August 2007

The good ol’ folks in the direct mail world have been living and breathing PURLs over the past few months. They’re supposed to be the “next best thing” when it comes to direct mail. Not sure what PURL stands for? You’re not alone, but we’re trying to change that.

A PURL is simply a personalized URL (www.briansumner.com, for example). The belief is that prospective students who receive a direct mail piece will be more inclined to check out a web site that has their name included, therefore turning into leads.

The results have been interesting. We tested PURLs on a couple of campaigns in the past two months and to our surprise, the non-PURL control pieces have outperformed the PURL pieces. And when I say outperformed, I mean the non-PURL pieces have more than doubled the response of the PURL pieces.

Any ideas on why the non-PURL pieces are flourishing and the PURL pieces aren’t? That’s a good question and we have our theories, but we’re going to continue to test PURLs in different methods to see if they truly are the “next best thing” in direct mail. In the meantime, we’re curious what you think. What is your opinion on seeing your own personal website on a direct mail piece? Will seeing this make you interested enough to check it out?

When I’m working with new PlattFormers from other departments and cross training them on exactly what it is we do in Media, I find it’s often hard to cram all that we do into a brief 45-minute session. Going over the intricacies of our reporting procedures alone could realistically cover an hour.

Someone once presented me with a nice analogy that I use to briefly sum up what it is Media does in the grand scheme of things. If PlattForm is a restaurant, then we in Media are the chefs. It makes sense when you think about it. (Don’t think too hard. Then it might cease to make any type of sense.) Sales functions as the maître d’, welcoming clients to our fine establishment. Client Services are the wait staff. It’s their job to ensure that the client receives the best meal they can. It’s Media’s job to work with Video Production and Print, which provide us the finest ingredients to cook up hearty media schedules that Client Services can deliver to the client.

Every chef knows that there’s a wide variety of customers, so we have to keep stirring the sauce. Changing out ingredients to preserve the freshest, most beneficial servings is always our goal. We need to make sure Video Production and Print know how well one of their ingredients works. If Video Production has a great spicy meatball of a television spot on their hands, then we’ll want to make sure we get more quality ingredients like that out to the clients.

Our job is very important in supporting Client Services. If the soufflé is burnt, the wait staff feels the consequences. So there’s a heavy duty placed upon the chefs of Media to ensure we never burn the soufflé.

Of course, I don’t want to forget Interactive in this whole mix. They’re a whole different breed of chefs. I think they use microwaves. At least it’s something high-tech like that.

Ultimately the metaphor can get stretched and you have to look at the reality. PlattForm is simply one delectable educational solution. The educational sector can be fast-paced, and ever-changing, but like we say in the Media department, “If you can’t stand the heat, get outta the kitchen.”

PlattForm-produced commercials blanket more than 60% of the country. That’s not too shabby for a company that started a mere decade ago in the basement of owners Michael and Tamie Platt.

Since I travel a lot for my job, nothing makes me happier than spotting one of PForm’s commercials playing on some random station in some random city … randomly. I still remember the first time I saw a commercial of mine flash across a TV screen. I was sitting in a busy diner in Pittsburgh and literally screamed, “GOOD GOD! I DID THAT!” to no one in particular. The construction worker beside me seemed rather nonplused about the whole thing and responded with a congenial, “YOUR MOM!”

I was walking on Cloud 9! It’s a wonder my head could even fit through the door on the way out of the diner. I was proud … I was ecstatic … I was nauseous from eating a chicken-fried steak sandwich.

Fame, however, has a downside. I became infamous for one of our spots that simply WOULD NOT DIE. Entitled “Tantrum,” it put me on the map … uh, AND on the floor. The premise involved me being gratuitously drug across a classroom in a cap and gown. From Baltimore to Butte to Boca Raton … it seemed this particular ad was doing gangbusters and it was inescapable … and after the 30,000th viewing … it was unwatchable.

My parents in Iowa saw it. My best friend near Miami saw it. My arch-nemesis in Los Angeles saw it and said I looked fat. It ended up on YouTube. Clients wanted sequels. On January 2nd, 2006, while on vacation in Orlando, I saw the spot air six times in under an hour. Granted, that hour was 2 am and it was during “Tyra,” but whatever.

