November 2007 Lawlor Focus
Joining the Conversation
For many months now, college admission and marketing communications professionals have been debating the wisdom of establishing an institutional presence in online forums that some students consider to be their own private social networking environments. While just two weeks ago creating a Facebook profile may have been perceived as an encroachment into students' personal space, the Nov. 6 announcement that businesses and organizations are now encouraged to create a Facebook Page explicitly to "engage with customers and fans" led the founder of Facebook to declare that "now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation."
As The Economist pointed out in its reporting of the announcement, that declaration echoed The Cluetrain Manifesto's opening insight—"Markets are conversations"—written in 1999, just as the Internet's power to enable transparency was being realized. Since then, the concept of "conversational marketing" has come to signify a bottom-up (versus top-down) approach to generating brand awareness and facilitating the spread of marketing messages. Those of us who attended the American Marketing Association Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education last week learned from keynote speaker Andy Sernovitz (author of Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking) how conversational marketing has given rise to "The Five T's":
- Talkers—Find people who will talk about you
- Topics—Give people a reason to talk
- Tools—Develop methods of spreading the message faster and farther
- Taking Part—Join the conversation
- Tracking—Measure and understand what people are saying
Another keynote speaker at the event, Lois Kelly (author of Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word of Mouth Marketing), pointed out that people's desire to belong naturally moves them from a "me" orientation to a "we" orientation, especially within social networking forums. Since "marketing today is a conversation," she said, colleges and universities cannot afford to ignore opportunities to listen to what people are saying about their institutions—and, when appropriate, to join in the conversation.
Lawlor Recommends
While online communication has increased both the speed and reach of message dissemination, it's important to remember that conversations about your institution happen everywhere and can be triggered by anything. Paying attention to brand touchpoints—that is, projecting your institution's identity with organizational intent via all of the means through which people come in contact with it—can help ensure that the conversations people are having about your institution are favorable ones. Yet, because conversational marketing is a bottom-up phenomenon, the key to successfully joining the conversation is to truly embrace the organic "we" instead of trying to dictate the terms of the discussion based upon what's in it for the institution. Because cynicism about being "sold to" runs high (particularly among young adults), sustaining conversations that are authentic will result in a much healthier conversation and educational marketplace.
Don't neglect to join the conversation among your colleagues, either! Attending conferences like the AMA's higher education symposium, engaging in our professional community's own online forums, and keeping in touch with others in the industry via word of mouth are essential means of learning about best practices.
In the News: Is E-Mail Becoming Obsolete?
A Slate editor recently contemplated "The Death of E-Mail " by pointing out that the teenage crowd has moved on to instant messaging and text messaging instead. "There's now a generation gap between first-generation and second-generation Internet users," he noted. (In a related news story, an Associated Press/AOL survey has determined that 70 percent of teens send more instant messages than e-mails, versus only 24 percent of adults. And according to eMarketer , 43 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds text message daily, as opposed to only 22 percent of those who are 25-44 and 16 percent of those who are 45-54.) The author wryly predicted, "Chances are, as usual, that the grown-ups will be the ones who are forced to adapt."
Did You Know?
Prospective college students rank college web sites as their second most trusted source of information (after campus visits). Yet admission departments spend, on average, only 12 percent of their marketing budgets on admission web sites, while the industry recommendation for spending in this area is one-quarter to one-third of the overall admission marketing budget.
Source: Eduventures
Add your comments: