NIU's Interactive Marketing Program Career Panel

We had a great career panel last night in Barsema Hall with three outstanding former students. We asked them how they found their job, how long it took, the process, did they have any advice for new grads and a number of other questions. They all took advantage of NIU resources to find their jobs and emphasized the projects from their classes in their job interviews. I was so proud of our recent grads and all they are accomplishing in their careers.

All of these companies are looking to hire recent college grads for entry level positions.

Kevin Cunningham, Marketing Solutions Consultant, 2011: works for Covalent Marketing a boutique consultancy working for the Fortune 500 and has done social media scans and database work. Kevin found his job through networking with a frat brother. From the ELC project where students act as junior consultants he learned he did not want to be pigeonholed and to be a liason between IT and business. The Interactive Marketing Technology course MKTG 470 and the Restaurant.com project were key to his obtaining his job and he wishes he had taken more coding, html or SQL.( COMS 359 is a good fit for learning HTML and the more technical aspects of web design). Kevin constantly learns and uses the netvibes.com dashboard site to organize his information.

Will Johnson, Advertising Specialist, 2010: works for Uline, a b2b shipping supply company in internet advertising, moving to catalogue area and a DM focus and is searching for a replacement so he can move up. Will found his job through 'Meet the Firm' night in a way because he had met the company at that event and when he applied they remembered him. Will delayed graduation to take a search internship at Zebra Technologies and then parlayed the experience into an offer at Uline. Will recommends the OMIS database applications course OMIS 352 for an understanding of how to put databases together from a technical view and how to learn SQL. He found the Google Adwords challenge classroom experience helped him in interviews as well as following up and getting some of the Google certifications. All the guests panelists stressed the importance of looking at data, knowing, how to understand, manipulate and speak intelligently about the company information.

Thorne Washington, Search Specialist, 2011: works for Leapfrog Online, an affiliate marketing, SEO firm that is moving toward agency model. Thorne is a Search engine specialist on the automotive side and writing ad content for Mazda and AutoNation, soon, Kia. He got his job through an Email through the IM Program listserv. Thorne got two offers this way and Leapfrog was a better fit. What really helped Thorne in interviews was stressing the projects he did in his classes; everyone who interviewed him was really interested in the Restaurant.com project and his having had a chance to apply marketing technology tools to a real business. The direct marketing project and its emphasis on Excel was also a help as Thorne manages very large, 8,000 plus rows, spreadsheets for keyword bidding. Thorne has done the Google Adwords certification and pursued that on his own, which impressed his future employer that he was the extra mile and had a passion for the field. Both Thorne and Will read the Google Analytics blog to stay up to date and Thorne has also pursued the Adwords certification on his own.

Zynga Direct means Direct is Social

Social gaming company Zynga recently unveiled Zynga Direct as a way to distribute games directly to players on computers and mobile devices and not just on Facebook. "It’s a platform for a direct relationship with consumers whether on the web, or on mobile, to give you a whole sandbox and create socialness about the games and not just within the games,” Zynga chief executive Mark Pincus said this month at the company’s Unleashed event in San Francisco. This announcement shows that direct marketing is more relevant than ever. Social media applications are wonderful ways to monitor conversations but savvy marketers will use social media to reach out to a customer base. Zynga will learn who its customers are and be able to make more relevant offers to them develop relationships. We recently renamed our Direct Marketing Course Direct and Multichannel marketing to reflect this continued trend.

Tip of the Day: Collect information from your customers on your Facebook page. Make an offer and in exchange collect an email address.

What is modern marketing?

Here is the list of topics from Vivastream that were covered at DMA 2011 in Boston. Vivastream is aa neat application that let show attendees see what topics were covered and participate in conversations about them as well as get more information on the sessions and otehr atteendes, Direct and Digital are truly merged I think. I am studying the language of marketing for another project that is not limited to Direct and Digital. Is this what your marketing life is like?

