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Friday Five: #Sizzler10 snippets

I had a great time attending part of iModules‘ annual users’ conference, Summer Sizzler 2010, held earlier this week in Kansas City.

I was only there for one day and only sat in on a couple of sessions. But I met some great people, made some new Twitter connections and, during my short stay for a few sessions, picked up some good tidbits to pass along.

1. Tuesday Trivia. One of the morning sessions of opening day was a lightning round of sorts called “5 Ideas for Doing More with Less.” In that session, five iModules clients each had roughly five minutes to talk about something they’re doing to build engagement with their alumni. One of my favorites from that session was the “Tuesday Trivia” concept. Dana Howard (@DanaMSUAlum) of the Murray State University Alumni Association discussed how the association’s Tuesday Trivia game leverages social media to engage alumni and gather their contact information. Here’s now it works: Every Tuesday during the academic year, the alumni association posts a trivia question about Murray State on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (here’s a sample question), directing followers to submit their answers to an online form where the association also captures email addresses for their database. It’s a fun and simple, but not trivial, way to connect with alumni while collecting contact information.

2. Repurposing social media content. Also during that “More with Less” session, Doug Smith (@idougsmith) of the East Carolina Alumni Association presented a quick rundown of how that association integrates social media content on the PirateAlumni.com website. One tool they use for publishing photos on their site is PictoBrowser, a free web application that displays Flickr or Picasa photos on websites. I’ve made a note to check out PictoBrowser to see if we might be able to apply it somehow with our photos.

3. Archiving email newsletters to maximize readership seems like a no-brainer, but I bet a lot of alumni associations aren’t doing that. During another “More with Less” session, Tracy Stolz of Gannon University’s alumni association talked about how her office uses the archives to not only expand readership, but also to preserve history and make the content more accessible.

4. Split testing for email marketing. Sue Henry of Adelaide University in Australia presented an informative session cleverly titled “Email Marketing: From Woe to Go.” This past spring, Adelaide tested two versions of an email to determine what impact subject line length, design and number of links might have on encouraging college seniors to join the alumni association. What she ultimately discovered through this test, however, was an unexpected outcome: that the timing of both emails was off. Compared to a previous email campaign (in October 2009, closer to graduation time for that class of seniors), both test emails from May 2010 had significantly lower open rates (13 percent and 11 percent, compared to 28 percent in October 2009). The reason? Henry and her colleagues determined that the message timing was not close enough to graduation, which was seven months away at the time of the May 2010 email.

5. Post-conference goodness. If you want to catch up on the conversations from the event, check out the #Sizzler10 hashtag on Twitter or visit iModules’ YouTube channel.

Friday Five bonus link. More a shameless plug than a takeaway, but here’s the link to my presentation at the end of day 1.

Have a good weekend.

Friday Five: Spicing up social media

Look at your social media strategy. Now look at Old Spice‘s. Now look at yours. Now back to theirs.

Does your strategy look like theirs? No. Could it? I don’t know.

But there may be a few lessons higher education marketers could glean from Old Spice’s ridiculously successful social media campaign featuring the Old Spice Guy, actor Isaiah Mustafa (@isaiahmustafa on Twitter).

The campaign, carried out by Old Spice’s ad agency, Wieden+Kennedy, is already being hailed by Mashable as the archetype of a successful social media campaign. By using the @oldspice Twitter account (personified by Mustafa’s character) as an avenue to solicit questions for Old Spice Guy to answer on YouTube, the campaign elicited “almost unequivocally positive results” across social media platforms. “Hell, even the comments on YouTube were overwhelmingly positive — and that never happens.”

So, what worked for Old Spice that could work for your social media efforts? Here are five thoughts to ponder:

1. Integrate. Yes, Old Spice has a marketing budget that is sixteen bajillion times greater than even the most prosperous higher ed marketing department. The company spent a lot on television air time to build awareness of the Old Spice brand before executing the online campaign. But the point here is not about budgets. It’s about connecting your social media marketing and visibility efforts with your other marketing. Is social media integrated into your overall marketing strategy?

2. Imitate. It’s the sincerest form of flattery, they say. But too often it falls flat. By now, the Old Spice shark has probably been jumped. But one higher ed entity that seized the opportunity of parodying Old Spice Guy in a YouTube video was Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library. The library’s Study Like a Scholar, Scholar video is a clever send up. (Thanks to @radiofreegeorgy, et. al., for sharing the link via Twitter.)

3. Personalize it. Old Spice has done some great marketing over the years. But one key to success with this campaign was the way Wieden+Kennedy personalized the brand in the form of Old Spice Guy. Even beyond personalization, the campaign showed the ridiculously handsome and chiseled Mustafa to be a real human being. In one video response — this one to his daughter, Haley — he speaks to her directly, explaining that he was until recently just another unknown actor. How can we in higher ed move away from speaking in the institutional voice and better personalize our brands?

4. Take risks. Opening up the Old Spice brand to social media, soliciting questions and daring to respond with such immediacy, was risky. How willing are we to step out beyond our social media comfort zones and open ourselves up as Old Spice did?

5. Be prepared to respond — in Internet time. How long should we wait to respond to a comment or post on one of our social media venues? If the Old Spice campaign is the new standard, the answer is: Don’t waste a second. On the marketing blog mUmbrella, Tim Burrowes tracked the Old Spice Guy’s rapid response to Twitter questions. “In the last 24 hours,” he wrote, “I count 116 new Old Spice videos. Every one in response to a Tweet. Let’s say that again – 116 videos. Wieden + Kennedy must have an army of copywriters working on this.” Insane.

So, is the Old Spice campaign a true game-changer for social media? Is it the social media campaign our social media campaigns want to smell like?

I’m on a blog.