I’m honored and humbled to have been asked to be the keynote speaker at the HighEdWeb Rochester Regional Conference on June 27, 2011. I’ve never given a keynote presentation before. And, I’m a tad rusty at conference presentations. I had taken a break from the conference circuit after 20 presentations in one year and wanting to focus my time and energy on my move to Ithaca and Ithaca College. This opportunity is giving me a great opportunity to get back in the saddle again, but I was hoping I could ask you for your thoughts.

Keynote presentations are tough. I’ve sat through dozens of them. Some have been fantastic. Others have tanked. Conferences typically attract people from all different kinds of backgrounds and experiences, and to try to find one broad topic that will appeal to all attendees is tough. In the case of this HighEdWeb Rochester Regional, we’ll have some web programmers, web designers, content strategists, marketers, communicators, and more. I want my talk to be useful, practical, and heck, maybe even inspirational.

My talk is current titled, “Reflect, Repurpose, Restructure, Re-energize: A journey from the last 15 years of the web in higher ed and the road ahead.” That’s a mouthful. I came up with a rough outline prior to accepting the keynote invitation to make sure I thought I could come up with something that might be worthy. The outline is still quite rough, and even though I’ve committed to the presentation, I’d still like to know what you might find helpful (“you” being the attendees – physically or virtually via Twitter or whatever).

In the “Reflect” opening, I thought I’d talk about where we came from, how much has changed, how much has stayed the same or we’re seeing repeat in various forms. In “Repurpose,” I’ll talk about skills web professionals (and marketing/communication types) have had in the past and how they can repurpose their skills into todays organizational needs. In “Restructure” I’ll actually talk about the organizational structure I inherited last summer at Ithaca College and what I’ve done to overhaul it in recent months, and my vision surrounding that effort. I’ll talk about higher ed’s challenges and needs within the web and marcom framework, and thought I’d try to tackle some hot topics (what do we do with magazines online, who should manage social media, is the viewbook dead, etc.). In “re-energize,” I’d like to share some thoughts about finding your niche, and find ways to leave you with some inspirational takeaways.

I have less than an hour to tackle all of this, yet I still find myself wondering if it’s not enough, or helpful enough. What do you think? What would be useful to you?

Reposted from Michael Stoner’s blog so we can collect comments here.

By: Michael Stoner

One of the main reasons I’m looking forward to the AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education this year (fyi: #amahighered) is because I’m doing an Advanced Marketing Session with Fritz McDonald from Stamats and Rachel Reuben from Ithaca College. Entitled “The Success Conversation: A dialogue about how your institution can leverage its online communications to meet its goals,” we’re hoping that we (and you: see below for how you can contribute) will be able to start a real conversation about how to be successful with an institution’s most important marketing channels.

Here’s the description of the session we submitted to AMA:

Need a moment? It’s not easy, fast, or cheap to make choices when technology is constantly evolving. There’s a staggering array of tools to use, trends to follow, and people urging you to do more. Still, achieving an excellent online presence isn’t a nice-to-have in 2010: it’s a necessity. Building a cohesive, broad-reaching, and successful Internet brand is a marriage of art, artifice, technology, and culture—and a challenge for everybody. In this session, we’ll encourage you to take a deep breath and join a conversation. We’ll pinpoint fundamental questions you should ask, look at what works (and what doesn’t) and explore some significant trends. What you’ll get out of it: a team of multiple, complementary and overlapping perspectives and the opportunity to articulate your challenges and success stories.

This is an ambitious agenda, and we need your help. We’ve posed a number of questions to that we’re going to use to start the conversation. We’d love to have your feedback: please let us know what you’d like to share with colleagues in marketing for colleges and universities. Share your thoughts about one, or all, of these questions that we believe are fundamental to building a coherent online brand:

• What are the primary challenges/issues that are top of mind of people for people focusing on their institution’s online presence (websites, social media, etc.)?
• What are fundamental questions you should be asking about your institution’s online presence in 2010-2011?
• What have we learned that works—and doesn’t work?
• Are there significant trends that marketers should be paying attention to?