Acquisition Advanced Advertising Affiliate Marketing Affiliate Programs Analytics Android App Applications Apps Attribution Augmented Reality B2b B2b Marketing Behavioral Behavioral Targeting Blackberry Blogging Blogs Bookmarking Brand Experience Brand Marketing Broadcast Media Buying Business Analytics Business Insights Call Centers Campaign Strategy Catalog Cognitive Advertising Compliance Consumption Content Content Marketing Copy Copywriting Coupons CPA Networks CPS Creative Creativity CRM Cross-Channel Culture Customer Acquisition Customer Data Customer Experience Customer Insights Customer Intelligence Customer Value Customer-Centricity Data Data Breach Data Governance Data Integration Data Management Data Mining Data Optimization Database Marketing Deliverability Design Development Device Id Devices Digital Direct Direct Mail Direct Marketing DRTV Dynamic Content Ecommerce Email Marketing Email Prospecting Facebook Free Content Fund Raising Gamification Gaming Green Highmark Human Behavior Triggers Inbox Influencer Information Overload Inserts Insights Integrated Marketing Interactive TV IPhone KPIs Lead Generation Lifecycle List Rental Local Search Location Location Based Services Location-Based Loyalty Mail Market Research Marketing Database Marketing Definition Marketing Mix Modeling Media Media Convergence Media Mix Message Recall Metrics Mobile Mobile Apps Mobile Commerce Mobile Coupons Mobile Loyalty Mobile Marketing Mobile Web Modeling Multi-Channel Multichannel Marketing Multivariable Testing New Media Offers Online Online Advertising Online Display Online Recognition Payment Processing Predictive Modeling Print Privacy Process Productivity Profiling Purchase Data QR Codes Real-Time Real-Time Execution Real-Time Marketing Recency-Frequency Recognition Regulation Renewals Retail Networks Retention Renewals Retail Networks Retention Revenue Growth Rewards ROI Scoring Search Search Engine Marketing Security Segmentation Sentiment SEO Share Of Wallet Site Visits Small Business SMS Social Social Business Social CRM Social Listening Social Marketing Social Media Social Media Data Social Metrics Social Networks Social. Mobile Spend Data Structured Data Structured Unstructured Data Tablets Targeting Television Testing The Marketing Funnel Trends Trigger Triggered Communications Twitter Unstructured Data Value Optimization Video Walled Gardens Website Usability Website Zero Moment Of Truth

Third Edition Internet Marketing Text by Roberts and Zahay

I was flattered earlier in the year to be asked to co-author one of the leading texts in Internet Marketing. My co-author MaryLou Roberts and I learned that the ISBN for the 3rd edition of Internet Marketing: Integrating Online and Offline Strategies, Roberts and Zahay, is available. ISBN 9781133625902.

There's a nice site for the new edition

The site contains a detailed Table of Contents that should help people plan courses. We cover the strategic use of internet and its direct marketing roots as well as a number of different acquisition and retention strategies such as search, social and email as well as measurement and future trends.

Shipment for the book is early/mid January. If that's a problem for any instructors, let me or MaryLou know and we will see what we can do for you to help you with your class.

NIU IM Student learns about social media firsthand

Tyler Miller, an Interactive Marketing senior student reports on his social media internship and says , "Over the summer I interned at an experiential marketing agency in downtown Chicago, Legacy Marketing Partners. They are currently on Event Marketer Magazine’s “Top 100 Agencies”. While there, I worked alongside their social media guru and aided her in developing projects for clients.

My work consisted partly of online research into what trends were and who the top influencers were on social media for particular interests and industries. The clients I worked on projects for were all major national and multi-national brands, ranging from alcohol brands to appliance brands to quick service restaurants. During my time there I helped develop ideas for how social media could be used to enhance real world events, as well as programs that would take place entirely online. I was afforded the opportunity to help with projects for current clients and for potential business.

I learned a lot about all the work that goes into a social media campaign and how social media campaigns tie in with those in other channels. I was well prepared for this experience through my classes at NIU where we had already had some exposure to social media marketing and had worked with a social media tool. However, in my internship I also learned a lot that can't be taught in the classroom, such as the dynamics of an agency, how agencies run, how they work with clients, and how they often work with other agencies."

NIU's Interactive Marketing Program Update

At Northern Illinois University, we have had our Interactive Marketing area since the early 00's and graduated our first students with a certificate in Interactive Marketing in 2007. The program is both online and offline channels and includes direct (where we teach email as a direct channel), imc, database marketing, Internet marketing (search, social, web design, etc.), and marketing technology where they drive traffic to a live web site acting as affiliates for Restaurant.com with two channels of their choice (10% of traffic is then donated back to charity). This marketing technology course is also taught as part of the Google Adwords challenge.

Forty students a year receive our certificate on their transcript and work for a variety of companies. Marketing Majors get a traditional major and then take four out of five courses in this area. We teach the managerial and strategic side, but students learn ExactTarget, Alterian's SM2, SPSS/Modeler and a variety of other technologies.

Let me know if you are interested in hiring our graduates for internships or full time positions or in joining our advisory board and helping us chart our direction.

Students work to beat benchmark cluster

This semester in Database Marketing we had the unique opportunity to work on some real-life data from Restaurant.com, a generous sponsor of our program. Here is a picture of my students working on a unique two-step cluster model to try to create a segmentation scheme better on some variable than the one that was presented by Restaurant.com. The students have a number of variables to choose from to create their clusters and I have a picture above of their hard work...is that steam I see coming from their heads or is it just the promise of extra credit?

I just came back from the DMEF/DMA conferences and a lot of other educators cannot believe what our students can do in analytics at an undergraduate level. After great preparation in our Marketing Research class, the students are able to analyze augmented customer databases and solve real-world problems using SPSS as a data analysis tool. Many of our students have gone to work at Nielson, Millward Brown and others and the analytical preparation they received has helped them on the job. Let us know if you need recent grads with these skills.