, and should be really specific and unique to the ad that you are running. In this case, we’ve selected “facebook_event_registration_09″, but it could get even more specific than that (say, if you were running a test on conversion rates using different pictures in your ads).

Hit “generate URL” and then use that URL in your ads.

CONVERSION RATE

So once you have your goal set up and your URL built (having done this all, of course, BEFORE you launch your ad), you can see which conversions came directly from you Facebook Ad. Go into Google Analytics and, under “Traffic Sources”, click on “campaigns”:

(click for full size)

Then drill down further by clicking on the “goal conversion” tab, and then clicking on the URL of the specific campaign you are interested in. Once you’re there, it will tell you the percent of users who came into your website via that campaign URL that completed the specific goal. A little bit of math will give you your conversion rate.

AVERAGE PROFIT PER SALE

The last field you need for the calculator is the average profit per sale. Basically, this is a dollar value that you assign to a specific call-to-action. How much is it worth to you that your users take a specific action? With something like registering for an event, it might be a small number, like $50-100. For something big like an online application, you might assign that value as a few thousand dollars, since an application is a huge milestone. It’s an arbitrary number…but not really. What you’re trying to do is get an apples to apples comparison between the amount of money you spent on a particular marketing initiative and the amount value brought back into your institution as a result.

You should always assign this number BEFORE you actually start running the numbers to figure out ROI. Otherwise, you might decide that the ROI you’re seeing just isn’t high enough, and therefore you’re going to increase your average profit per sale to make it look better. Be honest. If the numbers aren’t as high as you’d like them to be, that gives you good information about how well your particular tactic is working (or not!).

GOOD TO GO

Once you have all your values, plug the numbers in and hit the submit button:

So in this case, the ad had 30,580 impressions and cost $42.55. Of the 30,580 who saw the ad, .03% (or 9) clicked on it for the response rate. Of those 9 who clicked on it, 30% (or 3) completed your call to action, for your conversion rate. We assigned an average profit per sale of $100. Based on all that, we’ve calculated a marketing ROI of 605.05%. Not too shabby.

Think that’s a lot of information for something labeled as “easy ROI”? Trust me, it’s easier than it sounds. Once you get the hang of it, ROI on Facebook Ads will take you next to no time to calculate.

Photo Credit: dullhunk

Need a Link Building Strategy? Create Content!

Kyle James — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:00:33 +0000

So a few weeks ago we talked about Off-Page Optimization where the whole strategy there is to get inbound links and to do a good job of internal linking. So after you have mastered internal linking it’s time to get those external links. This can be extremely challenging and if you go about it the wrong way can sink a lot of time and still not feel like you are getting good results. So where should you focus?

Build It and They Will Come

If you create awesome, unique, and valuable content on your site then people WILL link to it. So the best link building strategy is a content creation strategy. So in many ways this kind of is similar to “the best defense is a great offense.”

It’s pretty simple to rationalize too. If you don’t have incredible content on your site why is anyone going to link to it? Yes, you can force your way into getting “spammy” and lots of directory links, but after a point this simply isn’t worth the time. For a higher education site it is definitely not worth your time.

Now we all know that college sites are extremely large and if you don’t believe that simply go run a Google Search using “site:schoolname.edu” and see exactly how many indexed pages of content your domain has. Now of course you want more and here are a few ways to create more pages of unique content.

Three Content Creation Ideas

Blog: Every blog post is a unique page of content. Do you have student blogs? How about professors that blog? Maybe you could have more or what about getting your newspaper staff to setup a blog? The possibilities are endless here. Blog posts are definitely the easiest and fastest way to get new pages of content and you can really dig into the culture and life of your campus through each and every post. Just make sure that your content creators understand a few of the On-Page Search Engine Optimization Best Practices before you let them run wild. What about a blog for your admissions office or mabye even Alumni blogs?
Split Up Current Pages: One of the most obvious ones I see about this is FAQ pages that go on forever. Take each of those questions and turn the Q/A into its own unique page of content that can rank around those long tail keywords. Maybe some of your academic pages go on forever and ever because they list all the classes and requirements on one page. Could this also not be split apart? Remember it’s about the user experience, and people don’t mind clicking on additional links as much as we think they do. As long as the user experience is clean and clear more links and pages can be a good thing.
Internal Site Search: Remember that useful internal site search is a great place to get a quick usability test. Do any of those searches look like evidence that you don’t have the perfect page to send the results to? Well go create that page for those visitors. Remember it’s not about what your site has it’s about what visitors want your site to have.

Now go Create Content

So keep on focusing on content creation and be sure to do a great job of linking to other content across your site with keyword descriptive links. Then watch your search results go up and your visitors being more engaged. They are more engaged because you are providing them superior content linking to additional superior content!

How Serious are XSS Threats for .edu’s?

Michael Fienen — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:48:07 +0000

Well, thanks to the keen eyes of fellow higher ed tweeter @gilzow for spotting the article, plenty of these guys could tell you just how frustrating XSS attacks can be. There’s simply no avoiding the fact that the more dynamic and complex our higher ed sites get, the more prone we are to these exploits. Be it clever linking, actual injections, or brute force attacks on the systems that run things (admitted not XSS in that case), this problem is compounded by the fact that we rarely have large offices staffed with the best of the best in application security testing before pushing out products for users. In many cases, these systems aren’t even complete, but rather “just work.” And even worse, as we outsource for systems like CMSs, some find themselves not only stuck with a system that they didn’t write, but budget cuts may be forcing them to limit the amount of support that they get.

The above article is talking about the usage of XSS attacks to inject links into pages on trusted web sites. They were looking at sites in the UK using a pretty basic Google search. But fear not, we can apply these exact same technique to .edu domains in the US.

Scary, huh? What, you didn’t think we were immune, did you? Luckily, it appeared that most of the sites that show up early in the Google search have already fixed the injections. But the injections were there long enough to get picked up by crawlers, which in and of itself is enough to do a little damage. Just to give you a short list of some of the sites I saw affected (note that I tried to make sure to not include sites where these links were clearly coming from spam of a user forum):

Princeton
Cornell
Columbia
Brigham Young
UCLA
Lancaster Theological Seminary
Arizona State University
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Arkansas Baptist (right on the home page)
Mount Olive College
Grace Bible College (user is actually hijacked and forwarded to a 3rd party site)
Ross University
Sierra Nevada College
…

And then I got tired of following links. Some of these have been fixed, some have not. Actually, the further into Google you go, the worse it gets in terms of pages that just flat out redirect you, no questions asked, so an online pharmacy site. Odds are, there are some porn links out there doing the same. I would also mention that more than once I saw links involved that were coming out of a Moodle install. And another thing to note that I didn’t really pull into the list above were schools with things like forum and wiki spam that showed up in the search results. That’s not XSS, that’s just annoying automated spam posting into an open system for the most part, but annoying no less.

The lesson? Be vigilant. Odds are, if you think your site and pages are secure, they aren’t. So have someone else try things out. Make friends with people on Twitter who will donate five minutes to try and do creepy things to pages. XSS is not something you just have to put up with, it can be prevented! Make Google your friend too, and try some of the common searches mentioned above on your site. I was happy to find no such content anywhere on our site. If you need some resources to help yourself out, take a look at:

photo credit: w0arz

Are you human? is CAPTCHA needed? Some Alternatives.

Nick DeNardis — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:00:15 +0000

If you have ever filled out a form online you have probably encountered a CAPTCHA. They come in many shapes and sizes. I am going to detail methods I’ve used to block bots from taking advantage of forms and their pros and cons. If you use a technique that’s not below just comment, the more options the better. Validating humanness should not be hard, why do some people make it that way?

reCAPTCHA

Solve a CAPTCHA and help digitize books. reCAPTCHA is the human extension of a project designed to digitize old textbooks. While scanning often there is words that the ORC scanner cannot recognize. These words are then pumped into a central repository where they are randomly displayed on screen for a human to decipher. Each reCAPTCHA has two words, one known and one unknown. If you get the known word right it is assumed you got the unknown word correct. If at least two people get the unknown word correct then it is marked as deciphered. Simple concept and for a great cause.

The biggest complaint about reCAPTCHA or CAPTCHA in general is the complexity of the images produced, sometimes almost unreadable by humans (especially if you have used ticketmaster.com). At least reCAPTCHA has the ability to refresh and grab a new pair of words or even read the words aloud. If you are forced to use a CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA is your best option in my opinion

The biggest issue in my book with reCAPTCHA is Javascript is required to show the image. Although most bots don’t use Javascript neither do some legitimate users. Not only ones with disabilities but also ones on mobile devices.

