Enter College using Facebook 95% of the time and LinkedIn 5% of the time. By the senior year, flip that.

Image via CrunchBase

Facebook will not get a student a job. It could, however, cost someone a job. Quick: have you heard about the person that wasn’t hired because of their LinkedIn post?

No, you haven’t. But there are people who haven’t hired college students because they didn’t have a LinkedIn profile.

How to care about LinkedIn.

Step #1 is caring about your profile. Your profile should be your best foot forward. Assume people looking at the profile are considering doing business with you, or hiring your for your business. Add details of your wins at school. If you were the president of a club, add it. Write a description of your duties. If your club accomplished something, take some of the credit.

Just don’t lie.

Step#2 is connecting. LinkedIn offers LinkedIn.com/alumni, a truly magical place of discovery. At LinkedIn.com/alumni, people can search LinkedIn by city, company or category. Or, you can click all three and narrow it down to the developer at Google in San Francisco, or the HR manager at Google in New York City.

Connect with the people who went to your school. There is a mutual reward in this connection: you can tell them what ii is like a their school now – believe me, alums want to know what is going on at the school. They want to reminisce with people who are in the moment.  They will be able to tell you about the category, the city or the company that you are interested.

It can be mutually beneficial, if framed correctly.

So go out and use LinkedIn instead of Facebook. The worst that could happen is no one cares. The best is someone does.

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Dr. at the November 29, 2005 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council, in Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Neil deGrasse Tyson came to speak at Colgate. He was awesome. Here are three reasons why:

1. He can tell a story.  The presentation was funny, but at times poignant. In those times, he created drama with props or just his voice. There was one moment where he stopped talking and walked to the back of the stage to get a chair. He pulled the chair to the front of the page, sat down, and sighed. THe theatrics helped make the point about scientific illiteracy.

2. He stood the whole time (with the exception of above) It seems obvious that when presenting one must stand. Indeed, it isn’t called sit down comedy. If you want to capture a room, you must stand up. True story, a marketing firm recently came to present at Colgate and they sat down for the whole thing. They bored us all because it is impossible to be energetic sitting down. Never sit down to present. Ever.

3. His slides had no more than 10 words and were mostly pictures. Slides should add to the presentation, they shouldn’t be the presentation. Never read off a slide. Always use a slide to add to what you’re going to say. If you find yourself reading off a slide, then you will find yourself with a room that pulled out devices and checked e-mail.

Your turn. What makes a good or a bad presentation?

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I used Facebook to reconnect to my high school friends, and have a different relationship with them now than I had ten years ago.

At the college I work, I can say with confidence that Facebook is making Reunion an entirely different experience. Facebook keeps recent graduates connected, and reconnects older graduates.

For the college-bound student, Facebook offers a chance to connect to new friends, but to stay connected to their high school friends.  The college student now comes with a built-in community of their past and present.

Image via CrunchBase

That won’t go away. When they get to college, I think it is smart to use Facebook and stay connected. The 2017 class Facebook group is a group filled with people who will be a huge part of the next 4 years. Connect. Engage. Make friends IRL.

Then create a LinkedIn profile.

LinkedIn is part of what students get from a degree. 

If Facebook is the platform of your past, LinkedIn is the platform of your future.

LinkedIn is the place to connect to people who went to your alma mater. The smaller and more intimate your school, the most alums will help you get ahead in your career.

To see them, click here.

Alumni of a small intimate Liberal Arts college have something a students want – connection to the real world. But current students have something an alum wants – connection to their alma mater.

So here’s the rule: in your first year of college, spend 90% of your time on Facebook and 10% of the time on LinkedIn. By senior year, reverse those numbers.

Upon graduation, make LinkedIn be the thing that proves you’re an expert at what you know. Connect to alums who would care about said proof.

Prosper.

And occasionally use Facebook to find friends to celebrate your success.

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So they start something. And they call me to spread it, because I do social media things, and most of the time they want to use social media things to spread the word.

I usually sit with them and talk about the words they want spread. Strangely, even though many people like images and sites like imjur and Reddit are exploding because of images, they rarely want to “spread the image”.

I don’t tell them the things I’m about to tell you, I use much different language. But this is the gist of it. Here are ten reasons people don’t care.

1. You aren’t targeting the right people. This one is actually quite simple. When people say they want to spread the word, I ask to whom? What people? If you don’t ask what people, people who accidentally find your site through some sheer force of you posting a lot will leave because they weren’t ever the right people.

2. The right people don’t care. When spreading the word, the word has to be something worth spreading. The message needs to resonate to the right people or your wasting your time.

3. Someone told you to post once a day or once a week. See, here’s the thing: you should post when the content you post resonates to #1, ergo #2. If you post for the sake of it, you’ll make Google happy, but then you’ll just attract more of the wrong people. And your traffic will look big but not full of people coming back.

