Fuzzy Content

I have two brothers - one in high school, the other a freshman in college. It stunned me to hear from the industry that email is a dead communication vehicle for high school students when I know my two little brothers both have (and check) gmail accounts.

At eduWeb, I caught Karlyn Morrissette’s session on recruiting using interactive media (podcast). She discussed all formats to get the attention of high school students, with email being one of them. That’s the important takeaway…email being one of them.

News.com had an article that put this well for me. Email is not dead…but rather their forum to ‘talk to adults.’ For those of you in the admissions field, you and your institution are adults. When it’s time to move the relationship forward, email does it.

Catching their attention may be in other formats. Back to Karlyn’s session, she mentioned MySpace as one of her more popular forms to engage students and push messages. When the important steps come, or more personal communication, email seems to be the one that most teens will head to.

Find ways to incorporate email, social networking, and text messaging where appropriate. More importantly, ask teens when and how they want to be communicated with. You’d be surprised that some will give you a home telephone number. You’ll also be surprised when the only thing you get from them is a Facebook account. Regardless, adapt to them.

For my two little brothers, if I want to catch their attention, I facebook them. If I want to ask them a question, I message them on facebook or myspace. If I need them right away, I text them. If I just want to send them something, I gmail them. It just works.

I had a chance to attend SXSW earlier this month in Austin. The leaders of the Web converge every year on this conference, and it’s an opportunity to rub shoulders with these giants.

I took particular interest in the sessions that were discussing the direction and uses of the Web’s place on mobile devices. I’ve been a user of the Web on my treo, but that certainly doesn’t make me an expert.

I wasn’t alone. Surprisingly, my Web brethren see this as early on as well. During one particular session, a couple of questions were asked on the usage of the Web on their mobile device and the crowd’s reaction was sparing.

This is going to sound odd, but that question was asked to the wrong people. Although we are the most Web-savvy, in my opinion, we aren’t necessarily the ideal end users. As I walk across college campuses, through airports, and talk with my brothers (high school aged, college bound), I recognize that these are the people that rely on Mobile Web.

For teens and college students, MoSoSo (or Mobile Social Networking Software) like dodgeball and sociallight are becoming addictive applications on their cell phones. Beyond texting, it allows you to find friends. It allows you to see where people are in relation to you. Most importantly, it provides a constant connection between you and your friends. For these cell phone users, mobile Web means controllable communication. It’s opt-in, it’s instant, and it’s constant.

For the heavy travelers, common applications and communication are a plus (like email and chat), but local information must be accessible. Directions (I use GoogleMaps), local restaurants and activities, and flight status are the most common that I see. On the road, these people want to feel like they are not outsiders. The Mobile Web allows the same world of information a computer provides, but no tie to the laptop.

That’s the thing about Mobile Web. Although it’s not here for all of us yet, it’s here for a large demographic. Here are the handful of concepts Mobile Web must provide:

• Quick. For services on the Web, it must download fast. I can’t wait for a 300Kb page to load when all I care about is clickthrough navigation.
• Constant. Like dodgeball or twitter, it’s always on. I don’t need to keep logging in or refreshing. It is as much part of my phone as the phone itself.
• Convenient. I won’t think I need a service until I actually need it. If it is a pain to log in or register or download, it’s not a convenient service.
• Relevant. Location-based information is the most relevant for cell phone users. If I am at a conference, I want to see the schedule and nightlife (thank you sxsw.mobi). If I am looking for a restaurant, I better be able to punch in a zipcode or be picked up by GPS.
• Singular. A one-stop shop for all relevant services would be great, but that’s a world that is pretty far away. I want GoogleMaps to do one thing and Dodgeball to do another.
• Cheap or Free. Per-use service is only beneficial when it is unsuccessful, if that makes sense. If I love texting, I don’t want to pay for every message. One-time or monthly fees that are reasonable make me use services.

It’s still early on in Mobile Web, which brings opportunity. In three years, a cell phone is more a part of communication for people than computers…let’s find the right applications.

I don’t claim that this is an original thought, but I wanted to put it out there for discussion. I just read an e-newsletter that talked about demographics of the U.S. population and, in a separate section, how colleges and universities can use Facebook for marketing.

It made me think about what we’ll be doing to attract the class of 2011. Here’s the prediction:

• Social networking *sites* will be irrelevant as each reader (user) will carry with them the context that they are now creating on sites like Facebook.

To the contrary of some experts, devices like XFN will make sites less important while increasing the importance of specialized or vertical search engines and even personal portals as those tools continue to develop.

SEO and SEM are going to get real interesting real soon. I can’t wait!

