Brad Kleinman from OMI shares Facebook Marketing tips with NIU Students

Brad Kleinman Director of Education from OMI (Online Marketing Institute/Online Marketing Connect) spoke to an overflowing room of over seventy students last night on the nuts and bolts Facebook marketing.

One of the things that I think is relevant to our class project in driving traffic to the Restaurant.com site is the concept that you can't 'set it and forget it' in Facebook (or any online marketing). In a three week project like this one, we need to check the progress of our campaigns every day. In terms of Facebook marketing, post and update frequently.

I also thought that Brad did a good job of articulating the benefits of a fan page versus a group in Facebook. In talking about the advantages of ability to customize, add in applications, have a vanity URL(if you have over 25 fans) and access Facebook Insights capability which will tell you page metrics, Brad really made the case for using the fan page.

Brad also talked about measuring both fan size and interactions and quality and quantity of posts to develop an intelligent understanding of how the fan page is benefiting your organization. Brad also suggested a variety of ways to keep your page fresh and update frequently. These suggestions included:

•Publish informative pieces of content such as interesting articles and videos

•Post and tag photos of customers, business associates, co-workers, and customers

•Upload and tag video clips of your organization in action or a program in session

•List an event for an open house or a social event for your prospects

•Write a note about upcoming programs or success of a recent event

•Ask a question through a poll or survey about how you can help

•Reward your fans with giveaways, sweepstakes, or coupons

•Keep your Facebook page up to date with RSS

There was a lot more in the talk so if you attended the event, check out the slides I just sent.

If you are just interested in learning more from Brad, contact him at: Brad@OnlineMarketingConnect.com

to posts from fans

Restaurant.com project in full swing at NIU

This semester in Marketing 470 we are doing something quite unique. The students are learning campaign management 'on the job' by acting as affiliates and driving traffic to the Restaurant.com (the company that sponsors my professorship) website. The students have picked two media channels, such as email, adwords, twitter, social media and blogs and have planned their campaigns and are now implementing. They will track the progress of their campaigns through landing pages and promotion codes that can be linked to their groups and get an idea of what it is like to run a campaign first hand.

This week I shared some of my project management tips with the class. Follow through, follow through, follow through is the main thing that my father always taught me and this principle really applies to project management. The students need to get information from personnel at R.com and are learning to follow up to make sure they meet their project goals. I emphasized that they need to complete the project in three weeks and although I put some 'slack time' in the schedule, another project management concept, they need to make sure they begin this week and then can measure the results of week one and make changes for week two, etc.

I also emphasized the importance of proofreading and checking the facts of every campaign. We had a guest speaker earlier in the semester that told us some 'war stories' about when things are not correct in marketing campaigns and the problems created by mistakes and how costly these mistakes can be. I encouraged each group to check their landing pages and make sure they look correct. Looks like the teams are up and running to a good start. Any other advice for our grads?

Okner Symposium highlights IM grad's success

I talked a few months ago about Will Johnson, who is an Internet Marketing Specialist at Uline, managing several major search campaigns. Dr Labrecque and I attended CADMEF's Okner Symposium at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater last Friday with our Internet and Marketing Technology classes and were delighted that Will was featured on the career panel for recent graduates.

Upon reflection, I think what distinguished Will in his job search was that he was focused and directed and that he explored all possibilities. Will did not just look online. He attended job fairs and networking events and contact targeted companies he thought would be a good fit.

Will delayed his graduation by a semester to take an internship at Zebra Technologies which led right to a job a Uline. Will knew that he wanted search as an initial career and at the end of his internship targeted companies that he thought would be a good fit. Will also remembered meeting Uline at a Meet the Firm night last year and, upon investigating further, saw there were some search jobs open. He was honest and said he had some experience at Zebra and then some experience from our Google Adwords Challenge last year but did not exaggerate. His focus, perseverance and integrity won out and Will is started on an excellent career. Not bad for someone who graduated two months ago. Congratulations, Will and stay in touch!

Alterian's SM2 hits the NIU campus!

This past week and a half we have had Alterian in our classroom twice in Marketing Technology to learn about how to analyze social media data. We learned some general background on social media and then learned the SM2 tool for use in the class project. What I learned is that it is important to look at not only frequency of mention as well as sentiment. Those companies that were ranked highest in mentions for the Super Bowl were not necessarily those that ranked highest in terms of sentiment.

Using SM2 I also realized how much of an art as well as a science these tools are. Looking through the social media postings for a particular topic I got a good feeling for the company I was researching in terms of their major competitors and how people think about the brand. As a quantitative researcher I was worried about how representative the sample was and how to really quantify some of this 'squishy' data. Still, SM2 is helpful in understanding how people think about your brand and we have emphasized the importance of technology for brand building in our class.

Is social media monitoring 'squishy' or valuable?

