We are so excited about audience-generated content. It implies engagement and involvement and all kinds of great things.

But there is a dark side, too. Andrew Keen, in The Cult of the Amateur, notes that “amateur hour has arrived, and the audience is running the show.”

While I don’t necessarily subscribe to that entire sentiment, I do wonder about the sometimes reckless creation, dissemination, and perpetuation of audience-generated content.

In our rush to be first, to add the latest twist, or to offer the clever insight, we sometimes overlook the responsible use of the tools at our disposal.

This is especially problematic in a blogosphere that is comprised, surprisingly, of people who can sometimes be digitally sophisticated on the one hand, and alarmingly naïve on the other; people who appear, at times, only too willing to believe what they read or see or hear without any real thought about its veracity, credibility, or the motivations of the writer.
As with many things, it is a question of balance.The internet reminds me, somewhat, of the “As Seen on TV” store in the Mall of America. That store sells products that have been pitched via TV infomercials, as if being on TV is all that is needed to establish your bona fides.

For the content creator, the reminder that with great power comes great responsibility.

For the content viewer, the reminder that when faced with a sea of insights, is even more important to be critical, careful, and thoughtful.

Thoughts?

Follow me – @Sevier_Stamats

For those of you who have met me you know that I spend a relatively significant amount of time each week in the air flying from school to school to help them “do better” with their adult student population. Last week, after a particularly frustrating Friday on a campus discussing the PROCESS of developing a new major to be offered to an adult student population, I boarded a three-hour flight, pulled out my Nook, and prepared to settle in for a nap and some personal reading. In the back of my head was some frustration in relation to why new program development needs to be so blasted hard at colleges and universities but I was sincerely ready to let it go and to have the wisdom to accept the things I cannot change in higher education (at least for that flight).

Sitting across the aisle from me was a 30ish woman with her 10ish son. They appeared to be heading off on a little mom/son weekend and were overall in good spirits. As we cleared the 10,000 foot mark and it was “now safe to use electronic devices” both the mom and her little guy pulled out their equipment—he some type of game, and she her laptop. As the beverage cart made its way past us I looked back over to see that Mom had set up shop on her tray table. Much to my delight she had out a management text, her computer, a notebook, and a highlighter and was busily making notes in the book’s margin.

Despite my love of silence on long flights I knew I would not be able to resist asking this woman what she was studying and soon a conversation unfolded about her quest for an MBA. She shared with me that she had explored about eight programs pretty extensively but arrived at her current decision based, more or less, on one factor—it worked into her schedule.

She talked about being so surprised that this program turned out to be her top choice because when she had first explored it she wasn’t that enthralled with it as it was very similar to the others she was looking at. I was stunned to hear that it wasn’t until after she had spent time on the institution’s website, after she had gotten a brochure in the mail, and during her SECOND call with an admission counselor that the flexibility of the program and the amazing schedule designed for working adults was even brought to her attention. In this woman’s words “once I looked at the schedule of courses and my own life it was really my only option” and in fact, was the only program she filled out an application for.

As I settled back into my reading I smiled a bit—it wasn’t really a magical program—it was a run-of-the-mill hybrid MBA program. The woman attended class one night a week every other week and would for two years, but in the end would have a solid education from a reputable school with an average brand name in the marketplace. All that was nice, but the line that stood out for me regarding her choice was nothing the actual student said, it was her son who paused his game only a moment to let me know that his mom had not had to miss any of his soccer games and sometimes they studied together—that was apparently the magic. I wonder if the school knows . . . What is your magic?  Have you asked your students lately?

When you are not sure about which of your messages matter most, there will be a great temptation to send as many messages as possible with the hope that something will stick.

Let me give you four reasons why this “shotgun” strategy is dangerous.

First, this strategy causes your most important audiences to lose sight of what makes you compelling. Over time, they will question whether they are important to you and will drift away.

Second, a “more is better” message strategy shifts your emphasis from outcomes to output. In other words, you measure how many messages you sent, not whether or not those messages had an impact.

Third, this approach is expensive. Not only is it more expensive to send more messages to more people, but it instills a false sense of security…a sense that something is happening when it really isn’t. You will lose sight of your message goals amidst all the busyness and clutter.

Finally, this shotgun approach makes it almost impossible to measure the ROI of your message strategy. And when you can’t measure the return on your message expenditures, these expenditures will always be considered costs, not investments.

So what’s your alternative? The answer is to focus your message; here’s a five-step process to help you do just that:

First, identify your top four or five audiences. Ask yourself: In the near-term, who matters most? Once you have ID’d your audiences, pull together everything you know about them. Discern their VALs. Look at market research. Answer the question: What do they most want to know about us?

