nov0caine’s posterous

Blogging for Educational Institutions

From an engagement perspective, it is a well known fact that any website with a blog in practice can foster an online community that centralizes its activity around your brand name. In business, blogging is a great selling point in conveying human qualities to your posts and promoting positive B2C interaction and encouraging feedback. But what about blogging for educational institutions...?

Blogging for your school or university is an excellent way to promote engagement online and also give an insight into life within your school, college or university. But there's no point in trying to convery the success of educational blogging without substance... Let's illustrate this with an example.

The International College of Management Sydney is a great example of educational blogging, click on the link and open up the site page. Let's run through step by step as to what makes the ICMS blog so ubiquitous and effective:

1. Posts are written by student and staff - Now, from a reader's perspective, you really can not get much more genuine than this. Having the posts written directly by the staff and students of ICMS allows the readers to directly relate to the writers, with a subsequent inclination to learn more about the college. Now, not only is this a good tactic for building rapport with other students of the college, it also makes potential students and college prospects feel more welcome - an outcome of which all educational institutions strive to achieve.
2. The posts add value - One common element you will encounter when trawling the vast expanse of the internet for decent reading material is the self-aggrandizing tone of business blogs, intricately laced with corporate jargon to the point where reading the first sentence will have that particular product or service ingrained in your mind forever. It is common with businesses, yes, but some educational institutions have also been notorious at blatant self-promotion. 

   What you will notice about the posts on the ICMS blog is that each adds value to the reader... But how are they adding value? That question is easiily answered. If the students and staff are not offering college advice or tips, they're adding value by making posts pleasurable to read. No post on the blog burdens the reader!

3. Visual Appeal  - The design of the blog does not divert the reader's attention away from the blog posts, but still maintains an amiable visual appeal. The brand name is bold, and college imagery is also displayed throughout the header. The effectiveness of this? The campus is visually marketing itself, but subtly, which is ideally what institutions should aim to achieve.
4. Call to actions - Any educational institution can benefit from social media, however in order to make these channel prevalent they need to be exposed wherever possible. By placing social media call to action buttons in an easily accessible place within the college blog, ICMS i effectively utilising the blogs function as an engagement hub and social media conduit.

So there you have it... In black and white, the illustrated benefits of running a blog for your educational institution. It's a great way to encourage engagement within your digital assets whilst subtly market your institution as genuinely as possible.

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Posted 1 day ago by Mark 

Internet Marketing: Using Live Video

One powerful but inherently risky internet marketing strategy is the integration of live video streaming across your social media platforms. I guess it's the old marketing cliche, really... The more interpersonal you make the consumer's experience, then the more genuine the response.

I've been searching the internet relentlessly, chasing the highly sort after yet incredibly elusive social media strategy for educational institutions, when I came across a culinary training academy in Australia that displays an awesome example of social media integration with text book use of live video as a sell point for their services. If you check out this example on the Hostec training academy website, they've gone as far as installing a live camera within a hotel kitchen in Sydney that they use to offer paid work experience to their staff.... How is it a selling point? Well, if you're lucky you might be watching it live right now... But if you didn't get a chance to catch the actual event... Here's why it's so good.

It conveys a real-world example of the quality of their services.

In marketing, there is nothing more effective than showing a real example of your goods or services in practice. In my opinion, a real-life selling point is the star on the top of the christmas tree.

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Posted 2 months ago by Mark 

Social Media: Understanding the rules of engagement

Recently, I was asked to create a social media guidelines document for a reputable management college in Sydney. They've recently just embraced social media as a means of increasing a more interpersonal element to the interaction with their students, in coming to this realisation they also recognized the importance of adopting the latest technoology as well as harness the sheer power of the exponentially growing social media communications medium. I'm not going to show you the document, because it was uniquely generated for the College (and is yet to be published), but I thought I'd outline a couple of idiot-proof rules of engagement that should always be adhered to as a business interacting with customer through social media...

Things to remember when engaging:

1. be ethical
2. be honest
3. take leadership
4. don't promote or aggrandize
5. try to add value when posting
6. apply social etiquette

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peace.