Simple Questions

What is 3+2? If you can answer a simple math problem you must be human. This method relies more on someone comprehending a sentence and placing the right string in the form field. It can range from simple math to just repeating a word.

It’s great because the only programming needed is to validate a field is submitted with specific information. The down side is when someone cannot answer the question. Making questions too difficult or obscure can result in frustrated users.

Hidden Field

Bots rarely render their forms in a browser so hiding a field with CSS (or Javascript) allows you to determine if the form was submitted without being looked at. Only someone in a browser would not see a specific field, so if that field has content its likely filled in with a bot and you can ignore it.

Bots often fill fields with junk or things that look like text and try to match up the “name” attributes with almost valid data so “first_name” might result in an actual name. But they cannot resist a good type=”text” field since it allows them a great deal of space to inject HTML or BB code. Hidden text fields work great with they are type=”text”. Downside of this approach is someone viewing your page with CSS turned off might get confused to see a field with no label just sitting there.

Check Referrer

Did the form submission come from your site? If not do you care about its contents? After a form is submitted checking where it was submitted from is as easy as $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] with PHP and Request.ServerVariables(”HTTP_REFERER”) with ASP (I think, I despise ASP).

Bots often will pull down your form and submit it remotely which creates a blank referrer. No referrer often means the form was not submitted through your site. The plus side of this method is the user does not have to do anything extra, the downside is you have to be careful when throwing away data, it might be legitament.

Confirmation Page

Is this information correct? A confirmation page is probably one of the best ways to supply a form to a user and verify if they are human while still making them feel comfortable with the information they submitted. Bots almost certainly don’t analyze the “Thank You” page so if your form goes to a confirm page where they have to click another button to confirm and submit their information it will more than likely not be compromised by a bot. The only down side to this method is the user has to click a Submit button then a Confirm button, there is a likelihood you loose someone in the middle.

Just Deal With It

You could also do what most people do and just deal with it. Make sure your data has to go through an approval process before bring posted publicly or sent via email. This will ensure a human verifies the information on the form was submitted by a human. Too bad this is the most effective and time consuming option, there is no better way to spot a human than with a human (currently).

Some forms like login’s don’t interrupt your daily routine when captured by bots but a full inbox all the time can really get on your nerves. None of the methods above are foolproof so some spam may still get through but any one of the above is better than nothing. Don’t be left with an open form for bots to clog the internet, inbox and databases with.

Lets not forget about accessibility

While all these options are fine and dandy the first two require extra work on your users end. This throws the red flag to make sure they are accessible. Opting for an option that does not require any extra work on the users end is best but can lead to a higher spam rate. Weigh your options and determine which method is best for you, each form is unique and one solution cannot work for all situations.

Main image from XKCD.

Social Networking Research: 99% of Your Audience Are On Them, Still Need More Convincing?

Kyle James — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:00:45 +0000

This data from the Participatory Marketing Network (PMN) was simply too compelling. The article talks about how the majority of Gen Y have not yet taken flight on Twitter claiming that only 22% of 18-24 year olds are on it. However, you could flip this data to say that almost a quarter of them are there so your institution should at least be listening. Personally I am tired of talking and reading about Twitter as it seems like every blogger has written about a dozen posts on it already. I mean how many different things can you really say about a service that only lets you input 140 characters?

Anyway let’s get back to the big story here. According to PMN’s data:

“99 percent of this same group reports having an active profile on at least one social networking site”

How can you ignore that data? We are talking about practically every undergraduate student that you have! Some of the other really interesting findings include:

- Online social networks are hot for Gen Y
- 99 percent have a profile on a social networking site
- 89 percent have downloaded an application to their profile page
- Photos (89 percent), Games (53 percent), Entertainment
(51 percent), News (32 percent) and Weather (29 percent) are
the most popular applications

- Mobile social networking is heating up for Gen Y
- 38 percent have an iPhone or iPod Touch
- Games (53 percent), Entertainment (35 percent), Lifestyle
(31 percent), Financial – Free (28 percent), Financial – Paid
(7 percent) are the most popular mobile applications
- More than one quarter (26 percent) indicated none

Now what?

