Seize the Spray

It's August but I already know what I want in my Christmas stocking. Genkiwear has produced a line of Star Trek-inspired fragrances: Tiberius, Red Shirt, and Pon Farr.

The promotions are creative and somewhat demeaning to their potential customers. If you're not familiar with Star Trek, just know that "red shirt" has become a euphemism for someone who is expendable. Now the tag line "Because Tomorrow May Never Come" takes on new meaning. With these offerings, Genkiwear may be producing a line of nearly consumer-free products. I say "nearly" because of crazy trekkers like me who might just wear it anyway, as long as it doesn't give me a rash.

Note to Genkiwear: if you're looking for a spokesperson and both William Shatner and Chris Pine are unavailable, I suggest you call Simon Helberg.

Dealing with Protestors

I spent the morning listening to protestors. As tempting as it is to use this space to poke holes in their arguments and assert my position that’s not very helpful for anybody involved. What is helpful is to recognize that there are likely lessons for everyone who does marketing and communication.

First, I was in a class a few years ago when a corporate public relations executive explains that the first step in any P.R. crisis was the “fix the problem.” I couldn’t agree more. While in this case there was no problem we could fix, we did have a clear position we were taking and it wasn’t really up for debate. I’m not saying you never give into the will of public, but in this case it was pretty clear where we stood and that gave me a lot of internal peace and a clear position I could go back to.

Secondly, it pays to wear your good suit. Standing in the midst of 18 protestors I think I realized that 16 of them had cell phone cameras and are now carrying around my picture. My friend Dave has put forth a position in where we as the media relations professionals should be taping each interview ourselves so that we could use on You Tube or our own sites later if needed. This might be helpful where editing doesn’t do us any favors. In this case, I think I could have done that and it would have probably worked to help faculty and staff better understand the situation.

Finally, dealing with protestors is hard work. It has been a long week at it is only 3 p.m. on Monday. I’m drained, not so much from actual work, but from the emotional energy of being on the receiving end of a lot of anger and ill will.

Maybe as the sky clears I will have more lessons, but that is it for now.

Beloit's New Mindset List

This year’s Mindset List from Beloit College is wistful for me, because I realized as I read it that the people they are describing were born the same year that I graduated from high school. It doesn’t make me feel old exactly, but it does highlight some of the disconnects that can happen when doing communication at a college.

For instance, today I heard a professor make a pretty funny comparison using the “Landshark” skit on Saturday Night Live as an example. This class didn’t even remember Wayne’s World, let alone the early zany years of Akroyd and others.
It is easy for time to pass and to realize that those things that we thought were cultural touchstones have changed. Sure, within my group of friends nobody lets a good “Caddy Shack” reference go by, but when I’m with students most of them just think I’m weird.

Relevance. It is a key challenge for the communicator, and it may be the key challenge of the University in coming years as pressure continues to mount and we face a generation that has always had online classrooms, went to college with laptops, and did as much research from Starbucks as they did in the library.

Narrative Theory Applied or Applied Narrative Theory

I have an undergraduate degree and one Masters degree but I find myself sitting in the classroom again headed toward a doctorate and learning about persuasion. It’s a pretty interesting exercise for someone that has practiced some forms of persuasion for the past 15 or so years, but have not thought much about the theory of persuasion. It also highlights a classic faculty and staff rub. Broadly and grossly generalized faculty spend too much time in theory and staff not enough - but I digress.

The thing that keeps resonating over and over for me is Fisher’s narrative theory and how much it explains about what we do in the world of communication. And even if the theory isn’t 100% correct, the thing that it brings me back to is the challenge of always making sure that you are telling a story when you communicate.
Far too much of the day is taking up with creating bulleted lists of accomplishments and features, when in some cases what people want is a narrative. I’m not saying it has to take a lot of space or that people with actually read. (I haven’t lost my mind.) But what I am saying is that telling the story of a new student is more compelling to most people than giving the statistics of the Freshman class.

Having said that, I just wrote an entire post that didn’t really include a narrative flow. Maybe I should have written a story about writing a blog.

For those that are gluttons for punishment, my complete recent short paper on the narrative theory and how it explains how Obama got elected and why we can’t get out of Gitmo I have posted it to my personal site.

Pure is Better

Despite our dog's mournful cries when we cut her nails, my family and I always ignored the television when the Pedi-Paws commercials came on. But my wife bought a one after her mother sent a video via email. Viral videos work, they’re "purer" than standard advertising, distribution can be free, and the videos may have tremendous reach. But can virals be harnessed by higher ed?

CAUTION: THE FOLLOWING IS AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION

Consider the ROI for running an ad in a magazine that targets college-bound high school students. Say you've spent $10,000 for a back cover and it reaches 250,000 high school students. Some might think you've spent only $.04 per student, but out of that quarter million, you get 1,000 inquiries, 100 of which are viable candidates. Since you have a smart Admissions office, they focus their energy on the 100 and 10 actually become matriculated students. So in reality you spent $10,000 to reach 10, or $1,000 per student.