Second, pull your mission, vision, and core values into one document and develop eight to 12 potential messages.

Third, look at your top competitors. Identify their core messages.

Fourth, juxtapose your initial message drivers against the messages currently “owned” by competitors. Review. Revise. Condense.

Fifth, test your potential messages with your most important audiences. Ask which messages are  most important, most believable, differentiate us most from our competitors, and most emotionally engaging.

This research will help you identify which of your potential messages matter most to your audiences.

Thoughts?

Follow me on Twitter: @Sevier_Stamats

At the risk of sounding indelicate, your school needs to get its act together. In my perpetual quest to dissect life into its most fundamental, digestible chunks, I’ve come to an important (albeit no-brainer) conclusion: Entities that demonstrate a high “Act Together Factor” (ATF) almost always earn more respect, gain deeper traction, and achieve greater allegiance than those with lower ATFs. This is a simple reality your school’s leadership team should examine carefully. At our primal core, we humans want to be associated with people, products, and institutions that demonstrate high ATFs. We’re looking for…

• Leaders who consistently demonstrate what we consider to be good judgment,
• Products that appear to meet or exceed needs we didn’t even realize we have,
• Service providers who deliver on their promises every time, and
• Institutions that actually walk their remarkable talk.

Bolstering your school’s ATF means embracing all of these. And it requires all hands on deck, ready to row, tug, push, and pull in the direction of the institutional vision spelled out in your strategic plan. Remember that your school’s ATF takes a serious hit the moment a stakeholder (or a prospective stakeholder) observes campus leaders:

• Waffling on important issues,
• Demonstrating questionable judgment,
• Marginalizing constituent needs,
• Failing to follow through on a promise, or
• Promoting something other than the reality you can deliver.

So if you’re interested in really helping your school achieve greater success raising money, recruiting students, and attracting the best and brightest new faculty and staff, critically assess your ATF from an outsider’s vantage point. Or better yet, conduct some market research to quantify how much of your school’s act appears to be together from the outside looking in. Chances are, you have plenty of “it” to get together.

[Author’s note: In the interest of full disclosure, the word “act” in “Act Together Factor” was my second choice. You can probably guess—and feel free to use—my first.]

Photo of previous awards won.

CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA – Recently, Stamats, Inc., won best of show awards—and a number of gold, silver, and bronze medals—in two agency competitions.

At the Cedar Rapids/Iowa City American Advertising Federation (Addys) Awards held on February 26, Stamats won best of category for the Ramapo College Capital Campaign brochure, the University of South Florida Polytechnic pop-up direct mail, and the University of South Florida Polytechnic “Be Polydimensional” mixed media campaign.

Two weeks later, Stamats won best of show in the national awards sponsored by Higher Education Marketing Report for its work with the University of Michigan Admissions website.  More than 2,900 entries were judged in this event.

In all, Stamats’ creative teams won 36 awards in the two competitions. A complete list of the awards may be found at www.stamats.com/about/awards.asp.

Founded in 1923, Stamats, Inc., located in Cedar Rapids, is the nation’s leading higher education consulting firm. Each year, Stamats works with more than 150 colleges, universities, and schools in the United States and Canada.

According to participants’ evaluations, the learning was fast and furious at the 2012 Stamats Adult Student Marketing Conference. Just in case you missed it, I wanted to share what our guests consider to be some of the key findings.

#1           Focus on adult learners.  Many participants shared that they were stunned that only 16% of all current students are those who attend school in a “traditional” manner (full-time attendance, 18-22 years old, living residentially), according to a paper completed for the U.S. Department of Education in 2008.  With that in mind, it would only make sense that the spotlight on the adult student continues to shine brighter and brighter.

#2           The nation’s need for higher education.  It was not by accident that Dr. Mark Milliron dropped the number 37 million into the room, but not many in attendance seemed to realize that this is the projected number of additional high-quality degrees or credentials that need to be awarded by 2025 to meet the Lumina Foundation’s “big goal” of having 60% of our workforce educated in order to meet job demand.  To learn more about this, read “A Stronger Nation through Higher Education” at www.luminafoundation.org.

#3           Benefits of the one-stop shop.  The 2012 Adult StudentsTALK™ results indicated that schools that had the ability to get students through a process that included applying, requesting financial aid, and enrolling have a distinct advantage in the minds of the adult student considering coming back to school.  Those seeking a graduate or undergraduate degree identified it as the most important service a school could offer.