And if I was sick of it … think what havoc it was wreaking in San Antonio. Fortunately, like any good star that burns brightly and suddenly implodes upon itself, “Tantrum” stopped pulling leads and was immediately shelved. Children danced. Angels wept. And, once again, all was right in the cosmos. If I never see an ad of mine on TV again, that’s fine. It’s someone else’s turn to go supernova!

Search engine optimization does not just include the on-site and off-site optimization strategies that may be implemented on a given web site. The structure of the code and how it is organized is also a very important piece of the SEO puzzle.

Jonathon Hochman, of SearchEngineWatch, recently spoke with Dan Crow, the product manager for Google’s Crawl Infrastucture group about clean code and how it affects the indexing of web pages.

There are only so many pages that Google can index because of bandwidth and electrical constraints, and they attempt to spread the indexing love evenly. For example, Google isn’t going to index Web sites A-G and then ignore H-Z. They must allocate their resources so that they are dispersed evenly and reasonably.

It takes more time for a search engine spider to crawl a page with excess code. If every site had very clean, concise code, the spiders could index pages faster. This clean code structure would include the externalization of JavaScript and CSS. If all sites had succinct code, the search engines would be able to index more pages.

So what exactly does this mean for us?

This proves that every piece of the web site is important for SEO and should be addressed in the strategy that is implemented accordingly. This also shows that it is easier for the search engine spiders to index pages that have clean code.

User-generated content (UGC) has been getting a lot of buzz lately, and for good reason; when used correctly, it is an incredibly effective marketing tool (and it’s generally a lot of fun, too). UGC is so effective because consumers are sick of sales pitches – they trust other consumers, not salesmen. UGC is real. Using it can give you the kind of credibility you won’t achieve through advertising alone.

One of the most brilliant (and entertaining) uses of UGC is found on www.willitblend.com. The site chronicles the sheer power of a blender like no other. Users can suggest things to blend, and the suggestions are actually taken. There are videos on the site of the blender blending everything from an iPhone to cubic zirconium. There’s also a video of them sticking a video camera in the blender and filming the ensuing carnage from a first-person perspective. (There was even a video of them trying to return the blended camera to the store where they bought it, but it has since been removed for legal reasons. I can’t tell you the name of the store, but it rhymes with Rest Rye. You can still find the video on YouTube, though.) But I digress.

Amazon.com has made great use of UGC with its user reviews on virtually every product that they sell. Before buying a product, users can read what other people who have used the product say about it. In some cases, they can even see comparisons of similar products to get an idea of what the product is like. Amazon.com has an edge over physical store locations because users can get opinions from people who aren’t trying to sell them something.

The simplest way to implement user-generated content is to start blogging. “But that’s not written by users, Brandon, how could that be UGC?” you ask. Well, people can leave comments on blogs. This also gives you a great deal of control over your UGC, as you control the topics of conversation and you can choose whether or not to display a comment. The element of interaction draws an audience, and positive comments from users carry a lot more weight than positive statements from employees.

You can take blogs a step further by asking students to blog, and then linking to those blogs from your site. (For quality control, you can host the blog on your site and have students send you their blog posts for you to post yours.) By some miracle of sociology, every college student loves to blog, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find volunteers. It might help to hand out assignments or make requests of the student bloggers – but make sure not to pull the reins too tightly, or the content will seem forced.

A much more immersive and usable example of UGC is forums. With forums, users can interact with each other freely and in whatever way they choose. Classes can collaborate on private boards (imagine the potential for a creative writing class), and online clubs and organizations can make use of the forums to create a tighter community. The big downside to forums is the upkeep. You have to have moderators that frequent the boards, and you have to have dedicated posters or else the boards just seem dead. Done correctly, forums are an incredible community-builder; but done incorrectly, they just die off slowly.

A more classic example of UGC would be some sort of advertisement contest. If you have a video program, you could have a contest to produce a television spot or promo video for your web site (that would probably find some success on YouTube as well). If you have a web design program, you could hold a contest to come up with art or a new section for your web site, or even to come up with a site for entertainment that only loosely ties back in to your school. Find out what your students are good at, and give them avenues to express themselves.

These are just a few ways that schools could incorporate UGC. Really, the possibilities are as plentiful as your users. Just make sure that your UGC shines through as genuine, or else users won’t be very excited to see it.