How to Have Fun While Learning Marketing Technology

This video describes what we do in Marketing Technology 470 at Northern Illinois University.  It is the advanced course in our sequence, the 'capstone.' Students plan, implement and measure a paid search campaign using Google AdWords and Analytics and also developed a personal social media campaign. This semester we also did a a corporate social media marketing plan for the companies we have been working with all semester.  These firms are Ideosity and AllWorld.  Thanks to +Nicole Gault and +Mike Glassberg for putting this information together.

Congratulations to them both and to all our Spring 2013 Interactive Marketing graduates!

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Everything I Learned About Social Media I Learned from My Students

This post shows how you can develop your brand, connect and contribute on social media networks and in a short time change how you are perceived and create value online.  We just finished our social media module in Marketing Technology at Northern Illinois University   I gave them a basic structure to start building a personal social media plan using the top five platforms of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, G+ and Pinterest.  There was no time to have them develop videos but we discussed the importance of YouTube and video in general in improving search engine results and web site engagement.

Teaching this class is like teaching in a Petri dish, a big sloppy experiment in various aspects of digital marketing.  I can observe the results of marketing campaigns that we deploy, see which PPC approaches work best and how online and offline strategies interact.  In this case, I made some simple suggestions for each of the five social media platforms and then sat back and watch the results come back.  I already noted in a prior blog post that making simple profile changes to LinkedIn resulted in more targeted job opportunities within twenty-four hours.

What I noticed was that my students were able to get results quite quickly from simple changes that they made to their approach to social media.   When we started the project, few of them had an organized approach to their personal social media plan.   I just finished reading their reflection papers on the subject and want to share some insights as to what worked for them and can work for you.

You can change how you are perceived online

Just by following my advice and fleshing out their Google+ profiles, when they were logged in to Gmail they could see a more professional appearance online.  Their LinkedIn, blogs and other online information showed up first in search results and helped them to present a more professional appearance.  This all happened in a few weeks time and many of them had online profile to begin with that reflected their personal rather that their professional lives.  Social media marketing helped them develop their personal brand image.

You can connect to just about anyone

The students were asked to connect to people where they might want to find a job or just find out more about the interactive marketing field  and this approach was effective.  Students were able to find people at key interactive companies and connect to them.  I recommended having some sort of relationship before connecting, i.e., having met them at a seminar or participated in a group discussion or webinar with them, before making the connection.  The students have the added advantage of being students.  Everyone loves to help students (I know I do).  I told them make these connections now while they are in the student role.

Everyone can contribute something online

Sometimes students think because they are students they can't contribute.  They don't realize being in an Interactive Marketing program like ours gives them and advantage in terms of knowledge and understanding in the area.  But everyone has something to contribute online.  The students learned that they could take a blog post or something we had learned in class, put a twist on it or make a comment and create value for those reading the information.  Witness the graphical approach to taking notes in class above by +Felicia Aguillon.  Her summary of our last day of class on social media was well-received not just by me but other social media outlets where it was posted.

So this post shows you can develop your brand, connect and contribute on social media networks and in a short time change how you are perceived and create value online.  It only took a few weeks to change perceptions.  The students changed how they were perceived online and also how they were perceived by others.

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Google Authorship Made Easy

Establishing Google Authorship Can Be Easy

This post summarizes how to create Google Authorship on your blog posts and other content.  There has been a lot of talk about Google Authorship and I have read some excellent posts about how to be credited in search results on Google.  I have shown an example above of how my blog shows up on Google when I am logged in to Gmail in the above screen shot.  I am shown with my picture, my name as shown on my G+ profile and the number of my G+ Circles.  This type of display is the goal. +Andy Crestodina  helped me establish this authorship in search   I followed the instructions that he presented at the January Chicago AMA Meet the Experts Night.  It took a few weeks but everything is showing up in search quite nicely now.  Even in my econsultancy.com blog authorship shows up after I followed these steps.

I think the key is to understand that there is a way to do this even if you are not blogging on a domain where you have an email on that same domain.  In my classes we use publicly available tools like WordPress or Blogger so we needed a way to link authorship without the verifiable email address.

