Category: measurement

Friday Five: FYI edition

Stuff every higher ed marketer ought to know about:

fyi-sm

  1. The American Marketing Association has issued its call for papers for the 2010 Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education. This year’s symposium will be held Nov. 7-10 in San Diego. The AMA is looking for “proposals/papers that report on new and innovative strategies and tactics in higher education marketing. Popular topics include including image and brand building, buzz/viral marketing, marketing research, internal marketing, electronic marketing, new marketing channels, social media, Web 2.0 tools, emerging markets and trends, marketing organizational structure, marketing budgeting, web metrics, and marketing ROI.” Submissions are due April 9, and this year the AMA is even welcoming video submissions. (Hear that, Todd Sanders?)
  2. What do social media users want? According to research from online ad network Chikita (and as reported by Mashable), “Twitterers mostly consume news, MySpace users want games and entertainment, Facebookers are into both news and community and Digg’s audience has a mixed bag of interests.” Also, MySpacers “have no interest in news whatsoever.” (Hear that, news mogul Rupert Murdoch?)
  3. Virtual graffiti. No, that isn’t the name of a Led Zeppelin remix. It’s what’s happening, right now, on college campuses everywhere, thanks to mobile mapping apps like Foursquare. “Since Foursquare’s debut last year,” writes the New York Times’ Marc Parry, “students have diligently labeled, praised, and, in some cases, profaned college campuses. Take this note, easily Googled, that somebody calling himself Mock Redneck Jr. left at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte: The library has Free Wi-Fi, Barely Legal girls and a warm place to drop a deuce.'” Drop a what? (Via Mark Greenfield’s Delicious links.)
  4. The state of campus CMS. Good research results from a survey of content management systems as compiled by .eduguru’s Michael Fienen. Lots of data to sift through here.
  5. From the it-had-to-happen-eventually department: RandomDorm: ChatRoulette for the College Set, via @davewiner.

A new rung on the social media ladder

Update, Jan. 19, 2010: Josh Bernoff introduces the new version of the social media ladder in this morning’s post. “Conversationalists” are on the second rung. – AC

Those of you who sat in on my CASE District VI session on social media last week may recall a discussion of the social media latter, a concept introduced by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff in their wonderful book about the rise of social media, Groundswell.

The ladder is one way of illustrating the “social technographics” Li and Bernoff created to classify different Internet users — from the “creators” who publish blogs and user-generated videos to the “collectors” who use RSS proficiently to the “joiners” who link up via social networks. Above is a shot of the ladder from my Tweets, Tubes and Feeds presentation, and here’s a good explanation of technographics from Bernoff himself.

Well, the ladder just got taller. Forrester Research just announced the new social technographics. The original ladder, Bernoff explains, did not take into account “the rapid conversations that take place in tweets and Facebook status updates.”

To reflect the new behavior, we’ve added a rung to the Social Technographics ladder: Conversationalists, a group that starts out with 33% of the online population (compared with 70% who consume social content and 59% who use social networks).

I’m not sure where on the ladder that new rung fits, although for $499 I could buy a report from Forrester Research that would probably tell me. Anyway, the new rung makes sense. The conversations occurring on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere have exploded over the past 12-18 months, reinforcing what The Cluetrain Manifesto told us some 11 years ago: that “markets are conversations.”