Well, let me tell you…
Yep, to Blue Sky Factory, an email marketing provider, as Vice President of Strategy and Innovation.
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Financial aid swansong: Mass. College Goal Sunday
It’s fitting that my last work in the world of financial aid was to volunteer at Massachusetts College Goal Sunday. This year’s CGS was significantly different for me personally than in years past for several reasons.
First, this is the first year I’ve presented at College Goal Sunday.
Second, this is the last time I’ll be working in the financial aid industry after my departure at Edvisors.
Third, the differences in the FAFSA and FAFSA on the Web worksheets this made for a more complex, more challenging College Goal Sunday than ever before.
Let’s start with the first – relatively late in the process of creating this event, I was asked to present for the Framingham/Metrowest site. I spent some time reviewing and editing the presentation beforehand, working with the national College Goal Sunday committee to make it a little more streamlined…
… but the projector at our site didn’t work, so I ended up winging it instead. The truest test of a presenter is when everything goes wrong and that lovely slide deck you made just flat out doesn’t work. How well do you know your stuff? I’m proud to say that having none of my slides didn’t compromise the presentation at all – and in fact might have helped because the audience then HAD to listen to me and couldn’t mix up their verbal brains trying to read slides and listen to me talk at the same time.
On the second point, I can say pretty much whatever I want now that I no longer work in the industry. This is rather liberating.
Here’s the biggest challenge that we had at this year’s College Goal Sunday. The form given to students and families, the FAFSA on the Web Worksheet, is basically not worth the paper it’s printed on. It’s supposed to make the FAFSA process easier and more friendly, but instead makes it deeply confusing and frustrating for many students.
If you look at the slide deck for presenters, there are half a dozen slides which are all labeled, “Important question not on the worksheet”. That the College Goal Sunday committee had to go to these lengths is a sad commentary on how poorly the government’s forms were created with regard to the online application. Things that are omitted? Well, for starters, questions like assets (cash on hand, in savings and checking – vital financial aid information) don’t appear anywhere on the worksheets but are in the online application. Someone just using the worksheets would be rather startled to be asked for a bunch of information that isn’t in their preparatory worksheets.
Other questions that are deeply flawed? One of the biggest showstoppers – and one that caused more than one FAFSA application to completely fail – is the question about income tax paid in 2009. Again, this doesn’t appear anywhere on the worksheets. However, the wording in the online application is incredibly vague:
“Enter the amount of your income tax for 2009”.
This single question caused more errors and blowups in the application than any other, of the families I worked with. What should the question actually say?
“How much did you pay to Uncle Sam in taxes (NOT withholding, not your annual income, not anything other than what’s on line 55 of your IRS 1040) last year?”
Very few of the families who completed the FAFSA got this question down in the first attempt. Many got to the end of the application and were confronted with an error correction screen saying that the numbers in their application didn’t add up.
Another doozy, one that can affect your financial aid significantly in some cases? There’s a question about your adjusted gross income in 2009. In the online application, there’s a “helpful calculator” which supposedly can help families estimate how much their AGI is. As far as I can tell, this calculator doesn’t do anything useful, which is a shame since there are several adjustments that CAN change your adjusted gross income, which in turn can change your financial aid eligibility, such as the tuition and fees adjustment or the student loan interest adjustment. None of these are accounted for in the online application.
There are also some interesting interface issues with the online version of the FAFSA, one of which is a dealbreaker of sorts for people looking for help. Along the righthand side of the application, there are floating help boxes that change contextually based on what question you’re on. Lots of students and families today said they couldn’t find the help system at all…
… because they thought those boxes were ads. They’re strategically located in almost the exact same spot as you’d run a skyscraper banner ad, and if you look at studies of how our brains interact with web pages, we nearly automatically ignore advertisements like banner ads.
