Category: measurement

What are your top marketing challenges for 2009? Take 5 minutes to fill out a survey

Today I’m asking you to peer into your crystal ball and forecast what your top communications and marketing challenges will be for the coming year. Actually, the prognostication has already been done for you, and all I’m asking is that you take 5 minutes to complete a brief survey ranking the challenges ahead and sharing how you plan to address them.

The survey is part of an effort by Michael Stoner to take the pulse of the higher ed marketing community. Michael’s tapping into our collective wisdom to help us better understand our challenges.

The survey is the second of a two-part process. In part one, “150 thought leaders in college communications, marketing, and PR — among them leaders of the CASE commissions, PRSA’s national board, and others — were asked to identify the marketing challenges that most concerned them for the year ahead. Not surprisingly, more than half of the respondents cited financial constraints or budgetary problems as the top challenges facing their institutions.” Stoner posted a summary of the first-round results in mid-November. That post is worth a read — but you may want to wait until after you take the survey, if you’re worried that the round-one results might unduly influence you.

As a bonus for those attending the CASE District V conference coming up later this month, Stoner and company will hold a panel discussion on the subject, titled “Challenges for 2009: Dealing with New Issues or Struggling with Old Ones?” Wish I could be there. Hope someone plans to blog about it.

Traffic patterns from a PR campaign: a brief, shallow case study of Missouri S&T’s spacebook blog

On Nov. 10, 2008, the university where I work launched spacebook, a blog by NASA astronaut and Missouri S&T graduate Sandra Magnus. (I also posted about it that same day.) That same day, we launched our PR campaign announcing the site. We notified schools, the dozens of kids who participated in our campus’s aerospace camp last summer, alumni, bloggers, the mainstream media, state legislators, and our internal audience of students, faculty and staff. We sent targeted messages to groups via email, Twitter, our website, Facebook and many other avenues.

The result has been some pretty nice bit of buzz for our campus, both in the mainstream media of newspaper, TV and radio and in the new media world of blogs, microblogs and social networks. (We keep track of the main media mentions on our Delicious site and collect it all under a single category.)

It’s great to tell people about the great media coverage we’ve received. But what kind of conclusions can we draw about that coverage’s effectiveness to drive people to the website? There’s the anecdotal information, such as comments like this received on the blog: “Before you left for this mission, ksdk news channel 5 announced, ‘Belleville native heading into space’…” But as the saying goes, “The plural of anecdote is not data.” It’s a nice anecdote, but it isn’t really measurable.

So, how effective have our promotional efforts been to draw people to the site? For this mini case study, I’m going to share some information based on referrals.

Breaking it down

In the 10 days since the blog was announced, spacebook has seen 5,009 unique visitors. The breakdown looks like this:

  • Direct (no referral): 1,936, or 39 percent of the total
  • Google (organic search): 1,288, or 26 percent
  • Everywhere else: 1,785, or 35 percent

It’s the “everywhere else” category where we find the mainstream and social media at work. Below is a breakdown of traditional vs. social media referral sites (traditional in blue, social media in red):

OK, the graphic is unreadable, even if you tilt your head to the left. So just let the pretty colors tell the story, and I’ll fill you in on a few details.

The top referrer among mainstream and social media was the Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat, which is Sandra Magnus’ hometown newspaper. But the Nos. 2, 3 and 4 referral sources are all social media sources. Missouri’s two major daily newspapers, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Kansas City Star, are the seventh- and tenth-place referral sources.

When lumped into two groups, the impact of social media as a referral source becomes more apparent.

The social media side of the pie, like a Pac-Man with unhingeable jaw, appears poised to eat mainstream media for lunch. But the main news sites still appear to be a mouthful, and won’t be easy to swallow.

Conclusion: Social media is definitely a player in getting visitors to your website. But that’s really stating the obvious, isn’t it.

Now, don’t read too much into this little exercise. The fact that some social media tools, such as Twitter, outperformed main news sites in terms of driving traffic, doesn’t mean traditional media is not effective in building interest and buzz. In terms of “opportunities to view,” no doubt the Post-Dispatch and Star had numbers much higher than many of the websites that touted spacebook.

Plus, this is skewed somewhat by my own blatant promotion of spacebook on this blog and via Twitter. (It’s also been a regular link on the @MissouriSandT Twitter site.)

Still, it is kind of interesting to see where your traffic is coming from. And this data may help someone who’s interested in launching a PR campaign to drive visitors to the web.