4. If you’re doing it on Facebook, 70% of the people who like your page don’t care because they don’t see it. That’s right, a post goes to about 30% of your ‘likes’. Sometimes it is more: we once had a post go to almost double the amount of people who like our page. It went viral! Did I mention that happened once? Yea. Good times.

5. It is even less if you’re doing it on Twitter.

6. Back to Facebook: lets say someone in the 30% sees your post, it is surrounded by cute pictures or personal posts from friends. It is doomed to be seen but not seen. I like Facebook for certain things, but not for “spreading the word”. Incidentally, Facebook should be about “spreading the image”.

7. You focus on SEO and not people. SEO should be called search engine optimization for the people who want to see my content. SEOFTPWWTSMI is way too long. So it is SEO. And you do headlines and pepper your posts with keywords to be found. This impacts #2. Unless it doesn’t. It doesn’t have to. Nail #2 and you’ll nail SEO.

8. Use more pictures than words. Not because people don’t read, because images and moving images look better on mobile technologies. People read. Ask the New York Times.

9. You’re not the New York Times. You’re not a professional writer so write short. Get to the point. Use short sentences that get to the point. The point? I’m not a professional writer. This is the longest my blog posts should be. There probably should not be a #10.

10. Instead of creating something new, find content about your thing and engage with the person who created it. Unless you’re really awesome, there is someone out there doing what you want to do, and they’re doing it better. Find them. See if you can find ways to get their content on your site.

Good luck.

Lets begin with the good. Facebook, it is said, offers the ability to share content in a way that is unique. At Colgate, we have the fancy “share on Facebook” button, and when we share news, we typically see it as the number one referrer. People who like and follow Colgate get their news from Facebook.

It offers a history that, in ten years, will be compelling and worth studying. The archive of content, images, likes and comments will exist for internal use in a way that is profound. (A Facebook profile is the same: my kids will have an archive that is unlike anything that has ever existed).

Facebook’s new targeting offers brands an ability to talk to subsets of the fans on the page. From age to educational status, the data in the targeting offers rich potential to the smart marketing staff.

The bad.

All of the above is for established Facebook pages. If you’re sitting there thinking you should start a Facebook page for your thing/brand/cause I have bad news.

It is noisy in Facebook. Most people have the pages they are willing to fan, and the relationships they want. People aren’t seeking new brands or new friends on Facebook. Indeed, chances are good people are trimming.

But lets pretend that they do want to ‘like’ your page. Your posts do not go to all of your fans. Indeed, a good post might got to 30% of fans (if the page has 100 fans, the post is seen by 30).  That said, I’ve seen some of our posts go to almost double the number of fans on the page (if the page has 100 fans, the post was seen by 170).

If you manage a Facebook page, you’ve seen these numbers. They are low because of the noise on Facebook.

What does that mean? 

Don’t start a Facebook page. If you have one already, and it has 1-2 hundred fans, kill it. Decide who you want to talk to, and what you want to say. Then figure out the proper tool for saying it.

Facebook isn’t magic. It should be part of a plan, but also, it should be give acceptable expectations. That means, you need to identify people who will like the page.  You will waste your time and effort if you start a page – for any reason – without having a plan.

This is what it looks like.

One of the targeting choices for posts are now “people who are in College.”

What does that mean? It means that when people like a school’s page, we can now post to the current students or the alums using this targeting tool. Incidentally, we can also target male alums in New York City. Or female alums in Chicago.

Will we do the last two?

I don’t know. But I do know this: we can now post updates to students, and updates to alums. We can now see, with some certainty, the number of current students on the page in real-time.

Facebook is also working on sub-comments in the stream. In other words, there is a long comment stream of people talking about a memory. Currently, people talk to each other in the stream in a somewhat clunky way. People respond by saying @Matt, you’re right.

In the new reality, people can respond to that particular comment and start a new sub-thread. Both of these innovations will make the Facebook experience a better one for fans of college Facebook pages. We can now offer relevant content to the right market, and when people comment, they will be able to have better conversations.

Kudos Facebook.

“Can you ask your phone?” he said.

At four, he is keenly aware that the answers to all the questions in the world are in my phone.

I tell you this because it makes me think about how school will be for him. When we went to school, we were essentially tested on our ability to memorize information. We would ‘study’ content, then recite it on a test. The higher the grade, the more it was about memorization.

But we didn’t have a device in our hands that give us the answer. Back then, we had to know the answer – someone needed to have that information memorized.  Now, it isn’t as critical.

Aside: I know my parent’s phone number, but I still need to look up my new phone number because I use my cell phone and just say call home.

