Patrick Powers

It’s incredibly easy to set up a Facebook page and perhaps that’s part of the problem. Credit Facebook with a high level of usability. Any wanna-be marketer with a profile can create a Facebook page is a matter of minutes. The problem, however, comes when expectations for that page fail to deliver the intended results. [...]

All business collateral — letterhead, envelopes, business cards, etc. — uphold an identity standard that promotes brand consistency. Why should email be any different? If email is sent from a corporate email address, it represents the corporation that created it. Uniform email signatures present a professional image while still providing brand consistency across departments, divisions, [...]

If anything, Twitter will keep you on your toes. The microblogging giant earlier this month announced plans to rework its interface in an effort to make the service faster and simpler. According to Twitter: “We’ve simplified the design to make it easier than ever to follow what you care about, connect with others and discover [...]

Writing this post may endanger my ability to score free Axe hair gel in the future, but it needs to be said: Klout scores mean little when it comes to real social media success. The online measurement tool does a great job of entertaining those who care about the difference between a retweet and a [...]

Photos draw greater rates of engagement than any other type content posted in Facebook, according to a recent study conducted by Web Liquid. The statistics are interesting in that they confirm what most marketers have known for a while — more dynamic content leads to greater levels of engagement. However, it’s not safe to assume [...]

It took a while but it appears Google+ is open for business. Google on Monday unveiled its pages feature that allows organizations — including institutions of higher learning — to create brand personas and engage with the more than 40 million people already using Google+. It’s about time. The Google+ platform is a slick one, [...]

There’s a scene in the 1983 classic “Mr. Mom” when new stay-at-home dad Jack Butler attempts to drop off his kids at school. It’s a simple task, really, but as his kids and others are quick to point out, he’s doing it wrong. When it comes to location-based services and how we employ them in [...]

Crafting the image or identity of an institution’s brand in the mind of a student is nothing new. Brand positioning in higher education relies upon the ability to convey a institution’s uniqueness, differentiation and verifiable value. It’s no different online. All positioning is digital positioning. The web often is the university’s front door for students. [...]

Recent changes to the way Facebook generates its news feed may have marketers rethinking the kind of content they post from a page —  but they also need to consider the means by which they post it. EdgeRank Checker last month conducted an analysis of 1 million updates on 50,000 pages that influence more than 1 [...]

What does Facebook’s timeline mean for marketers? Will users subscribe to public figure profiles? What’s the impact of the ticker? And what do all these changes mean for page administrators? Seth Odell and I spent an hour breaking it all down on Higher Ed Live, a weekly web show dedicated to digital development and professional [...]