Posts Tagged ‘Higher Education’
Boosting the Bottom Line Through Retention
Tags: business, cognitve elaboration, Higher Education, mentoring, Non-Profit, retention
Posted in Business Development, Communication, Higher Education, Internal Communication, Non-Profit on March 1st, 2009
A New York Times article raised an interesting question. Is the GOP losing a generation?
Americans identifying themselves as Democrats outnumber those who say they are Republicans by 10 percentage points, the largest gap in party identification in 24 years.
I wrote shortly after Obama’s election that he had garnered a 66% share of the 18-29 demographic or about 16 million people. Brand loyalty is created as a result of cognitive elaboration (thinking about it) by an individual. Since 16 million young voters assigned a positive attribute to Obama and ultimately the Democratic Party, chances are good the large majority will live a life loyal to the democratic brand. It is a fundamental principle of positioning.
The challenge before us as communication practitioners is not only gaining market share but also retaining those that are loyal to our brand. Higher education needs to retain the students enrolled. Nonprofit must retain core individuals who are active with time or money. Business must retain clients and key employees.
Higher Education
A top down approach to staff and faculty mentoring of students creates a family environment and identifies potential problems before they arise. International or minority students are an extremely high at risk demographic. Faculty and upper classman who reach out to the new students, prior to arrival, are sure to create a bond. It is this sense of inclusiveness that will tie the student to the university well beyond their four years.
Non-Profit
Shifting money from salaries to other priorities sends managers into a never-ending downward spiral of dealing with frequent turnover. An alternative approach is paying more to gain stability, maturity, and the skill sets to sustain long-term initiatives. Retaining those grass roots organizers and donors will be enhanced as the time manager spent on training and retraining staff can now be devoted to personally strengthening key relationships.
Business
Engaging your new clients is very much like higher education. Your account executive should be communicating with the client between projects and not just during the projects. Personal client engagement by senior executives creates an environment of partnership instead of a vendor status.
Employee retention may not be an issue today, however there is a way to thwart key staff turnover when the economy heats up again. Authentic engagement, mentoring and training by senior management today will pay dividends in the future.
None of us can afford to lose a generation of students, customers or employees. How we manage our human relations with stakeholders will ensure that we don’t fall into a chasm of disconnect and disinterested.
Life and Higher Education in the Blogosphere
Tags: google, Higher Education, new media, pew internet, yahoo
Posted in Blogging, Higher Education, Recruitment on February 20th, 2009
The Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 57% of American teenagers create content for the Internet-from text to pictures, music and video. says Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the Future in California says “In this new-media culture people no longer passively “consume” media (and thus advertising, its main revenue source) but actively participate in them, which usually means creating content, in whatever form and on whatever scale.
This does not have to mean that “people write their own newspaper”, says Jeremy Zawodny, a prominent blogger and software engineer at Yahoo!, an Internet portal. “It could be as simple as rating the restaurants they went to or the movie they saw,” or as sophisticated as shooting a home video. (Delaney, Hastings, Rainie, & Orville, 2006).
In terms of higher education recruitment, blogging is the new media. It is participatory and it is a new tool that marketers will need to integrate into the marketing mix. With nearly 60% of teenagers creating content and participating in that media, it is easy for a university or a business to create relevant content and function as an active participant in the lives of potential students. The first step in recruitment is relationship building and relevance.
Delaney, Hastings, Rainie, & Orville, conducted an interview with Terry Semel of Yahoo!. He spoke in depth about portals and blogs serving as the new media and communication tool of choice for college age people. For his first few decades in the media industry-at CBS, then Walt Disney, then Warner Brothers, where he was chairman and co-chief executive-Terry Semel felt pretty clear about what media companies were. Then, in 2001, he left Hollywood and went to Silicon Valley as the new boss of Yahoo!, the world’s largest Internet portal. A self-avowed technophobe who barely knew how to use e-mail, Mr. Semel suddenly found himself in “meetings with a bunch of 23-year-olds”. He already had the ambition to turn Yahoo! into the archetypal “21st-century media company”, but suddenly he was no longer so clear about what that meant.