So the question now is what are you going to do knowing this data? I know that we all run into cases where it can be difficult to convince administrators of the importance of social media, so hopefully you can bookmark this data to help make your case a little more compelling next time around. Also be sure to check out the associated graphs that can be downloaded and printed at the end of the PMN press release.

Image Library: Moving from Extensis Portfolio to Google’s Picasa

Rachel Reuben — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:00:12 +0000

We’ve been using Extensis Portfolio Server and clients for five years between two departments, Public Affairs and Design & Printing Services, to attempt to organize our digital image library of nearly 50,000 images. We’re also starting to store videos on this same server. We have a mixed environment of PC and Mac platforms. The PCs automatically map a network drive to the dedicated server through a Novell login script when we login to our computers everyday. The Macs mount the server via Finder > Go > Connect to Server.

When we initially purchased Extensis, we figured it would take a year or so to get up to speed, get everything cataloged, add meta data, etc. before we would start to see a return on our investment in terms of the time it would save us in finding images for print and electronic projects. This couldn’t be further from the case. This product has been extremely hard to use, slow, and is not overly intuitive for basic users. As a die-hard iPhoto user for over four years for personal use, I’ve been in search of a comparable product for our multi-platform, multi-user networked environment.

I’ve tweeted a number of times in recent months about my displeasure with Extensis and search for a new solution. Extensis was even listening on Twitter and another vendor’s forum in which I posted, and offered to have a senior sales engineer call me to discuss our concerns. We had that phone call, and it didn’t help. Their software just doesn’t meet our needs. Michael Santoroski responded to one of my tweets earlier this week and put me in touch with his colleague Whitney Anderson, who sent me a very detailed e-mail about their switch from Portfolio to Picasa. She blogged about it over at High on Web with the detailed pros and cons list she sent me. We’re just starting to implement this solution, so we have not yet tested it in all of our use cases, in particular multi-user update. Here’s what we’ve found so far.

Picasa is the best solution I have found for us. Not only is it user friendly and extremely fast, it’s free – big differences from Extensis Portfolio.

But wait, what about my meta data?

One of our primary concerns in deciding whether to make the switch was whether we would get all of our meta data we’ve put into our Extensis catalogs over the years back out and into Picasa. It was a bit of a challenge, but we did figure it out.

Using your Extensis Portfolio client, open your catalog(s) and select all of the images within. Control (Mac) / right (PC) click on one of the images. Choose “embed properties” from the sub-menu, then “view metadata settings…” The two main fields in the catalog we were most concerned with were “keywords” and “IPTC-creator” (photographer credit). Select each of those on the left side, and on the right side (’where to embed the field data’), map them to “IPTC-keywords.” This embeds the meta data you had entered in Extensis into the image file itself, which now makes the terms searchable within Picasa.

Test thoroughly before complete abandonment

My Senior Web Producer and I are still testing this switchover and have not deployed it to the rest of our department or other areas yet. As soon as we’re done testing in the coming week, we plan to write up a guide for Mac and PC with installation and setup instructions. While it will be quite specific to our environment, if seeing this guide would be a helpful starting point for you, please leave me a comment below or contact me directly, and I’ll be happy to share.

What’s your story?

What digital asset management tool do you use? Do you have a custom built tool, or do you use a commercial product? Are you happy with it?

Responding to Offending Blog Posts: The Mirror up to Nature

Nikki Massaro Kauffman — Fri, 29 May 2009 12:00:13 +0000

Before you get offended by someone’s blogging, you need to ask yourself three things:

1. Is this post even about me/us?

“It’s a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction,
everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised
biography — but if you write your biography, it’s equally assumed
you’re lying your head off.” —Margaret Atwood

Good bloggers write from experience, but—for the love of good ideas—not every good blog post is a secret revelation of a writer’s life! And before you think the following post was inspired by any recent event or my work as a Guru, please reread the above. What I have done, as they do in many works inspired by reality, is taken the experiences of many, many, many others people and events, edited, combined, and omitted to protect anonymity but preserve the meaning.

2. Is there any truth to this post?

If the answers to both of the above are clear “yes” answers, silencing the blogger is only treating a symptom. The person writing about the problem is only holding a “mirror up to nature”, so to speak. If you want to change something, don’t ask the blogger to change how he or she sees the world; change the reality that he or she is blogging. What do you accomplish by pulling a post? The truth is already out there. The reality of bad customer service, poor morale, a ruined friendship, or whatever, still exists. Why not fix the underlying problem?

