Is this marketing campaign really an advantage?

September 3rd, 2010 No Comments

The photo found above is a screen capture of the Drake University admissions site after it launched a new marketing campaign touting the Drake advantage. I understand the need to be edgy, but the enlarged image of a D+ has me scratching my head.

The Drake website offers a brief explanation: “When we talk about D+, that’s what we mean. Every moment at Drake is one that has the power to educate, to transform, to open minds and to unleash potential — to introduce who you are, to who you hope to become.”

So is this a brilliant campaign that will inevitably draw people to the Drake website (albeit for perhaps the wrong reason)? Or a marketing plan gone wrong? My D+ brain can’t quite figure it out. Your thoughts?

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5 things higher ed could learn from Justin Bieber

August 31st, 2010 No Comments


It doesn’t matter if you love him or hate him … or even know who he is. You have to respect Justin Bieber for the mere fact he knows how to draw a crowd.

Teenage girls launch into deafening screams of delight at the mention of his name. When Bieber was scheduled to perform earlier this year at a Long Island mall, it took more than 35 police units to wrangle and control the crowd. Australian police in April canceled a television appearance when a crowd crush injured several adoring fans. What gives?

I can’t name one of his songs (he is a singer, right?), but clearly Justin Bieber is a man who knows how to market himself.

I’m not saying teenage girls soon should be screaming down the doors of college admissions offices, but surely there’s some lessons to be learned here. One can’t be a constant trending topic on Twitter without knowing a few tricks, right? Bieber’s teenage audiences react to him in ways college admissions counselors could only dream about. Why can’t we be rock stars, too?

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Relinquishing control on Facebook comments

August 27th, 2010 2 Comments

“Someone wrote something on my Facebook page and I don’t know if I should delete it or not. Could you take a look?” This is not the type of phone call you want to receive as you’re trying to shut it down at the end of the day.

I’ve always been — and will continue to be – an advocate for keeping wall boards and comments open, especially on the social web. One of the first changes I make to any Facebook page I create is to open the wall to show all posts. The wall should a conglomeration of comments from the page administrator and the people who like it.

It’s easy to delete comments that are hateful, racist or threaten the safety of another person. Those are the no-brainers. But what do you do when the comments fall into the category of oh-I-wish-he-wouldn’t-have-said-that? Here’s the initial posting on an admission counselor’s page that caused my phone to ring:

It’s not a particularly negative comment and at least he was nice about it. He even apologized! But it’s also not exactly the type of message you want attached to a post that’s trying to get kids excited about the upcoming school year.

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Admissions counselors don’t need friends; they just need people to like them

August 23rd, 2010 No Comments

The question for college admissions counselors isn’t should they be on Facebook, it’s how they should be on Facebook. U.S. News and World Report first asked the question nearly a year ago: “To friend or not to friend?”

Admissions counselors want to keep the personal lives they stored on Facebook separate from their professional ones. This is understandable. Potential students share a similar concern for privacy. They’re fearful what admissions counselors might see and how that might impact an admissions decision. This is also understandable.

Multiple profiles (for personal and professional purposes) aren’t the answer. First, they’re a clear violation of Facebook’s terms of service: “You will not create more than one personal profile.” Second, isn’t that just confusing?

You don’t need Facebook friends anyway.

Admissions counselors simply need people to like them … or at least like the institution of higher learning they represent. They don’t need another profile. They just need a page.

A Facebook page kills the privacy debate from both sides:

Pages are tied to a personal profile, yes, but the only reference to the page administrator is the acknowledgement that the administrator ‘likes’ his own page. Personal photos, wall posts and embarrassing Farmville apps remain with the profile, not with the page.

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The new Tweet button is more than you think

August 12th, 2010 No Comments
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Twitter today finally announced the arrival of the Tweet Button. The button works pretty much as you would expect. Similar to Facebook’s ‘Like’ button, the Tweet Button allows users to tweet the content of a page. The tweet is pre-populated with a link back to the original piece of content.

It’s pretty simple, pretty cool.

And, yes, the idea behind this button is nothing new. There’s a million third-party applications that allow for users to tweet content. Yet Twitter takes it one step further.