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Posted 2 months ago by Mark 

Business to business social media

When it comes to generating a viable social media strategy for business to business targeted campaigns, in order to successfully draw traffic and generate online credibility you need to be offering incentives with a targeted appeal towards your niche market and client prospects. I just thought I'd point out a decent example of a good business to business incentive... etrainu.com specialize in industry tertiary qualifications and training, however part of their target market also consists of small business training. In order to promote this service, they've designed a "try before you buy" scheme by offering free short staff training courses and management tools to small business enterprises - what's good about this incentive is that normally such tools are only available to larger business enterprises.

With B2B marketing it's all about giving your client incentives and rewards for participating. Like any marketing strategy, this will assist in the generation of customer loyalty.

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Posted 2 months ago by Mark 

The Social Media Paradox

The funny thing that people fail to notice about the art of social media is that it is in fact completely and indisputably paradox. I've been thinking a lot about this lately, and being an advocate and practicioner of social media myself you get to see things from both sides of the internet marketing equation. When you generate content and promote through social media, you do your utmost to relate genuinely with other users with the prerogative of reaping landing page hits and heightening conversions - a contradiction in itself really, because how exactly can your interaction with people be 'genuine' when the nature of it is in reality highly sycophantic? It's an age old marketing paradigm that everyone agrees to acknowledge but can do nothing to change.

Now, throw in some social media to the marketing equation and you add to the overall paradox of the nature of marketing. For example, when I write this blog it is streaming straight from my own thoughts, but at the same time I have already calculated that social media is a popular topic, and from a marketing perspective this blog post is highly likely to get a large amount of hits. I expose a few keyword links at the bottom of the post and PRESTO! The link juice flows.

Sure, if it were a perfect world, we wouldn't need to sell and we wouldn't need to tart things up for the sake of making some dollars. The beauty of this paradox though is that we get to be creative, and it creates an avenue for harmless marketing manipulation. That's the way I see it anyway, it's rewarding when you see your techniques reaping the result that you desire.

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Posted 5 months ago by Mark 

Facebook Frenzy over Vanity URLs

As with anything to do with securing the highest SEO advantage possible amongst the hoardes of fiercely competitive online reputatyion junkies, there was an inevitable frenzy a-brewin' when Facebook decided to release it's long-time coming 'vanity URL' option. And for those who haven't heard about it yet, you can now customize your Facebook profile domain name in classic Myspace fashion. But get in quick though, as the most popular URLs are being torn away from the existing list of vacant domain names. But seeing as I'm writing this blog on the 15th, and this information actually went live on the 12th the odds are that you probably aren't going to get the custom domain that you desire.

There is however, like any other site that has allowed personal URL customization, an inherent flaw in the ways of which Facebook conducted this exercise. When it comes to the domain name game (hey, that rhymes), there is always a dogfight between large businesses and quick-witted geeks who make it their life's work to secure business domain names only to sell it back to the companies at triple the price. Facebook hasn't exactly taken steps to avoid this sort of conflict. How, do you ask?

Simple. As Facebook doesn't allow businesses to register as normal users, they instead register Facebook fan pages. Upon the release of the Facebook vanity URL, there was some heavy restrictions imposed on businesses seeking a custom URL for their fan page. To be applicable, it is a prerequisite for businesses to have an existing page before the cut-off date of May 31, 2009 with a minimum number of 1,000 'fans'. Also, if you wanted the URL so badly you had to reserve it - which involves a fee, of course. So if you didn't reserve your custom Vanity URL in the name of your business, then it's highly likeyl that some geezer has created a normal Facebook account with a fake name in order to swipe any business URL left in limbo. You can read more info here: http://raven-seo-tools.com/blog/462/the-facebook-vanity-url-fiasco

I'm all for the use of vanity URLs, but I think that Facebook (the social networking mogul) should have put more thought into the release of these free custom domains to its +200 million users globally. What do you think? 

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Posted 5 months ago by Mark