I’ve nothing but positive remarks for the staff and volunteers for this year’s College Goal Sunday. As usual, everyone who volunteered did so out of the goodness of their hearts, giving up a Sunday afternoon to help students and families figure out the world of financial aid and get them started on that path. I commend the folks at MASFAA and its partners for continuing to make this important day happen every year. I just wish Uncle Sam made it easier for those families to get through the paperwork to accomplish their educational goals.
Finally, College Goal Sunday was a great note to end my career in financial aid on. Nothing’s better than helping other people, and that’s a great way to go out.
Stay tuned tomorrow at noon eastern time for where I’m going next…
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I’ve said in the past that marketing is the art of creating demand for your ideas, but in terms of something measurable and impactful, what does this mean? What does marketing make? Yes, it creates things like ads, Twitter accounts, email, etc. – but those are the tools to execute the mission of marketing. What does marketing actually do that’s measurable and meaningful?
Throw out all your other metrics. Followers on twitter, hits to your web site, mentions in the media. Toss them all.
The only metric that matters is this: qualified leads.
On the continuum of business, marketing (which includes marketing, advertising, and PR) takes media and audience as its raw materials and makes qualified leads.
Sales takes those raw materials, those leads, and makes them into customers.
Product design and customer service take those raw materials, those customers, and turns them into evangelists.
Everyone and everything that’s doing marketing makes qualified leads. We may not call them as such – we might call them volunteers for the non-profit, new members to the congregation, new players in the Warcraft guild – but they are.
I’m being a little facetious when I say toss out everything else – but not by much. Things like site traffic, media mentions, etc. are good diagnostic measures to tell you what’s happening with individual tools and processes, but at the end of the day, the only metric that shows you the results of your actions is the number of qualified leads that you pass on to sales to convert. For small businesses especially, marketing, sales, and service may be the same person, the same sole proprietor, but the count of qualified leads is an important number, not to be missed or glossed over.
Finally, metrics that are really trendy and popular, like ROI, are built on qualified leads. You can’t compute Return on Investment if you have no idea what the Return is, and you can’t get a Return on your Investment until you have some leads for Sales to turn into business. Worry later about ROI and worry more now about how many leads Sales has to work with.
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Steve Jobs and gang did a phenomenal job introducing the iPad for consumers. Books! Movies! Music! Games!
…but…
The iPad has the potential to make sales and marketing people into legends. Take any sales demo you’ve ever done. Take any presentation you’ve ever done. Now take it on the road. Got a prospect you want to chat things over with in a coffee shop? Bring out your Keynote app (iWork for the iPad) and you’re showing your deck or demo on a glass 10 inch screen without all the hassle of keyboards, mice, remotes, or other crap. Just open your leather binder and show the show.
… and then …
Remember: iPhone apps run on iPad out of the box.
So you swap from your slide deck to your Salesforce.com iPhone app. You take the order right there. You’re done, and you’re on a device that looks as slick as your product or service hopefully is. No Salesforce? Use iWork’s Numbers app and fill in your order spreadsheets, or fire up Safari and complete the lead form on your web site because you’ve got 3G wherever you’ve got good mobile service.
Professional speaker? The Keynote Remote app for the iPhone will run out of the box on the iPad. Instead of squinting at your iPhone while using it as a remote for your Keynote presentations (because your laptop is tethered to the projector), you have a gorgeous way to display your speaker notes and control the show from the podium. Just slap your iPad on the podium and swipe its screen to change slides, see your speaker notes, and not miss a beat. If you’ve ever presented professionally and wished that the venue could provide a speaker’s screen, the iPad is now that screen for you regardless of venue.
Image: Engadget
Yes, you’ll be able to handle all the mundane things that iWork and other iPhone apps can do, but the large, large screen will be perfect for when you’re at trade shows, conferences, and coffee shops as a way of showing your customers and prospects all the goods you have to offer without lugging an entire IT department around with you. Anyone who’s ever hung out with me at a conference knows that I lug a server farm with me – and I probably still will to some degree, but this device certainly will make life easier for the working professional. As a bonus for conference-goers, when the venue Wi-Fi implodes – as it always does – your iPad will feed your data addiction with its 3G connection.