So how will my son be tested? Knowing that the answers are in the device he’ll inevitably have in the classroom, how can teachers test on memorization?

My thoughts.

I think we need to radically rethink the definition of learning. I do think we need to teach the basics – reading, writing and arithmetic. I also think we need to work on diction, grammar and sentence structure.

However, I really think we need to focus on story telling. I think we also need to teach students how to talk into cameras and tell stories. They can do papers using video. We can and should teach them to tell stories using YouTube, Facebook, a blog or Google Earth.

We should also teach them to think about anonymity online.

Communication will be the most important element of the next 40 years. It will be crucially more important than the ability to memorize who won the war of 1812. Instead, teach students how to use Google Earth to show how people fought the war.

The obvious problem is that for my son, technology will be a way of life. For his teachers, this is all new. They learned through memorization. The only device they had at their disposal was the calculator – and some were old enough to not even have a calculator in the class.

Here is a look at technology in College.

The first bundle to fall was the Record. Napster gets a lot of credit for changing the record

Timeline of file sharing (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

business, but what it really did was un-bundle songs. Prior to Napster, if people wanted the hit, they bought the album. An album was $14-$20 because it had 10-15 songs on it. Concept albums were even better – they told a story in the songs.

Hits no longer sell albums, they sell MP3’s at less than a dollar. So a hit that used to earn $14 in the bundle, earns less than a dollar alone.

Newspapers.

The next casualty of the digital era was the bundle we call the newspaper. Prior to the Internet, if someone wanted the box scores or the sports section, they had to buy the bundle.

To newspapers, the bundle was more than just the 50 cents. The bundle was readership of ads. If someone bought the paper, it was assumed that all ads were seen. We know by our own habits that we might only read the sports section, or business, or the front page. But the fact that the paper is in our hands means all the ads could be seen.

And that’s how they were sold.

The internet un-bundled the articles and the sections, and undermined the business model. Aside from the strange notion that online was free and the paper was 50 cents, the real costs came from the loss of potential eyeballs. When someone goes to read an article online, they only saw the ads on that article. No longer could it be assumed that they saw all ads in the bundle.

Cable TV (and radio)

One of the last bundles still holding on is cable TV. In order to get Showtime or HBO we have to buy the bundle. The business model of TV, and the era of incredibly good TV is predicated on the notion of the bundle. People pay upward of $100 a month for the bundle. But that will change.

There will be a time where the Internet is easily accessible from TVs. When that time comes, watching Netflix

(the first un-bundler) and livestreams will stop the need for the bundle. I can buy, and watch all Arsenal games online for about $100 a year. For a little more, one can buy all NHL games. One can see a time wherein the leagues sell their programming directly from around the world. Once that happens, it isn’t far off where records and newspapers went. TV will un-bundle, and when it does, it will require a new model. Incidentally, and off-topic, the new model could advertise to people instead of a demographics, but that’s another blog post.

So what does this have to do with education?

It is my opinion that online learning is an attempt to un-bundle the College. University of Phoenix and other online schools are taking the classes out of the experience.

Think about it: as more schools consider online courses, and open badge systems re-think the ‘degree’, what is lost is the College bundle. The experience of moving in – the experience of joining clubs and teams and fraternities. The parties. The shared experiences that are also a part of the College experience.

There are other bundles out there. This one, in my opinion, is worth keeping.

Full disclosure: I work at a 4-year College, so I’m biased.

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“The University of Virginia needs no “brand enhancement.” Once you consider a university a “brand,” you have lost. I suppose university presidents lapse into such language to placate the MBA’s on their boards. But the challenges and duties of private firms do not in any way resemble the challenges or duties of universities. So we must stop using business language to describe universities. It’s not only misguided and inaccurate, but it also sets up bad incentives and standards. The University of Virginia is a wealthy and stable institution, a collection of public services, a space for thought and research, a living museum, a public forum, a stage for athletics competition, and an incubator of dreams and careers. But it’s not a firm, so it’s certainly not a “brand.””

You should read the whole thing, it is a good article on technology in the classroom by Siva Vaidhyanathan. So, the qualifier: even though this paragraph isn’t the point of the article, and I am taking it out of context, I want to address it.

Because it drives me nuts.

“Once you consider a university a “brand,” you have lost” writes Vaidhyanathan.

The next couple of sentences make the point that a University isn’t a business. For reasons that might be clear to readers, I agree that a University isn’t a business. With the exception of a few, the University has a mission that is more than ‘make money’.  Investing in creating smart young people who can think critically and solve problems is a good long market strategy. The results far outweigh the costs.

No, my complaint with the above paragraph is simple: after saying ‘brand’ doesn’t matter in the second sentence, Vaidhyanathan uses the second last sentence to describe the brand.