3. Is this post completely untrue?

Consider the work and reputation of the person posting it. If the blogger’s work seems to be credible, you may want to follow-up to set the record straight. (Tip: Sometimes it’s worthwhile to submit corrections privately to the blogger and allow time to him/her to self-correct instead of posting publicly. It allows both of you to save face.) However, if the blogger has a reputation for distorting facts or being disgruntled, it may not be worth your time to intervene. You will probably get nowhere with the blogger, and most readers will probably disregard whatever he or she has to say anyway.

Image Credit: writing… by envina

Time to get serious about email

Karlyn Morissette — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:09:56 +0000

“Direct mail has begun spiraling into what we believe is a precipitous decline from which it will never fully recover”

According to a new study from Borrell Associates, direct mail will decline 39% in the next five years, with many marketers opting for email as a cheaper, more sustainable, alternative. I don’t think this means that print is dead in terms of response rates…but it does mean that the competition for your users attention in their inbox is going to increase immensely. The more email your users are getting hit with, the harder you’re going to have to work to make your messages stand out.

How does your email program stack up? If you can answer yes to any of the following questions, it’s time to step up your game:

Are you sending your mass emails in-house, without using an external service provide?
Are you relying solely on email newsletters or mass messages with little-to-no segmentation or customization?
Do you continue to send email after email without taking a moment to analyze your core email metrics?

If you’re one of the guilty, don’t feel too badly. You have lots of company. Here are some some simple things you can do to make your emails more competitive in the competition for your users attention.

Outsource, Outsource, Outsource!

It never ceases to amaze me how many institutions still continue to insist on sending their own email in-house. There are many things that colleges are capable of executing well in-house. Email deliverability is not one of them. You can have the most well-written, well-designed, most perfect emails in existence…but if they aren’t making it to inboxes, it’s all for not. And if you’re sending in-house, I guarantee that you are probably (minimally) blocked from delivering messages to Yahoo email addresses.

Outsourcing is not only cheap, but also gives you access to better features, additional data, and information about industry best practices from your provider. Most importantly, your deliverability problems will be on the shoulders of your provider. My favorite email service provider is Fire Engine RED, but there are tons of others out there to choose from if they aren’t quite your style.

Make It Personal

Email newsletters have their place, but they should not be the focal point of your email marketing program. Instead, focus your energy on a strong segmentation strategy. The general rule of thumb is that if you cannot segment your message into at least two groups, you should probably think twice about sending it. Segmentation only works if its based on things that your users care about. Don’t be afraid to experiment and test to find out what works best.

Segmentation will naturally lead way to customizing your messages. Customization should be seamless. Think about the fields that will add value to your message, while not taking your user’s attention away from fulfilling the primary call-to-action.

Use Your Data

Your metrics are the keys to the kingdom. They tell you what’s working and what’s not. Take the time to really analyze your numbers, and approach them with an open mind. Accept that the awesome strategy you came up with may not have pulled as well as you thought it would, or that the subject line you hated may have been perfect for the audience.

Although I look at a wide variety of metrics, the two key ones for me are click-to-open and conversion. Your click-to-open rate compares the number of people who click on a link in your email to the number of people who opened the message, and is a much more accurate indicator of the success of the overall message thank the click through rate. Your conversion rate measure the percent of people who actually completed your call-to-action (i.e. filled out an online application, or made an online gift). Each of these rates is going to require a bit of extra effort on your part – click-to-open is not a metric that is normally included on standard email service provider reports, so that’s probably a calculation you’re going to have to make on your own. Tracking conversion rate will probably require an extra tool, such as Google Analytics, but it certainly can (and should!) be done.

When All Else Fails, Make It VALUABLE

If you do nothing else, make sure you ask yourself what value you are providing for your users. Are you just pushing out information that is valuable to you? Or are you really taking their wants and needs into consideration? If you aren’t giving your users things they care about, then no amount of outsourcing, segmentation or data analysis will be able to help you.

Don’t Forget to Vote for the eduStyle Awards!