I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these.
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Everyone and their cousin in marketing is panicking about your mobile strategy.
Some of this is true. Before you rush headlong into deploying mobile everything and trying to convert every last bit of marketing collateral you’ve got into something mobile, think. Think for a few moments about mobile. What things do you like and not like about mobile?
I’ll give you an easy one. Take a look at the FAFSA form, the financial aid form that I’ve spent the last 7 years studying, presenting, and guiding people through. This form is about 108 questions long.
No matter how good your mobile platform is, no matter how awesome or shiny your mobile device is, you will not fill out the FAFSA on a keyboard – real or virtual – that’s the size of chicklets and retain your sanity after 108 form fields. Now, will there be one or two users among your many that will try? Of course. Is the amount of time and effort needed to develop a pure mobile implementation of the FAFSA justified for those two users a year? I’d have to say probably not.
Start with a mobile browsing strategy.
It’s absolutely true that mobile will be an integral part of your online marketing strategy over this year and coming years. We haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible. That said, the desktop/laptop isn’t going anywhere either – so don’t throw everything away for a future promise that isn’t here just yet (though it’s arriving more every day).
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Find yourself overwhelmed with reporting options in Google Analytics? Not sure where to start your analysis on a regular basis? It does, after all, contain nearly everything and the kitchen sink.
Here’s an easy way to get started and a great feature to show to your team. It’s Intelligence (beta). Go to your Google Analytics, click Intelligence, and select Weekly Reports. (daily’s not necessarily all that helpful)
Now you can see major changes in your analytics data from one screen, like a “what’s new” for your data. In the example below, I can see that referrals to this site were up, as were new visitors. That tells me that folks are coming here from links on other sites. If you look on the right hand side, Google even ranks the different pieces of information by what it thinks are events of greater or lesser significance.
Click the Group by switch to change from metric to dimension – this is more or less like a simple PivotTable for the intelligence. Now, I can see that my referrals, which were up in the previous statistics, had some interesting behaviors. Their bounce rate was lower and their time on site was higher. This tells me that whatever they were coming to this site for, they found it (bounce rate dropped) and it was compelling enough that they stuck around (time on site).
Armed with this information, I can take a look at the content I created that week and any links I might have shared on Twitter, Facebook, or other places I share.
The Intelligence feature isn’t a replacement for hardcore analytics analysis by any means, but it’s a great way to start your day if you manage a web site. Intelligence will give you some initial areas to start digging into, some things to investigate as you prepare for your day.
Try it out!
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Over the past week, I’ve had the opportunity to have some great conversations with companies, individuals, and groups looking for my help growing their businesses (as I’ll be leaving Edvisors at the end of the month). There’s been a common question among all of them:
How do we get more traffic to X?
This is the wrong question to be asking, folks. Yes, absolutely, more feet in the door is critical to long term growth, but you don’t start fixing or improving your business at the top of the funnel.
You start at the bottom.
Which would you rather have? A web site with 1 million visitors a year that converts 0.5% of them, or a web site with 20,000 visitors a year that converts 30% of them? Everyone clamoring for more traffic says “I want the million visitors!” but the answer is the latter, in case you’re mathematically disinclined.
Fix your funnel from the bottom up. Why? Two reasons – you make the conversion engine more efficient, so when it’s time to build traffic, you can make use of it, and the further down the funnel you go, the more control over its outcome you have.
If you don’t know what your funnel is, now’s a good time to map it out. I suggest this order:
Start at the bottom, which is evangelists, the people who love you so much that they spread your message for free on your behalf. If your product or service sucks, you won’t have evangelists. If your customer service sucks, you won’t have evangelists. Put time and energy into making a killer product and helping people make use of it, and every referral you get from your evangelists will bring gold to your doorstep.