Briefly, you need the following:
1) Put a nice head shot on your  G+ Profile
2) Use the same name on your profile as your byline, i.e.,  "By Debra Zahay-Blatz"
3) Copy and past HTML code into your blog that establishes the link.  Some code is on my slideshare presentation on this subject and on Andy's blog.

I also think it is important to set up your G+ profile properly with links to everything to which you contribute so these items can all show up in search as well.  Good luck establishing authorship and don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.  My slideshare presentation also shows how to link Google Analytics to your blog, which is extremely helpful in tracking activity and seeing information who you are reaching and how long they stay on the page.  

The slideshare also covers assessing your online presence, Filling out your Google+ Profile, Pursuisng Authorship and how to link your blog to Google Analytics.  The byline from the code is shown below.

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Scholarship Awards Ceremony Honors Interactive Marketing Students

At our Scholarship Awards Ceremony last Saturday, April 13, 2013 at Barsema Hall at Northern Illinois University, we honored a number of graduates in our Interactive Marketing program.  Recipients of the Interactive Marketing Board Awards were +Sarah Harant and +Nicole Gault (shown above with +Dave Henkel and +Debra Zahay-Blatz.   The Zahay-Blatz Family Award went to +Sekou Noriega.  Joe Glaser from Glaser Direct presented his award, targeted for those interested in B2B, to +Nick Kochetta.  The Johnson & Quin Award was presented by President +Dave Henkel to +Amanda Forneck, who will be beginning a full-time position at Johnson & Quin in the Fall.   Thanks to the generosity of our Corporate Advisory Board members for these Awards.

These awards were given for scholarship and dedication to the Interactive Marketing Field.  Look for these talented graduates to make substantive contributions to careers in Search (SEO and SEM), Social Media, Email, Website Usability and Testing and other areas that are a focus for our Interactive Marketing Program.

Interactive Marketing students also receiving scholarships were +Jason Conklin and Allison Greco, recipients of the Michael T. McSweeney Endowed Direct Marketing Scholarship. Interactive Marketing Student Board President +Mike Glassberg received both the Marketing Achievement Award sponsored by the Department of Marketing Faculty and the Top Marketing Achiever Award. Student board member +Antonio Garay received the Always be Contributing Award.

A highlight for me was the fact we honored +Dave Henkel as an honorary Alumnus of the Department of Marketing at Northern Illinois University   Dave's company, Johnson & Quin, has recruited on campus most years out of the last 20 and has hired closed to 30 people out of the IM program and it's predecessor program in Direct Marketing.  Dave said the association with NIU is a good fit because our students are hard-working and come in well prepared.  Program graduates don't have to be taught the basic vocabulary of the direct and interactive business because they have already learned in in their Marketing classes and Interactive Marketing classes in particular.  Dave has been a corporate board member for almost ten years and this award was well-deserved.  Thanks to Dave for his service to NIU and the IM program and congratulations to all on their awards.
By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

The Shocking Truth About Content Marketing

Who Are You?

We are in the middle of a seven week social media module in my Marketing Technology Class.  I wanted to share some of the learnings from our class, particularly on branding and strategy  and how they relate to content marketing.  Even a personal social media plan, which is one of our projects, can relate to how a company does business because you  can't 'tweet' without self-knowledge.


Let's work backwards to illustrate this point.  Content marketing, as I mentioned in this blog previously, makes sense of social media marketing  because it puts it all together.  The company (or individual  creates content, as show in the figure above, and then puts it out through multiple communications outlets, social media or otherwise.  So a white paper I might write on how to hire students in interactive marketing could be transformed into a few blog posts, a couple of tweets, an article in the college magazine.  We might say content marketing is also another way to think of integrated marketing communications, where our visual message but also our content message is consistent across channels.

What is Your Story?

This approach is all great but the biggest challenge for students (and companies) not what to create as appropriate content but what basic story they have to tell.  I have challenged them to think about their professional passion, what they are good at and their story (their personal brand).  That thought process is the hard work.  Once they defined themselves, they were able to create solid profiles on LinkedIn using key search terms relating to their areas of interest.  One student, +Megan Meyers, said she improved her LinkedIn profile by expressing her career interests in social media marketing and within a day was receiving jobs from LinkedIn that were targeted to her personal interests.