Personally, I’m really excited about doing this session with Fritz and Rachel. They’re smart and insightful: it should be an inspiring session. Even more so if we have your help!

This morning I presented a couple of workshops for the Dutchess County Regional Chamber of Commerce (NY) on Facebook and Twitter, and how they can be effectively used by small businesses. Both sessions were packed with very interesting people, representing health care organizations, personal training, sports marketing, tourism, and so many more. I was particularly excited to meet Megan Ogulnick, who recently moved to this area from Chicago, to fill the roll as Manager of New Media for the Hudson Valley Renegades, and look forward to collaborating on some local networking opportunities.

I mentioned several articles and case studies available on MarketingProfs.com, and highly recommend their “Pro Membership.” Side note: I’ve been a premium member for five years and have benefited a great deal from this membership. Here’s one of their many benefits:

Here’s another great article I found from a fellow MarketingProfs.com member: 16 Tips for Gaining More Fans on Facebook

Below is my slide deck from the presentation. Some slides won’t make much sense without the context of what I was saying around them, but that’s usually how it goes.
:)

On April 23-24, 2009, Cornell University will be hosting the HighEdWeb Regional Conference. The .eduGuru Crew is scheduled for a session at 3:15 p.m. EDT on the 23rd called “Social Media Storytelling with the .eduGurus.” Only one of us will be there in person, but the rest of the crew will be joining the session virtually. We’d like to invite our readers to also join us virtually!

Mark Anbinder from Cornell University has graciously agreed to ustream our session live. Follow this link to join our ustream channel on Thursday, April 23 and 3:15 p.m. EDT.

During the live stream, we should also appear below:
Live Streaming by Ustream.TV

We’re hoping to pull off a minor technical feat for this session. Stay tuned and watch it all unfold…

Next week I’ll be heading to the OmniUpdate User Conference to give a presentation on a project we implemented on our campus a couple of years ago called the “My First Year” tab. The official presentation title is, “Using OU Campus in a Luminis Portal.” The “My First Year” project was mentioned in a Campus Technology article last year, and I published an article in NACAS College Services magazine (PDF) about it.

Based on student opinion survey feedback, the Division of Student Affairs at SUNY New Paltz determined they needed to make more outreach efforts to better communicate the services their division offers. A group of them came to me outlining their goals, and at the same time I was looking into other ways we could better utilize our new portal, Luminis, by SunGard Higher Education. The two ideas merged together, and we found a way to better communicate student affairs services to first year students. We’re now at the end of the second year of this project and evaluating what we’ll do with next year’s cohort. I’ll talk briefly about that at this conference, and will be blogging about it here as part of the on-going Café New Paltz series.

I’ve been a very happy OmniUpdate customer just over four years, using their OU Campus CMS product on our campus. An added bonus of going to this conference – they’re going to be filming me for their “Web site Hero” video series.

Mark Greenfield from the University of Buffalo will be the opening keynote speaker (@markgr on Twitter). We’ve started the hash tag #ouusers for tracking conference chatter through Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc.

Are you going to the conference? I’d love to meet you. Let me know in the comments, and be sure we’re connected on Twitter (@rachelreuben) if you’re there too.

Presentation @ #stamats08

How are you making Web decisions: Did the prez tell you to do this? Build a picture with meaningful data.

What is the purpose of your college’s Web site. What do you want to get out of it?

Alfred Sloan: Chairman for GM – manages by fact rather than by intuition or emotion.

Conversions are your bread and butter. Measure that. Segment out your users. Traffic is meaningless without context. Content is king.

What is important?

Analytic terms

• visits
• pages/visit
• absolute unique visits
• % new visits
• traffic sources
• landing pages

Average time on site: we have no way of measuring how long they stayed on the last page. Only when a page is initially requested a time stamp is requested. If someone’s on a page for more than 30 min, it boots that too.

A bounce is always an exit, but an exit isn’t always a bounce.