Making customers is a function of sales. If sales can’t take a qualified lead and turn it into a customer most of the time, your sales process is broken or your sales team sucks. Ask your leads why they didn’t become customers, and fix that. Sales force automation tools can give you more insights into aggregate info about who tends to convert or doesn’t convert, but nothing beats asking the folks who didn’t buy.
Making traffic into leads is a function of marketing. You want as many qualified leads as possible – so if you’re not turning your traffic into leads, chances are marketing’s not doing its job demonstrating the value of what you have for sale, or the mechanism for conversion to a lead is broken. Are your web site forms working at all? Have you tested using things like Google Optimizer? If your lead quality is poor, are you asking the right questions and filtering out the garbage before your sales force has to handle it?
Building awareness and getting traffic is what you handle last – as said earlier, the higher up the funnel, the less you have control over the outcome. This is where stuff like search engine optimization, social media, and the variety of traffic building mechanisms come into play, and this is where most folks think you should start, but it’s where you finish.
Make sure the engine is working before you start blinging the shell of your car. More traffic without a conversion engine is just wasting your bandwidth, your resources, and your time.
Photo credit: Chris Brogan
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I had an interesting conversation last night with a photographer friend who said he faced a dichotomy in his work: on the one hand, he doesn’t overly care about others’ opinions, and on the other hand, he feels as though he should shoot for views as the best way of seeing how his work is being valued as he doesn’t sell his photos.
To me, there’s no dichotomy here. We focus on things like views of a photo, followers, retweets, fans on a fan page, etc. because these are the measures and metrics we know about. This is the best we have to work with, for the most part, and so valuing them isn’t wrong or crass. In the absence of other, better metrics, we value what we know.
To alleviate my friend’s dichotomy, I suggested he consider other metrics that would more accurately gauge his work – in essence, expanding what he knows about his work and how people perceive it. Sales, of course, is one such measure. It’s easy to click follow or subscribe or friend someone, but it’s much more of a commitment to open your wallet and purchase the work of an artist. You have to be much more invested in it to put up some money.
If you’re in it for the love and not the money – which is perfectly okay and good – dig deeper into your analytics. Last night in my USF Advanced Social Media course, I talked a bit about using Google Analytics to measure inflows and outflows to social networks as a way of better gauging what people are doing with your stuff. Here’s two examples.
1. Measuring outflows. Using Google Analytics’ virtual pageviews, you can tell whether that giant Twitter badge on your blog is worth keeping around. Set up links using an arbitrary virtual pageview, and every time someone clicks out to a social site or platform from your blog or destination site, you’ll know. That giant “BE MAH FRIEND” badge may be taking up valuable real estate for little value. Add a virtual page view to high value links or affiliate links as a sanity check for your affiliate reporting, too.
Example code – no virtual page view:
Example code with virtual page view:
<a onclick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview (‘/vpv-twitter-text-link’);” href=”https://twitter.com/cspenn”>My twitter account</a>
This will show up in your Google Analytics under Content. Filter for the virtual page name to see how popular it is. (/vpv-twitter-text-link in the example above, can be anything you want it to be, like /omg-im-linking-to-chris-brogan for example)
2. Measuring inflows. Nearly everyone on Twitter uses bit.ly or another URL shortener to make stuff easier to share. Go the extra step and use the Analytics URL Builder so that you can see traffic from individual social links you’ve shared – and how well they convert.
Take the link to your site, blog, or destination that you were going to share, feed it to the URL builder, append some useful data (did you share it on Twitter? Facebook? is it PPC? shared to a specific user? Customize as you like!), then feed the Google Analytics enhanced link to bit.ly.
Now, when you share that link, you’ll see exactly where your traffic is coming from and more importantly, you’ll see how your traffic does on your site. You can isolate, for example, how many people from an individual tweet bought something or downloaded an eBook. It’s laborious to do this with every single thing you share, but for high value stuff, this is the way to go.