How Should Customers Think About Your Brand?

So the shocking, or maybe not so shocking,  truth is that content marketing really comes down to telling a story.  Content marketing is the work of creating the story, aka the brand image, that is the most difficult part of marketing.  I often walk into potential consulting projects and the client thinks they need a new web site design.  However, when we talk, we find out what they really need first is something to put on the web site that demonstrates a solid brand positioning.   Good branding requires self-knowledge and a knowledge of their target market.

Things are going well in class.  The students are all complaining that they suddenly have to manage all their new social media interactions.  I tell them that engagement is good and that is the goal of creating a powerful branding story that we can distribute through a content marketing program.

So YOUR assignment for the upcoming week is to think about your brand story.  Who are you and who is your audience and how do they want you to think about them?  Then and only then can you create your content marketing program.

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

New Media Secrets from the Chicago Blackhawks

Adam Kempenaar, Senior Creative Director of New Media
& Creative Services at the Chicago Blackhawks with our IM Student Board

Chicago Blackhawks Come to Campus

Adam Kempenaar, Senior Creative Director of New Media and Creative Services for the +Chicago Blackhawks visited our University last Wednesday April 3. He spoke to a packed room of about 100 students, many of them interested in sports marketing, many of them in our Interactive Marketing Certificate Program and nearly all of them sporting red NIU shirts or Blackhawks gear.  That's our Interactive Advisory Board in the picture above with Adam at the Center.  Board President +Mike Glassberg, who spearheaded this effort to bring the BlackHawks to campus, is two people to the left of Adam.  The board presented him with a personalized NIU hockey jersey after his talk.  Below is a summary of advice on social media marketing and how to find a fulfilling career.

It All Started with Video

As you can imagine, for an exiting game like hockey, video is an extremely important part of the marketing communications mix.  Adam started out with a communications and radio background and his first job at the Hawks was to record and produce videos.  The Blackhawks post a lot of videos on their site and also stream the morning skate and other events.  The team has branched out into YouTube but really wants people on their own official web site.  Adam said, as we teach in our classes, the website is still the best way to communicate to fans and the first place people go to learn about their team.  Video and photos provide a way to give rare behind-the-scenes access to fans.

Social Media Exploded with the Team's Success

Social media did not exist in 2002 when Adam started with the Hawks, but now the team makes extensive use of social media and was voted the best brand on Twitter in 2009.  Adam said it just happened that as the team was really getting 'hot' there was a great new way to get the news out to fans in the form of social media.  The team seeks not to just push content but to engage its fans and answers tweets from fans.  Adam wants to engage customers and not just sell t-shirts and tickets.

The team has 1.3 million Facebook fans, 300.000 Twitter followers and is in about 73,000 G+ circles and connects with 54,000 fans on Instagram.  It views Facebook as a way to push out content but the other social media networks as a way to be more engaged.

Adam said his job is to get content out to the world  and his department is the gatekeeper.  He appreciates the emphasis on quality that the team has and credits the recent management team with contributing to the team's success not only on the ice but also in communicating with its fan base.  It takes a real commitment to make it all happen and the team work together.  Adam has a relatively small team of professionals and interns that work nearly nonstop during the hockey season to communicate with fans.

Students Need to Find their Own Professional Passion

At the end of the talk, Adam spoke to students on their careers.  He spoke of his own career path and gave three pieces of advice:

1. Find your passion:  Adam had a good job doing something else that he did not feel passionate about, but when the Blackhawks opportunity came up, he knew he had found his dream job and went for it.  To his surprise, he was just what the Hawks were looking for and got the job.
2. Communicate:  Write well and opportunities will come to you.  Adam had the chance to write a key letter for an executive early in his career that that success opened up doors for him.
3. Just 'do it':  If you want to be in social media, start a blog, create and disseminate content.  You have to show that your really are interested in this field.

We all thank Adam for taking the time to speak to our class.  We teachers thank him for reiterating the things we say in class about finding your passion and job hunting, writing well and creating content.  Go Blackhawks and good luck!