“The University of Virginia is… ”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call the beginning of a definition of the brand. I think the word brand simply means ‘how you’re defined by people”. Even if the brand isn’t in the business of making money, and instead is in the business of making smart people who will pay for my retirement, the way the thing is defined in people’s mind is the brand.

When a brand stops talking in unison about what they are, the terms get defined for them. In UVA’s case, the current brand is defined by the sacking, then re-hiring of the President. So while it is nice to think that the school is “a space for thought and research”, that isn’t the way many people would describe it. Rightly or wrongly, UVA needs to get a coherent message to people on what the school is. And for the record, no school should say it is the “incubator for hopes and dreams.” That is marketing-speak. A school should use alums to showcase the potential of the degree. It should focus on creating critical thinking problem solvers. And it should work on proving that it can create critical thinkers. But we’re getting off-topic.

People are the brand

It’s been said many times, but it is worth repeating: people make up the brand. If a brand promises good customer service in their advertising, but doesn’t train people to deliver good customer service, no amount of marketing will convince people of the promise. If a brand promises outcomes, but doesn’t deliver, then the brand is impacted.

At a University, the way people talk about the school will define the school’s brand. The way the category talks about outcomes will impact brands.

Brand is simply this: what people say when they write My school is….If the brand can’t define it, then people will define it for them. That applies whether the mission is to sell carbonated drinks, or create critical thinking problem solvers.

Stop putting it in quotes, start thinking about how people define it.

This is the class that, in theory, had to decide to lose touch with their classmates. But since Facebook was still in the adoption phase people were more-likely to still be connecting their senior year.

We used Facebook ads to talk about reunion. We used Facebook posts to talk about reunion. To the class of ’07, Facebook is a platform to stay engaged with classmates and the things they had in common (like Colgate). For the first time in my history with Facebook, I was talking with people who were five years into it.

So, did Facebook work?

After an IPO that was less than stellar, Facebook came out with a report from ComScore that said:

“people exposed to a Starbucks marketing campaign on Facebook were 38 per cent more likely to buy Starbucks products in the following four weeks.”

Facebook advertising (and Facebook itself) is different from TV, Radio and Print. Those platforms used interruption techniques to get attention between content.

Facebook is an active platform, where people like to share content or interact with the content on their stream. And while they might not ‘see’ ads.

Image via CrunchBase

I happen to think that ad messages on Facebook sink in. We placed an ad message beside alums who follow us on Facebook that garnered almost 200K impressions. All of those impressions were out of the corner of their eye. None of those can be measured, or even proven to have worked.

Except for the actual results. We had record numbers at reunion.

Think about it this way: logos from Starbucks – or their alma mater filter into their brains as they look through the stream of content. Some of the content in that stream are from Starbucks and their alma mater.

Nigel Hollis, who has a blog that you should read, wrote something about brands:

Time is the most expensive commodity in today’s economy. Few people will invest significant amounts of time researching all the possible options for a brand purchase. Usually the risk of making a bad purchase is relatively low and there are too many other things vying for those precious, irreplaceable minutes. So the stronger your brand, the more likely it is that people will click on its link instead of some other one.”

(Emphasis mine)

Brands become strong through a message in advertising. Think about Coca-Cola, a strong brand made stronger through constant image advertising. The point is simple: get in front of the consumer with a message that makes the brand stronger. That way, when it comes time to make a purchase decision, the brand can rise to the top. Brand advertising acts as a reminder, even when the reminder is barely noticed.

For Starbucks, it is getting more than just coffee into a consumer’s head, it means getting the experience of coffee in their heads.

For Colgate, it is getting a reminder in the heads of people who graduated in a 7 or 2 that a 10 or 5 reunion is coming. On top of that, it is a reminder of the real-life connections that last years after commencement. Those last connections, facilitated by Facebook for people five years out of school.

So back to the question: Facebook was a large part of the strategy to get alums excited about coming back for reunion, can I measure Facebook’s impact?

Not really. Like a billboard, I can’t prove to you that Facebook ads contributed to the record numbers.

Maybe they didn’t. Maybe the fact that this was the first “Facebook class” made the attendance inevitable. If we asked (and we did ask a few), the ads had nothing to do with it. As marketers, we know that isn’t true. We know advertising works as a reminder, whether the reminder is drink Coke or Strabucks, or attend a reunion.

Facebook is not a billboard company. But the almost free impressions on Facebook can be targeted infinitely better than a billboard, while still acting as a billboard. To me, that makes it too valuable to pass up.

This brings up a question: as a publicly trade company, can Facebook afford to give me free impressions? Or will this be an accident of the time that a social media site evolves into a billboard-like impressions model where we pay for GRPs?

What do you think?

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