Tools:

• edurank.nucloud.com
• Website Grader (includes good SEO info)
• Google Analytics

Types of Clickstream Data – more specific way to describe Web analytics

Choosing an analytics package: no tool is perfect

Only book he recommends starting with: Web Analytics – An Hour a Day

Spend 10% of you budget on the tools, 90% on the people. With Google Analytics, spend 100% on the people – it’s free.

Data overload? Segment! Filter!

Install up to 100 profiles in Google Analytics – track specific things.

Setup site search – your bread and butter

Standardize data: “We use the “dub” some don’t” (www.wofford.edu vs. wofford.edu)

Filters:

• Filter sub-domain traffic: include things like — athletics.wofford.edu
• Including all domains traffic filter – set this up on umbrella profile
• Exclude IP traffic filter, such as oncampus traffic
• directory filter — such as just the admissions site, wofford.edu/admissions
• country filter – U.S. only? international? Setup city traffic for community colleges
• tracking and tagging: how do you make sure it’s coming in the right way – destination URL tagging
• tracking links & tagging audience segments
  

Site Search Report – good keyword data. People tell you how they like to see things, what they’re searching for. Address the needs they have for you.

Keyword reporting from search engines – bigger picture.

Titles are so important for search engines. Any page on your site could be the first experience they have with your school at all.

Referring sites report: important to know where your traffic/people are coming from.

404 error page report – dead links? where did we fail? what were they looking for? fix problems! Setup redirects, correct links, fix it for them without them having to do anything. Improve the user experience.

Goals & Conversions: This is where you really decide, where ROI comes from. It’s not perfect, but it’s 90/95% accurate.

There’s so much more you need to be tracking/monitoring.

Offline Campaigns: Vanity URLs: Help with tracking, but some people may strip the “extras” (fitynyc.edu/subway vs. fitnyc.edu)

It’s all about being creative – there are unlimited ways to use this.

Check out the slide below on Wofford’s e-mail campaigns: Wofford’s DonorConnect, NewsroomConnect, eConnect. Cool graphics & layout.

ShareThis Tracking — #1 way to share content is still through e-mail (blog post, news story, etc.)

Ask your audience — SurveyMonkey.com, lots of others too (free & not); ask them what they care about. We can look at the data and make decisions all day, but the best info we can get is asking the people.

Video Analytics: YouTube has insights – which videos are working, which aren’t. None of this happens over night – you need to produce content, monitor what works & what doesn’t work.

Web Analytics Rules

1. set goals before you do anything else (business goals, not Web goals, not “I want to get this much traffic to my site.” Instead – I want X people to schedule a visit, to apply to the school.
2. always be testing
3. don’t get caught up in the numbers, look at the trends.
4. setup a reporting schedule and track key metrics

Slides:

Matt Herzberger’s (@mherzber) Session @ #stamats08

*Watch the Presentation Video*

Goals & Research

• migrate old posts, move to WordPress, ability to add multimedia, social media linkage, easy for writers

Research

• evaluate what’s out there (both .edu & .com) – <3′s NYTimes.com
• talk to writers – what are their needs
• themes/designs/templates (SocialMediaRelease.org) – SMPR template

Goal: Make news sexy!!

RSS = plumbing (if only you could see the photo to go with this slide – classic!): You may not know it, but you’re consuming RSS

Problems

• writers: put it in play to see what works
• comments: convince to enable, monitor
• consistency
• add multimedia: writers tend not to care

Measurement

• tools
  • Pay: Vocus, CustomScoop, Trackur
  • Free: Google Alerts, Technorati, Blog Pulse, Compete, del.icio.us

Future: What’s next

• Do reporters in your area want RSS feeds instead of e-mails, faxes, paper press releases?

Examples:

• Check out Texas A&M Engineering News site
• MizzouWire
• University of Illinois, Springfield
• BU Today
• Stanley Cup Winner JS Giguere Tackles…
• WebEx launches the Green Guide to your Office
• Doritos

How to practically start w/ limited resources:

• use WordPress – known for 5 min install
• redeploy writers – they’re already writing, just change where they’re putting it
• they’re already taking photos – use them here
• find creative ways to add sound & video – try SlideShowPro. Beauty of YouTube – they don’t have to be polished. Flip & Kodak video cameras.