The coolest feature associated with the Tweet Button is the suggestion of who to follow. Implementation of the Tweet Button allows sites to recommend people the user may want to follow. For example, say I incorporate the Tweet Button at the bottom of a University press release. If a user tweets out the release, the Tweet Button would suggest the user follow the main University Twitter account, or the account associated with the content.

It’s all pretty sweet.

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Four things you should be doing on Foursquare

June 11th, 2010 No Comments

I’m been touting the marketing merits of joining Foursquare for a while now, but can’t shake the thought of what happens when the conversation ends.

I imagine an eager entrepreneur navigating the iTunes app store, downloading the Foursquare application and marveling at the white-on-blue checkbox icon that now graces the screen. One question remains:

Now what do I actually do with it?

Foursquare is a virtual game that allows users to “check-in” at locations and awards them points for each check-in. A certain number of points makes you the “mayor” of a location or earns you “badges” that tout your usage.

But you don’t have to earn badges or mayoral status to make the system work for you. If you represent an organization that wants to gain value from Foursquare, there are really only four things you need to do:

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St. Louis local government and Facebook, an opportunity lost

June 3rd, 2010 No Comments

The following post was originally written for the St. Louis Social Media & Tech Report.

The small St. Louis County municipality where I live spent more than $30,000 in August 2008 to purchase and install an electronic sign outside the police station. The purpose was to provide a place for news and events pertinent to city residents.

I’ve probably driven by the sign 10 times in two years. I could never tell you what it said. It’s the prison warden in Cool Hand Luke who said it best: “What we’ve got here is … failure to communicate.”

My problem isn’t so much with the sign (although I’d certainly appreciate a better allocation of my tax dollars). My problem lies with my community’s overall approach to communication.

My city isn’t on Facebook and I think it’s missing the boat.

For some people Facebook IS the Internet. It’s where they e-mail, chat and find information. The social media behemoth boasts more than 400 million active users, with 50 percent of those logging into Facebook on any given day. The average user is connected to 60 page, groups and events.

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10 tips for live-tweeting an event

May 24th, 2010 2 Comments

Some of the greatest buzz I’ve generated on Twitter have been from live-tweeting events — from annual commencement ceremonies, to our president’s first day on the job, to an on-campus lecture from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. The response has been great.

Live-tweeting allows communication to flow to and from the event, engages audiences wherever they may be and creates a digital diary of all that happened. It isn’t the end-all-be-all of promoting a University event. But I still think it’s kind of cool.

Here’s a few tips I’ve picked up along the way:

Live Tweeting Tip No. 1: Pick the right event
 Not every on-campus event is ripe for the tweeting.  While it might be cool to live-tweet when St. Louis Cardinals President Bill DeWitt III comes to campus, it’s maybe not so cool to tweet a memorial service for a longtime professor who passes away.

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#SMCSTL tackles the Facebook privacy debate

May 20th, 2010 2 Comments

While most people care about the information they choose to share online, they don’t care too much about Facebook’s move to make more of that information public — at least not enough to ditch the social media network altogether.

This care-but-don’t-care attitude was the general sentiment at a great Social Media Club of St. Louis event tonight at Schlafly Bottleworks in Maplewood. The event featured a heated debate on Facebook’s privacy policy between Brian Schwartz (@creativereason) of Spoke Marketing and Matt Ridings (@techguerilla) of MSR Consulting.

In case you’ve been under a rock, Facebook last month revised its privacy policy to require users to opt out if they wish to keep certain information private. The new default setting for Facebook makes all that information public and caused a minor raucous in social media circles.

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Getting people to “like” you on Facebook

May 20th, 2010 2 Comments

If there’s one thing brothers are good for, it’s for putting you in your place. Minutes after coding a Facebook “like” button into this blog, I received the following message regarding my apparent narcissism:

The way Facebook built it, liking someone (or something) is as easy as clicking a button. The benefits are greater exposure and the ability to promote a website on the largest social media network out there. According to Facebook, the like button “enables users to make connections to your pages and share content back to their friends on Facebook with one click … For logged-in Facebook users, the button is personalized to highlight friends who have also like the page.”

The trick is getting the like button there in the first place.

Consider the following a brief “how to” when it comes to adding a like button of your own. I can’t guarantee the success of the following steps across multiple platforms, but it works in WordPress (as evidenced by the button on the right) and I can’t see it being all that much trouble anywhere else.

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