WE NOW RETURN YOU TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED BLOG.

This may sound like a pitch from the late Billy Mays, but what is it worth to you, to get an extra 5 or 10 matriculated students out of the 100 viable candidates? It may be surprisingly inexpensive to do so, if you get your students to speak for you. Student-produced virals are pure recommendations because they don’t come from the institution--and pure is better. The production value will be low and the writing may be poor, but neither is a problem for YouTube.

Many campuses already have student-lead film festivals, where student work is displayed, judged and prizes are awarded. Frequently the student organizations are underfunded and need extra support to put on events like this. An enterprising marketing office can sponsor the entire event or single categories, which provides input for determining the message, genre, and length.

Student-produced virals may only cost the price of an iPod.

ONE MORE THING . . .

Fellow U Marketing Guru, John Paff, responded to my last post and asked if the distribution of a viral video can be planned and I didn't answer fully. The answer is "yes" and "no." Channels of distribution like YouTube can be set up and "viral" distribution via email can begin with an orchestrated campaign. However there is no way to predict with certainty the number of views that any video will receive. But our goal isn't to get a large number of views. Viral campaigns, like any of higher ed promotional campaigns, are pointless if they don't result in more potential students inquiring about the school. Therefore, a viral only needs to inspire the connection or bolster an existing link.

Twitter: Therapy for Graying PR Types

Recently, I have been feeling old. And it’s not the newly prescribed bifocals. I blame Twitter.

You see, I have always pictured myself an early adopter of emerging communication technologies. When I took my first higher-ed PR job—way back in the day, when my current colleagues were still in junior high—I ordered the first PCs for the public relations office and strung telephone wire above the ceiling tiles so we could share a printer. We started faxing our news releases instead of mailing them. In fact, I installed some nifty software that would automagically fax our news to regional media, even at night. Back then, this was cutting-edge stuff.

But somewhere along the way, I must have gotten a little complacent, a little too content, a little too self-identified as a PR guy with a geek streak. When the social media revolution burst onto the scene, I opened a Facebook account, but thought of it only as a place to play games with my kids. I avoided MySpace and shunned LinkedIn. I sniffed disapprovingly at Twitter as a refuge for the hopelessly self-absorbed: “I am sitting on the patio, folding socks.” Who cares?

Then it happened. Suddenly, last winter, Twitter was everywhere. Every trade journal, popular magazine, or PR rag I picked up had not one but several articles about Twitter as a business communication tool. This caught me completely off guard, and I didn’t quite buy it. I made casual inquiries of some trusted friends in the industry, asking if they had experimented with Twitter. Imagine my chagrin when I discovered that several of my peers had fully embraced Twitter as a means of reaching twenty-somethings. They had opened multiple Twitter accounts and had integrated the service with their news blogs and RSS feeds. My comeuppance was complete when I seemed to be the only one at a recent PR conference who had never seen anything like the Twitterfall projected at the front of the room.

It was like awakening with a start after falling asleep in the sun; it burned. Determined not to lose any more time, I jumped in with both feet. For several months now, I have been playing catch-up with Twitter. While the results so far have been modest, at least I feel that I'm back in the game, tech-wise. That’s good therapy.

Next Time: Discoveries of a Newly Fledged Tweep

New Contributors

I’m glad to note that John Paff and Mark Lambertson have joined Umarketing Guru as contributors. These are both guys that have a lot to contribute, and I think this experiment in blogging will be enriched by sharing the load. Take a look at their profiles to the right.

In the next few weeks I am hoping to add some other authors, and as always your comments are appreciated.

The Beauty of Cheap

After working at McDonalds many years ago, I promised myself that I would not eat there again. My negative feelings about the food won't be swayed by TV commercials. Assuming they want my business, this leaves McDonalds in a quandary. Aside from the obvious (making better burgers), what can they do to reach people like me? McDonalds has to get people that I trust to recommend their restaurants. This is a purer recommendation than one coming from the company itself, and the purer the better. There are a few methods that institutions can use to deliver pure recommendations, but for my first posts on U Marketing Guru, I’ll focus on “viral marketing.”

Rather than assume you know the definition of viral marketing, I’ll explain it briefly. It’s called viral due to the way the marketing message spreads, mimicking the growth of a virus. It starts with one person who sends it to their friends, each friend doing the same, until countable thousands (or millions) have received it. Viral videos are effective because of the purer method of distribution and the recommendation it implies.

Virals spread a marketing message faster, to a wider audience, and for must less money than ever before. Virals are working for Ford, Subaru, Nike, Burger King, et al. The beauty of viral campaigns is that you don’t have to a Coca-Cola-sized budget or get 1,000,000 views for it to be successful. Colleges and universities can launch viral campaigns with a very small investment.

Next time: Pure (and free) is better.