For my photographer friend, every link he places to his photos (or embedded photo on his site) should have either an inflow or outflow, and if he had some engagement metric like a free eBook download, he’d begin to know more than just views about his photos. He could see how many people went from a tweet to his photo blog to subscribe to download, and if someday he chose to sell his photos, he’d need only add that to Google Analytics to deepen his understanding of his audience.
Try out these tools and see if you can make them work for you.
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World of Warcraft has in-game holidays that closely mirror many real world holidays, such as Pilgrim’s Bounty (Thanksgiving), the Feast of Winter Veil (Christmas/Hanukkah), Noblegarden (Easter), Midsummer Fire Festival (Fourth of July), and so forth.
Savvy auction house marketers know exactly what goods and commodities are needed for each holiday and have them up for auction the moment the holidays begin, often at ludicrous markups. For example, for the Feast of Winter Veil, small eggs used to cook gingerbread cookies and egg nog, normally for sale for 50 silver (think 50 cents), rocket up in price by crafty salesmen to 9-15 gold each (think 9-15) for a few days until the laggards in the market realize the holiday’s on and start undercutting prices.
Here’s the funny thing: the in-game calendar is published months ahead of the actual events, in the game and on Blizzard Entertainment’s web site. Every player of the game is given in-game notices in major cities about the impending holiday. There’s plenty of time to stock up the goods you need to sell…
… but few ever do. Few are willing to plan that far ahead, to farm the eggs or deeprock salt ahead of time and be ready for the doors to burst open the moment the holiday starts. As a result, those few who look at the calendar and plan accordingly reap huge profits.
So what does this have to do with blogging? The same applies in the blogosphere as in Azeroth. Google Calendar has a holidays calendar for every nation in the world. It lets you see all the major holidays you could possibly want, for your country or others, for different religions, for just about anything that you can stick on a calendar and call a holiday.
The power bloggers can look at the calendar and decide in advance, like an editorial calendar, what should happen in the lead up to the holidays on the calendar. Do you blog about marketing? You know when Valentine’s Day is – work out now what things you want to blog about as that holiday approaches. Do you blog about history? Seems like everyone’s got a holiday about them.
Having your blog posts published in advance of the holidays ensures that search engines can index your content. Having a decent social network ensures that you can move the needle in real-time search on the day before and day of the holiday. Having time to plan ahead lets you come up with creative memes that can stick well ahead of time – you can even beta test memes and hashtags to your current followers to see who says “heh, that’s clever” or the equivalent reaction you’re looking for.
You’ve got the calendar in front of you. The holidays on it are not a secret by any means, but know that most everyone in blogging and social media is probably going to wing it at best on the holiday. Farm your small eggs and deeprock salt now so that in 2010, you can profit handsomely when the times are right.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go hit some rock elementals for deeprock salt. We sold out this year, so I’ve got a year to farm for next Winter Veil.
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So, a scant 11 days ago I blogged about making this year a year of playing to your strengths. Karma has a funny way of making you walk the talk, because a few days later Edvisors, the company I’ve been with for six and a half years, and I agreed to part ways. We each have different strengths, and we both want to take those strengths in different directions. For example, my love of things like public speaking, new marketing, social media, and the ever-evolving relationship between marketing and technology are areas I want to more fully explore, and those don’t always integrate with the world of financial aid as well as they should.
If we’ve worked together in my work at Edvisors, you’ll likely get an update as to whom you’ll be working with next. If we’ve collaborated in the past, I hope to do so again, especially as there are several opportunities I’m looking at for my next move that promise increased collaboration and exploration. I’ll still remain connected to financial aid here and there; for example, I’ll still be presenting at College Goal Sunday at the end of the month.
As this transition progresses, a few things are on my mind:
I’m eager and excited about the fresh starts ahead. There’s so much opportunity, so many different ways we can make a difference together. I’m ever thankful and grateful for everyone who subscribes to this blog, who listens to Marketing Over Coffee, who has stayed in touch on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn over the years. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the year will bring.
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