Mr. Semel has spent the past five years educating himself, including the counsel of trusted advisers such as his daughters, aged 24, 19 and 13. “The first does a lot on the internet, the second does everything on the internet, and the third “lives online” and has so many beeping devices that Semel, who has a New York accent and the kind of humor that goes with it, occasionally wonders “whether she is trafficking”. Between them, they have helped him to work a few things out.
The Internet “is a much larger change than the coming of television” in the 20th century, says Semel. In the past, “someone decided that the news goes on at 11 o’clock at night; people like my wife never even saw the news, because she never stayed up that late. We all grew up when somebody else was the programmer; now the user is the programmer.” That is change number one. To Semel, it means that Yahoo! must do more than provide technology. “We decided to open Yahoo! up, so that anybody using their personalized start page MyYahoo! and can instantly go wherever they want to go,” even if that leads to the web pages of rivals. That credibility, he thinks, will keep users coming back for a “deeper engagement”. As people spend more time on Yahoo!’s pages-news, blogs, e-mail, chat groups, photo and music sites and so on-whether as their final destination or as stops on a journey, Yahoo! can put more and better advertising in front of them.
Change number two, says Semel, is that-unlike in television, say-”you don’t need hits”. Many small audiences are as good for advertisers as few large audiences, and indeed may be better. This has huge implications for content, turning it into one long continuum-from professional to amateur, from blockbuster to subculture niche.
Chris Anderson of Wired magazine calls this stretched statistical distribution “the long tail”. Anderson argues that old-media economics, which are biased toward the hits at the “head” of this distribution, are being replaced by new-media economics, which allow creation and consumption along the entirety of a much longer content tail.
Exchanges become necessary because people need help navigating around this huge continuum of content. In the present century, says Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future (2006), “you get large by allowing the many and small to gather on your lawn. This is the media equivalent of what eBay, a Silicon Valley neighbor to Google and Yahoo!, has done for the trading of secondhand goods among individuals. It is what Wikipedia has achieved as an encyclopedia. It is also very similar to what, say, the New York Stock Exchange does.”
A university or institution needs to become the great lawn to accommodate the giant Frisbee of ideas and conversations to be thrown about by current and potential students.
Blogs Are About Conversations
Tags: Conversations, Higher Education, Long Tail, marketplace, messaging, Recruitment
Posted in Blogging, Communication, Higher Education, Recruitment on February 24th, 2008
Blogs are conversations between two people or hundreds of them. Understanding the need to create dialogue or conversation is central to the marketing of higher education or any business for that matter.
In the book Markets are Conversations, authors Doc Searls and David Weinberger suggest that we typically think of the Internet in the wrong terms. “When you think of the Internet, don’t think of Mack trucks full of widgets destined for distributorships, whizzing by countless billboards.
Think of a table for two. The first markets were markets. Not bulls, bears, or invisible hands. Not battlefields, targets, or arenas. Not demographics, eyeballs, or seats. Most of all, not consumers.”
Searls and Weinberger further define the evolution of markets in this excerpt from Markets are Conversations.
The first markets were filled with people, not abstractions or statistical aggregates; they were the places where supply met demand with a firm handshake. Buyers and sellers looked each other in the eye, met, and connected. The first markets were places for exchange, where people came to buy what others had to sell — and to talk.
The first markets were filled with talk. Some of it was about goods and products. Some of it was news, opinion, and gossip. Little of it mattered to everyone; all of it engaged someone. There were often conversations about the work of hands: “Feel this knife. See how it fits your palm.” “The cotton in this shirt, where did it come from?” “Taste this apple. We won’t have them next week. If you like it you should take some today.” Some of these conversations ended in a sale, but don’t let that fool you. The sale was merely the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence.
Market leaders were men and women whose hands were worn by the work they did. Their work was their life, and their brands were the names they were known by: Miller, Weaver, Hunter, Skinner, Farmer, Brewer, Fisher, Shoemaker, Smith.