#4           Impact of the web.   Like it or not, your website has,  for the fourth year in a row, been identified in the Stamats Adult StudentsTALK™ research as your key marketing tool, either through direct traffic or search.   There was practically an audible sigh from the audience heard about the room as this research was unveiled, as the web can be difficult and political to address.  That being said, there is no smarter hill to pick to die on when it comes to return on investment – your audience is there, and they are forming opinions about you as a result of what they see.

#5           Course delivery.  Hybrid courses continue to get more and more interest from those participating in the Adult StudentsTALK™ research; this year was no exception.  Across the board, from certificate seekers to graduate students, each prospective student audience expressed the highest interest in a hybrid course format.

#6           Social media.   Do what you can do well.  If you walked away from the conference with only one thing related to social media, it was the importance of doing only what you have the ability to do AND doing it well.   The cost with social media is always the time (for once, something that is not the money) and we all know how limited that can be with our limited human resources.  The other item of interest was the big announcement by Facebook about the changes being made that would be “forced” on institutions by the end of March.  If your institution has a Facebook page, you immediately made a note to go back to your office and get to work.

#7           Those elusive adult students.   We often sit at conferences like these and talk about how hard it is to “find” adult students.  I felt very fortunate that we were able to rustle up nine of them to sit on a one-hour panel with open Q and A with our audience.  It was, hands down, the best hour of the conference and something that certainly provided insight into the hearts and minds of our student audience.  I cannot thank Concordia University Austin enough for sharing their students with us.

What I love most about this event is the coming together of people (and institutions) from all over the country who serve very different populations yet find commonalities in their networking with one another.  Perhaps it is because those who work with adult students are used to having to retrofit everything to meet their unique need, or maybe this is always just a remarkably intelligent group of people, but the true learning is always in the networking, in those opportunities to share a cup of coffee and realize that you are not alone in your commitment to serve this population, regardless of the struggles you may encounter.

Thank you again for joining us – and if I failed to mention something that you had learned at the conference, please feel free to add it to the discussion.

Everything is bigger in Texas—and that held true for this year’s Stamats Adult Student Integrated Marketing Conference held in Austin Feb. 27–29.  We were delighted to have nearly 200 attendees at our annual event participate in the learning and networking that has become a hallmark of this conference.

In my wanderings across our nation’s college and university campuses, I’m occasionally reminded—sometimes bewildered—by a chronic, ironic reality. Higher ed marketing success is often compromised by a lack of the same three foundational educational elements our faculty celebrate, and that combine to form the bedrock of what we’re committed to helping our own students develop and demonstrate in our classrooms:

1. Subject matter intelligence, 2. Sound research, and 3. Disciplined persistence
Subject matter intelligence

Alarmingly, many campus marketing, communications, and public relations offices are staffed by practitioners with too-little formal training (and, these days, even less professional development opportunity) in their assignment. Most will admit it freely, while others will bluff their way through. Some hold key decision-making positions not because they were best-qualified for the job when they were hired, but because they’ve put in their time, remain absolutely committed to their institutions, and are sufficiently self-taught to hold their programs together from year to year.

This isn’t an indictment or a put-down, and I’m hardly one to lord lofty degrees or world-class marketing achievements over my higher ed marketing colleagues. This is, quite honestly, a dose of the reality I see and the frustration I hear in some shape or form from my marketing brothers and sisters in the field almost every week.

Sound research

Sit in any classroom or eavesdrop on any faculty coffee table discussion and you’ll hear the word “research” a healthy handful of times. It’s what scholars build their careers upon. It’s what textbooks unravel and explain. It’s the heart and soul of what happens in the academy.  It informs the effective development and execution of successful living-learning communities. And on many campuses it’s in woefully short supply when it comes to informing sound, strategic marketing decisions.

Admittedly, academic research and market research are cousins at best. But the common thread is research: Dissecting, quantifying, and analyzing reality so we can better understand a multifaceted challenge and make more informed decisions about addressing it.

We can’t imagine a college or university that would choose to build an academic program without the essential benefit of scholarly research. But there’s every chance that market research is a “luxury” your school’s marketing program may be willing to relegate to the back burner in favor of funding a few more television spots or another billboard campaign.

Invest 10% of your marketing budget in market research and I guarantee you’ll invest the remaining 90% more wisely.

Disciplined persistence

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “Build the plan; work the plan.” Crafting a marketing plan can be arduous, if not downright painful. Too frequently, it’s considered a distraction that takes us away from actually doing the marketing work that matters. Increasingly, however, schools are realizing they need to build and manage plans if they want to maximize the return on their precious marketing investments.