Michael Fienen — Wed, 27 May 2009 17:00:08 +0000

Voting for the second annual eduStyle awards closes in just a couple of days, and we wanted to give you a reminder to drop by and vote! Not only that, be sure to drop a checkmark down for .eduGuru for the best higher ed blog. Just in case you need some more convincing though, I put together a little video for your enjoyment, just to show how much I care.

Content is More Important than Design

Kyle James — Wed, 27 May 2009 13:00:06 +0000

Now I know that some web designers out there can’t wait to get to the comment section to “rip me a new one,” but please humor me and read through my reasoning here. I hope you will see this is a well thought out and valid argument worth your time. Then after reading you are more than welcome to “let me have it” in the comments.

We have all heard “Content is King” – so many times that we probably forget exactly what that means and why it is important.

Google and Craigslist as Examples

Simple isn’t always bad. Simple can be a very good thing. Take a look at two of the most popular sites on the web, Google and Craigslist. They are extremely simple without a whole lot of design work. It is the content that makes these sites so valuable. Granted Google’s content is a little different as their content is the value of their search results and Craigslist is all user generated content with the purpose of finding interested parties, but they accomplish their goals.

How about MySpace vs Facebook as another example? At one time MySpace was by far the largest and dominate Social Network on the Web. Fast forward to the present, and it has been taken over by Facebook. One of the big differences between the two sites is MySpace allows users to completely design their pages through custom CSS and templates. Facebook locks users into a pretty neutral theme. These loud, noisy, and sometimes obnoxious MySpace profiles have been buried to the corners of the internet and now Facebook stands supreme with its simple design. I’m sure some of you are already arguing, “Well yeah, some people should never be allowed to design a webpage” and I would agree, but that isn’t really the point I’m making here.

A perfect reason about why people shouldn't be allowed to design webpages much less MySpace Pages

Expired Content is Worse than Worthless

Staying relevant is vitally important. Nothing is worse than visiting a site and seeing banners for events that happened last month still being promoted. A few years back I was going through a redesign process of an Art website, and the group wanted to have pretty flash banners along with elaborate images promoting all the upcoming events. When it was asked “Who is going to create these new graphics?” and more importantly “Who is going to decide and start announcing events early enough to have a designer create these graphics?” the answers were all, “I thought you were going to do that for us.” The greatest power of a CMS is that it allows “almost” anyone to edit a webpage without being an HTML expert. Unfortunately a good easy button for Photoshop experts has yet to be built.

Being able to quickly and accurately keep websites updated with relevant and important information is crucial. Imagine going to Weather.com to look at today’s weather and seeing yesterday’s forecast because it takes too long to create a rain cloud graphic for today or they haven’t gotten around to updating the weather in your location. A lot of good that’ll do you when you are soaking wet trying to get home from your adventure today.

Search Engines Don’t Care About Design

Now putting on my strictly SEO hat – it’s extremely easy to make the argument for content over design. As I’ve said in *other posts* search engine bots are the dumbest, blindest users who will visit your site. They can’t see images besides reading the file name and an alt tag associated with an image. Crawlers have a hard time reading flash and can’t handle JavaScript either. So all that fancy and flashy design doesn’t do a lick of good to helping your unique content get indexed in search engines or get found.

Yes that is right – go take a look at a lynx browser and you will see what your site looks like to a search engine. Not the prettiest thing out there, is it? Can you figure out what you are doing on this graphically challenged version of your site? If not, you might want to spend some time working on that.

Closing

Now am I saying that design doesn’t matter at all? Of course not! I’m simply saying that what your site consists of is more important than what it looks like. So next time you begin to talk about a redesign or creation of a new site spend more time focusing on what is the value adding content that will be placed on the site instead of what it looks like.

Photo Credit: Fan of Four Kings by incurable_hippie

Can You Hear Me Now?

Nikki Massaro Kauffman — Fri, 22 May 2009 12:00:19 +0000

Today, I have a short thought that should apply to just about any of us in higher ed. It’s about listening.

It’s why we gather data.
It’s how we calm people down when they are upset.
It’s how we build relationships.
It’s one half of a conversation.

So I ask you… if you are not opening your site, your time, or yourself, up to feedback… are you even communicating? Aren’t you missing half of the information you need to do your job?

Thoughts? How has listening helped you in your field? Do you have any horror stories when someone has not listened?

Image Credit: Listen by runran