Social Media News Release

MNR on MNR

Live blogging Karlyn Morissette’s (@KarlynM) session

*Watch the presentation Video*

“ROI: the magic number will make you look like a golden god”

What’s the difference between marketing and communications:

• two way communication
• informative vs. persuasive
• two jobs/directors instead of one job
• MarketingProfs.com: “communications makes marketing tactics tangible”

Place to start out: set your goals – don’t pick the technology first

Steps of marketing:

1. set goals
   • the most important part of the marketing process
   • must relate back to the business goals of your institution
   • should be measurable
2. plan your communications
   • best way to articulate your message, such as “increase philanthropy”
   • what is message/segmentation, who is our audience, how do they want to be reached?
3. execute
4. assess your results
   • did you meet your goal?
   • did conversion result in return? staff hours vs. overall cost
   • what can I do better next time?

Calculate ROI:

• employee’s salary + 1/3 salary benefits = total salary
• totally salary/2080 = hourly wage
• hourly wage x # of staff hours = internal cost

Recommends book: Google Analytics 2.0 (Ledford & Tyler)

E-mail Marketing Example:

1. Step One: Set up a goal/funnel – can have up to 4 in Google Analytics at a time
2. Step Two: Build a campaign URL – Google Analytics URL builder
3. Step Three: Put the two together — after a couple of weeks, go back into Google Analytics & check out campaign names (Also checkout Kyle’s tool)

3,000 e-mails, 358 click throughs, resulting in 130 apps, e-mail took 2 hours to complete, $40/hr staff time and $0.015/per e-mail. How do you calculate worth of application? Dollarize everything. Assign a monetary value to your results to give you a common denominator to compare costs to outcomes. AssignValue: $20k/yr cost of tuition, 20% conversation rate from app to enroll = $4,000 “average profit per sale.” Plug in to ROI calculator –ROI = 415,900%

Share your success

• make it tangible, give it context, offer recommendations
• if you have good news, colleagues will be more apt to listen

Can’t give all of the credit to the original e-mail, but it is likely an important trigger.

Dirty little secret of e-marketing: Marketing on the Web is no different than marketing over any other medium. Also, there’s no play book – we’re making this up as we go along (and it’s ok!).

E-mail marketing: what it’s good for (transactional based):

• increases online applications
• register online for an event
• online donations
• starts a conversation

E-mail is NOT dead. E-mail addresses are essential to login to most programs, and are a pull into so many sites.

Facebook Ads – What are they good for?

• reach the exact audience you want – send very targeted content
• only pay for them if they’re clicked on (pay-per-click)
• Examples:
  • Lipscomb University used ads to tell students in the summer a new Starbucks was coming on campus – tremendous response
  • photo of hot girl in ad = tremendous response
• How to measure ROI:
  • use Google Analytics URL
  • use ROI calculator
• bid on ads: set your daily budget limit, and your max bid amount per click (0.59 – 0.72 is average)

Blogs: What are they good for

• provides authentic experience/stories
• provides opportunity for interaction with current students
• announcements & calls-to-action
• gain insight
• How to measure ROI?
  • conversion – have calls to action
  • readers – cost of advertising in a similar content channel
  • comments – cost of focus group (if it provides insight)
  • anecdotal: take it on a case-by-case basis
• Audience comment: administration has fear – trouble getting buy-in. Virtually every school runs into this issue. Show them what’s already being said in unofficial/other formats/venues. Remember 1% rule (only 1% of the people will take advantage of it in a negative way)

Social Networks: What are they good for?

• building a Ning network for deposit payers is one of the best things you can do – gives them a way to engage with each other and you, building relationships before they even step foot on the campus
• give alumni volunteers a way to interact and share tips
• How to measure ROI?
  • easy dissemination of information
  • ease “sugar off”
  • support alumni volunteers

Key takeaways

• start w/ bottom-line related goals, not w/ technology
• measure everything
• dollarize your results to calculate ROI
• always ask what you can do better next time