Interview Tips from Meet the Firm Night at NIU

I heard the following panel speak on career advice for new graduates on Monday, February 7 at NIU's Meet the Firm Night:

Drew Butts, Enterprise Holdings, Matt McClusky, Aerotek, Erin Quinlan, McKesson Pharmaceutical Group, Jerry Keyes, White Lodging

The panel gave some good advice for new graduates and said some things I have noticed myself. One, they said that students on their resumes need to indicate how they can help the company, not what the company can do for them. The panel also said to be careful asking about time off, salary and vacation until the company brings these things up. Asking these questions too soon makes it seem like you are only interested in benefits and not benefiting the company. Finally, I noticed that the panel did not appreciate job candidates that do not do research before the interview. It is great to go in with a problem and possible solution to show that you know what you are talking about and understand the company. Lynn Hazan is coming this week to talk to our students so we hope that she will give us some other great ideas. Feel free to post other interview tips.

Yahoo and AOL jockey for brand positions

We have been talking in class about the large web portals. Yahoo and AOL are struggling to create a unique, differentiating brand positioning and losing users compared to Google and Facebook. In class, we suggested that Yahoo could beef up its emphasis on media but it looks like AOL is planning take that brand positioning with the recent purchase of the Huffington Post. I heard in a podcast by The Economist today that AOL hired more new journalists that any other media outlet this past year, about 700. So what's left for Yahoo?

Yahoo's number of unique users rose last year but the amount of time spent dropped by 10 percent. Facebook's time spent increased by 79 percent and Facebook also boasts some of the most loyal users in the business.

In class we talked about another possible positioning for Yahoo being extending the 'My Yahoo' concept and this week the Wall Street Journal this week (February 7th) reports that Yahoo is seeking to beef up the site's personalized content, particularly for mobile iPhone and Android applications, creating online mobile magazines unique to each user. Will this approach work?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704858404576129161854139964.html

Students learn Google Adwords this week

We are moving into a phase of the course where we will be preparing our project plan for the Restuarant.com project and some students may choose to run a google adwords campaign. So we delved into adwords as a program in a bit more detail this week, I thought the most interesting aspect of the adwords videos we looked at was the notion of having ads that are specific and include what we would call in 'direct marketing' a 'call to action.' For example, for a Valentine's Day ad include specific information on the ad, like free shipping on roses if you click now, rather than just posting an ad for a florist shop.

Keywords selected that are tightly tied to the ad are also likely to improve quality score. It always amazes me how many advertisers still don't adhere to these good principles, particularly using a destination URL or landing page to track their campaign. Here is a link to one of the videos with some good tips for adwords.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djjN9zZNkYI&feature=channel

Defining Direct Marketing in an Interactive Age

Ron Jacobs of Jacks & Clevenger asks us to define Direct Marketing for our new world of multichannel, interactive media in the latest copy of CADM's ADMARKS. I like the DMA definition because it includes multiple media, a database and our old DM friend, measurability. Any Comments?

•An organized and planned system of contacts

•Using a variety of media

•Seeking to produce a lead or an order

•Developing and maintaining a database

•Measurable in cost and results

•Expandable with confidence (DMA)

I think that this definition does not include some of the aspects of interactive marketing such as collaborative social media tools that are not in total control of the marketer.

Marketing Automation is the next phase of internet marketing

Tuesday in class we talked about maketing automation. We looked at an example from Allstate where they are using marketing technology to improve their lead capture and demand generation process.

I said that I had watched internet marketing evolve from static banner ads, to email marketing, to search engine marketing, to interactive and well-placed contextual advertising, to social media marketing and now to the point where marketers want to track and measure the results of all their efforts on an integrated media 'dashboard.' We will have Acton software demonstrate their solution and have also looked at some material from Marketo. We analyzed Exact Target's stated positioning statement from their web site and see that that company also wants to be an integrated marketing solution.

I then asked a discussion question for next Thursday: What would a dashboard for your Restaurant.com project look like? Do you agree that marketing automation is the next phase in the evolution of the internet marketing?

Mktg Tech Class learns salesforce and salesgenie interfaces

This week I reviewed the class sales genie assignment. The assignment was to search salesgenie and download not more than 100 leads of companies that might be of interest for a career search.

Although some had trouble with the search interface to begin with, students were favorably impressed with the amount of information that could be downloaded in a short period of time. Almost everyone said the biggest challenge was figuring out what they wanted to do, what kind of company they wanted to target, not the tool itself.

We have been talking about strategy in class regarding marketing technology and I would ask you to think about yourselves in this context as you enter the job market. That is to say, what makes you unique and what can you offer?

There will be some more sales genie sign up times as we work on the project. Let me know if you want to do some more searches. You have a unique opportunity to use your salesforce.com login to manage your job search this semester. We loaded the salesgenie leads into salesforce and you can add others manually or through the uploading process.

So what makes you unique?