For thousands of years, we knew exactly what markets were: conversations between people who sought out others who shared the same interests. Buyers had as much to say as sellers. They spoke directly to each other without the filter of media, the artifice of positioning statements, the arrogance of advertising, or the shading of public relations.”
These were the kinds of conversations people have had since they started to talk. Social. Based on intersecting interests. Open to many resolutions. Essentially unpredictable. Spoken from the center of the self. “Markets were conversations” doesn’t mean “markets were noisy.” It means markets were places where people met to see and talk about each other’s work. Conversation is a profound act of humanity. So once were markets.
The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual by authors Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger discusses the lack of one-on-one conversation relative to marketing and communicating the attributes of an organization or product. Organizations put forth messages regardless of whether we want to hear it or not. This is also an inherent problem with managers who don’t understand the dynamics of communication. It generally ends up costing more to reach the target than is necessary.
“One problem: there is no demand for messages. The customer doesn’t want to hear from business, thank you very much. The message that gets broadcast to you, me, and the rest of the earth’s population has nothing to do with me in particular. It’s worse than noise. It’s an interruption. It’s the Anti-Conversation.”
Applying this simple and pragmatic approach to communication and in the larger sense recruitment advertising is paramount to the success of the institution. Lynne Bowen-Lowe, Vice President with Quantum Communications, a national nurse recruitment and communications firm said, “integration of one-to-one relationship management strategies must be part of the successful recruitment mix.
Utilizing broad reach media is a given. It is the personalizing of the message that gives an institution the edge over the competition. Prospects feel that the institution knows something about them as an individual by the very nature of the media they elect to communicate through. It all becomes very personal. It’s all about me”
Successful marketing practitioners understand this. Marketers who do not understand this fundamental principle continue to broadcast messages that people don’t want to receive. Every advertisement, press release, publicity stunt, and giveaway engineered by a marketing department is colored by the fact that it’s going to a public that doesn’t ask to hear it.
“The Internet is a place. We buy books and tickets on the Web. Not over, through, or beside it. To call it a “platform” belies its hospitality. What happens on the Net is more than commerce, more than content, more than push and pull and clicks and traffic and e-anything. The Net is a real place where people can go to learn, to talk to each other, and to do business together. It is a bazaar where customers look for wares, vendors spread goods for display, and people gather around topics that interest them. It is a conversation. At last and again” (Searls, Weinberger, 2004).
A case in point is that people will turn to a website such as Amazon.com or Epinions.com to read the viewpoints about a given product or service that interests them. Angieslist.com is a rapidly growing service that rates local service providers. The ratings are by people who have used the product or service ¬-no commercial endorsement just personal experience. These are all blogs and people are having conversations and making important decisions based on these conversations.
“I’m in the market for a new computer,” someone says, and she’s off to the Dell site. But she probably won’t buy that cool new laptop right away. She’ll ask around first — on Web pages, on newsgroups, via e-mail: “What do you think? Is this a good one? Has anybody checked it out? What’s the real battery life? How’s their customer support? Recommendations? Horror stories?”
“I’m in the market for a good desk dictionary,” says someone else, and he’s off to Amazon.com where he’ll find a large number of opinions already expressed:
I love the look of this book, and the publisher did a great job; but I made the mistake of buying it without realizing that it was first published over 7 years ago….
I’ve had this book for two days and I keep going back to it. I may not be typical since I collect dictionaries and wanted this when I heard about it last year, but….
These conversations are most often about value: the value of products and of the businesses that sell them. The conversation is not limited to just prices, but the market currencies of reputation, location, position, and every other quality that is subject to rising or falling opinion” (Searls, Weinberger, 2004).
Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a research foundation, believes that “people will become not less but more aware of differing arguments as they become heavier Internet users,” because contradictory views are just a hyperlink away.
Chris Anderson author of The Long Tail says “opinion is a marketplace, and marketplaces work when you have liquidity.” Liquidity is exactly what participatory media provide.