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

JRIM Special Issue: The Past, Present and Future of Interactive Marketing

Special Issue Announced

As Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, I am pleased to announce that we have established a partnership with the organizers of the Direct and Interactive Marketing Research Summit.  The Conference is in Chicago,  October 12th and 13th of 2013, and is sponsored by the DMEF (Direct Marketing Educational Foundation).  JRIM is to provide a $500 award for the best research paper submitted to the conference.  If you are not familiar with the conference, it is a two for one opportunity.  Not only do participants get a specialized academic conference in our area of direct and interactive marketing, but the first academic registrants also may attend the annual DMA conference and have access to top-notch practitioner presentations and the exhibit floor.

Cash Award Available

Speaking of a two for one opportunity, there is something different this year.  While last year we also offered a cash prize for best Research paper, this year the top papers submitted to the Research Summit will be given consideration for publication in a special issue of our Journal on The Past, Present and Future of Interactive  Marketing.  The process is twofold.  Submit papers for the conference here.  After receiving feedback from the conference, please then submit papers to our special issue on The Past, Present and Future of Interactive Marketing here. The paper deadline is August 30, 2013.

Suggested Topics

Topics for the special issue may include but are not limited to:

• Branding challenges and opportunities
• Business to business marketing developments
• Communications and new media channels
• Consumer behavior theories and applications
• Educational issues/challenges
• Internet strategy formation/implementation
• Linguistic issues related to the changing vocabulary of marketing
• Mobile marketing implications
• Marketing communications channels
• Measurement and attribution issues
• Other managerial aspects of internet marketing, such as product, distribution and pricing
• Organizational aspects of interactive marketing
• Political/legal issues and agendas
• Social network marketing.

We are open to these and other topics as well.  A lot has happened in interactive marketing in the last twenty years but the field is still in its infancy.  We are looking for thought leaders to help define where the field is and should be headed.  Please see me for any questions at zahay@niu.edu or contact +Lauren Labrecque  +Andy Rohm or +George Milne who are organizing the acdemic conference.  We hope to see you at the DMA/DMEF in Chicago in October!

By Debra Zahay-Blatz. You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Tips & Best Practices for Paid Search

+Thorne Washington, a recent grad from Northern's IM program, and Brad Hawk, both from board member company Leapfrog Online, have been coming to my classes to share their experiences and tips on Paid Search.  The duo helped students prepared for the Google Online Marketing Challenge last year and for their Paid Search consulting project this year using Google AdWords and Analytics . The two consultants have a great framework, listed above, for analyzing, implementing and measuring a paid search campaign.

We really appreciated  Brad and Thorne's clear approach to the problem at hand. They suggested a framework for the project that they use for their own work. As shown above, they suggested that the best way to approach paid search is to Research, Build, Launch and then Analyze/Report.

I agree that planning is key to effective Search Engine Marketing (SEM). If you don't understand the customer and the keywords they are searching for it is not even useful to start a campaign. Google provides many useful analysis tools to research initially and then modify the campaign once it has been launched. We use Google Trends and the AdWords keyword tool for our initial and ongoing research.  Sometimes we found that the terms the company thought defined its business were not highly searched for by potential customers and had to make adjustments.

Building and Launching a paid search campaign, the students found, was an ongoing, iterative exercise. +Brittany Sarkisian, who is in the class right now, said that the class is interactive and allowed her to apply the concepts we have been learning in the real world. The students monitored their campaigns over a three week time frame, often not finding an effective ad/keyword/call to action combination until late in the campaign.

Some other helpful tips from Thorne and Brad included bidding 1.5 or 2 times more than the suggested initial bid in AdWords to get a high ranking and improve your click-through rate, setting the geographic area of the search, limiting the campaign to the hours of operation of the business and using Exact match when you have a small budget.  Since mobile ads are more expensive than desktop ads, the students also limited the devices on which their ads were displayed (although we may not have this choice in the future).  Thanks to both Brad and Thorne for coming out and sharing their expertise.

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Three Simple FREE Things NIU Students Can Teach You About Paid Search

Our tag line says that NIU's College of Business is "Where the Classroom Meets the Business World."