But with embarrassing frequency, about the time a marketing plan (or creative concept or ad campaign or tagline or catchphrase or whatever) is really gaining traction in the marketplace, campus leaders grow weary of it and feel compelled to “freshen it up” if not start all over again. Internal staff boredom becomes external brand equity’s greatest enemy.

While this phenomenon often spells new work for consultants like me and firms like mine, it is nonetheless disheartening to observe schools whose marketing teams fail to work a plan until it’s clearly not working anymore.

How do you know if it’s not working anymore? See “Sound research” above.

In his 2011 book, Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant , author David Aaker puts his finger squarely on the paradigm shift I believe offers the greatest potential for colleges and universities to pull themselves out of the higher education blur:

 To be best positioned to thrive in the decades ahead, campus leaders must forsake their tired quest for brand preference in favor of creating and delivering programs and services that will achieve brand relevance.

 In a nutshell, Aaker explains two fundamental approaches to increasing mindshare and market share. The first is “…to win the brand preference competition by making [one] brand preferred over other brands in an established category or subcategory.” Those of us in higher ed know this is (1) extraordinarily challenging for schools that look, sound, taste, smell, and feel oddly similar to prospective stakeholders, and (2) unapproachably expensive for schools whose promotional budgets are beyond overstretched.

The second approach Aaker explains is “…to win the brand relevance competition by creating new categories or subcategories for which competitors are irrelevant.” For colleges and universities, this requires a purposeful moving-away from program and course offerings that look almost exactly like those their competitors are delivering. This approach essentially demands that campuses re-create the experience they deliver to stakeholders such that the new experience simply can’t be duplicated or replicated by any of its competitors.

Aaker spells out the daunting challenge schools face when they perpetuate the pursuit of institutional brand preference:  “The problem is that incremental innovation and investments in marketing rarely change the market share structure. Customers are just not inclined or motivated to change brand loyalties in established markets. Brands are perceived to be similar at least with respect to the delivery of functional benefits, and often these perceptions are accurate. As a result, a brand preference strategy is usually a recipe for stressed margins…and, ultimately, a decline into irrelevance.”

Sound familiar?

Some clever soul once suggested that “insanity” is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So perhaps Aaker’s assertion that creating new categories or subcategories of higher education which effectively change the way prospective students, prospective donors, and prospective employees look at the college-selection decision is worth careful consideration.  Witness how for-profit and first-in-market online providers effectively redefined the higher ed landscape by creating new categories and subcategories.

Aaker asserts that“…winning under the brand relevance model…is based on being selected because competitors were not relevant rather than not preferred, a qualitatively different reason…the result can be a market in which there is no competition at all for an extended time, or one in which the competition is reduced or weakened….”

In this economy when fiscal resources are in short supply, campus leaders are urged and (hopefully) empowered to address institutional priorities with higher-than-ever levels of innovation and creativity. Aaker’s brand relevance paradigm provides a thoughtful framework to guide campus leaders toward major-scale transformational innovation. The end game is to create program and service offerings so remarkable that they create new categories or subcategories of the higher education experience, an experience only one school can deliver to its marketplace.

But here’s where I believe all of this risks tumbling for higher ed. Embracing Aaker’s brand relevance approach requires:

1. A commitment to doing regular robust market research to keep a firm finger on the pulse of ever-changing marketplace and prospective stakeholder expectations,
2. An enterprise-wide willingness to commit to a redefined educational experience,
3. A significant institutional investment in bringing that redefined experience to market in a remarkable way, and
4. “A willingness to take risks by going outside the comfort zone represented by the existing target market, value proposition, and business model.”

All four are required. What’s keeping your campus from diving in?

Celia at the Stamats office.

We at Stamats are active in many charities and try to honor each other and our causes. Sandi Daubs, a long-time Stamats employee, has a darling daughter named Celia who suffers from Juvenile Diabetes. Every year JDRF has a Walk to Cure Diabetes at Westdale Mall. This year it is on Saturday, February 25. Registration starts at 8:00 and the walk begins at 10:00 a.m. This photo represents the pre-fundraising that has gone on at Stamats to support Celia and Sandy. Each shoe represents a Stamats donation.

The road is long and difficult for children suffering from this disease. Sandi told me recently that Celia was having a rough patch and declared, “I just don’t want to be diabetic anymore.” She is getting local support that is helping her and was in great spirits for this little photo shoot. Here is a link to her team and a bit of background information:

http://www2.jdrf.org/site/TR/Walk-IA/Chapter-EasternIowa4218?team_id=37698&pg=team&fr_id=1648

Good luck Miss Celia’s Potato Heads!