As support of this concept, our students just completed a nine week module on paid search during which they planned, implemented, measured and reported the results of a Google AdWords campaign and also used Google Analytics.  The classroom met the business world as students worked with Ideosity, a consulting firm that targets developing websites, content management systems and online catalogs for manufacturers, and AllWorld Machinery, a supplier and manufacturer of replacement parts for manufacturers worldwide.  Other clients were our own Department of Marketing and Interactive Marketing program.  Thanks to our corporate clients that supported the projects and our program with their donations.  Here are three things that we learned that we hope can help you:

1)  Paid search helps your marketing even if you don't have a lot of money.  These clients were all small entities that had not had a lot of past experience with paid search.  I always recommend a paid search campaign to enhance and inform an organic search campaign, even for small firms.  You learn so much even from running the campaign a few weeks about which keywords are most appropriate and what drives firms to you web site.  You don't have to spend a lot of money to learn a lot (our students were on small budgets).  The students were able to help all their clients pinpoint what their customers were really looking for and where potential customers were located.  Just simple adjustments in geographic targeting were able to turn around campaigns from just a few clicks to hundreds within days.

2) Direct marketing calls to action do pay a large roll in paid search success.  In the first weeks of the campaign we tested our ads and keywords.  By the middle of the campaign, if the refinements we made weren't working (lots of traffic, few clicks), the students actively sought to optimize their ads by employing tested calls to action.  Just inserting the word FREE in one ad's call to action resulted in a 7% CTR. (See above).  Adding SAME DAY SHIPPING instead of Call Us Today improved an ad with 0 clicks to one with a 4.76% CTR.  So dig out those old direct marketing books and look on www.convertasaurus.com/ to help figure out what converts.

3) Paid search can tell you about your brand.  In most of our campaigns, unbranded keywords outperformed branded ones.  What better way to tell that you need to increase your brand awareness and improve your positioning?  The next step in our class project is to create plans to promote these brands on social media and engage current customers and prospects.

So there you have it, three simple ways to use Paid Search to improve your marketing efforts:  Do it to learn, use calls to action that convert and use the results to improve your brand image.

If you still don't feel confident doing this by yourself, keep following this blog for more tips.  More importantly, remember, we have forty graduates getting our Interactive Marketing certificate this May.

The students reported that they enjoyed the project, liked learning how to create campaigns and analyze them via metrics and recover quickly from their 'mishaps' along the way.  This kind of nimble thinking is just what companies tell me they are looking for in new graduates.

Hire our May grads by placing your job posting on  "Huskies Get Hired" or email me, Dr. Debra Zahay-Blatz, to join our job listserv:  zahay@niu.edu.

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Report from the "Hot Seat" at Chicago AMA

The @chicagoama 'hot seat' March 14 at Catalyst Ranch, sponsored by the AMA Higher Education SIG, was a lot of fun.  There was a great group of attendees from various aspects of the marketing profession and the 'Ranch' is a great venue for creative thinking.

Here are some key takeaways from the event:


1) Social Marketing on G+ is going to explode, the group (and I)  thought.  The increased visibility on searches and the ability to share and collaborate on other Google products and platforms like drive and email will allow G+ to explode. Martin McGovern from @idealemon said that G+ is a learning center and I got home and found that Google had just launched Think Insights for the digital marketer. I did take a quick look and it appears to be a learning center for Digital Marketing 

2) Content Marketing is going to 'make sense' of social media marketing.  Start with strategy:  what are your strengths and what content should you be creating?  Think about the content that goes with reinforcing your brand image.  This content then can be re-purposed on all forms of social media, thereby integrating messages across platforms (what we used to call IMC).

3) Content Marketing is well-suited to the University environment.  We professors are creators of content.  Once professors understand that by being well-known on the web through content they will be found more easily in searches, that will motivate them to create more online content.  Tell them about Author Rank.  Other incentives may have to be used to get them going and they may have to learn to write like a blogger, not like a professor.

We talked about a number of other things, including the redesign of the Facebook page to include ads in the news feed.  I said that we are publishing a paper on this subject in our Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, on the fact that Facebook visitors don't tend to look at banner ads in the current format and why.  The Journal articles are designed to be read by both practitioners and academics so take a look and what we have published and see if it can help your marketing.

Thanks again for the great event, AMA Higher Education SIG, +Carrie Fuller, +Paul Stark and +Paula Kapacinskas and thanks to the lively and engaged attendees.

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.