Disclaimer: If the account below were real, it would undoubtedly be so over-dramatized by yours truly that no specific factual details could be gleaned from it. In other words, the story told is not what actually happened, but a made-for-TV version of it.

So, it goes like this: a university goes on a bleeding edge, hosts unmoderated, full-open blogs for a handful of their students, feeding straight to the university home page. The blogs become instant success and by far the most popular part of the site.

Second year into the adventure, one of the bloggers starts pushing the envelope with edgier content. Her blog gets noticed, even linked from a major sports network site. Posts are sharp, fun, and closely personal. Popularity is rising.

The blogger keeps inching to the edge, eventually going over (can I call this a “rageboy syndrome”?): a person in Admissions office turns on their computer in the morning and reads in horror a fun-filled, but wildly inapropriate (not for a university official site, that is) story, featured prominently on the front of the university’s online face. Orders are yelled, buttons are pushed, post rolled back, everybody’s pissed. Ouch.

Sounds familiar? No? Let’s pretend it is a fictional tale of caution. But what should we be cautioned of? That we shouldn’t let bad girls blog? That people only want read really edgy stuff? That blogs are bad? That young people are not fit to shape the brand of the university?

The reason why I ask these questions is because I don’t have ready answers. Or maybe I do, but I don’t know if they are the right ones. Talk to me.

Here’s a thought on Millennial marketing: Who you know is more important than what you know (or where you found it).

As previously reported blogging about blogs being passé is passé, but even the passé can take on new importance as new audiences are introduced to the idea. And now we’re seeing retail sectors catch up with higher education in their efforts to market to Millennials.

Colleges and university’s have been using student blogs, or journals, since at least 2001 to help prospective students figure out where they fit in. But questions of credibility and the rise of social networking sites are likely weakening the power of blogs as a marketing tool with this generation. Will the retail sector figure this out and lead higher education to the next big thing or is that our job because we’ve been working with the generation longer?

So what is next? Sponsored pages on MySpace, apparently. But isn’t that a bit like Ford’s pseudo flash mob?

People value most the things they discover themselves. They also pass these things along with pride. Marketers have been trying to help people “discover” their products using search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing (SEM), but the effectiveness of these techniques (and certainly tricks) are waning due to changes in the browsing behavior of Millennials.

When I care more about what my friends think than what Google thinks, then connections become more important than Pagerank. So how do we get people to our content?

I think we can engineer serendipitous moments by expanding our idea of keywords and care words beyond SEO and SEM, whose importance will continue but only in as much as they effect contextual ad placement.

As social networking tools proliferate their collective power will outweigh that of the Google results page. Our SEO/SEM tactics will have less impact. We need a holistic, Web-wide approach to content management (and creation) if we hope to have an impact beyond a niche or two.

Tagging (and eventually microformats) can help us manage our brands across sites, devices and audiences. Beth Kanter moderates an N-TEN affinity group called Tagvocates where discussions focus on the strategic use of tagging as a tactic for non-profits. But the meme has yet to gain momentum.

My suggestion? Make a list of keywords/carewords and tags and a list of sites on which placement would be valuable. Do this as one of the deliverables from the discovery phase of every project. Work those into every aspect of the marketing plan and site design. Do this just as you might for a highly optimized campaign. Don’t neglect geotagging either! Local search is bound to take off eventually (and then wane in favor of neighborhood connections).

Name me three tags that you’d like to see your customers use on del.icio.us, assuming your customers are using del.icio.us which, BTW, few to none are.

What made Fonzy cool was his lack of effort to be cool. But he didn’t wake up in the morning and say, “Today, I am going to be as cool as I can be.”

• Flickr is cool. What makes Flickr cool is that millions of people contribute photos and share stories because they want to, not just because they can.
• iPods are cool. They have revolutionized the way that music is listened to, downloaded, categorized, and used.
• Tagging is cool. Information on the Web is no longer a series of islands. Now, content can be syndicated, bookmarked, and searched through del.icio.us, newsgator, and technorati.

What makes these cool is the fact that they have been embraced. It’s not a matter of how fantastically structured the technology is. Who cares how Flickr does what it does. It’s more cool to see what the people do with Flickr. It’s more cool that Web sites embrace microformats and RSS.

I ran across this quote from Gerry McGovern. It’s not earth-shattering by any means, but it defines what cool is.

“I embrace technology. I love it. I’m surrounded by it. What I have to keep reminding myself is that it’s not about the technology itself; it is about what we can do with the technology.”

Cool is a reflection of what people do, or say, or how they act. They determine success. They determine what’s relevant, and important. They determine what’s cool.

A recent post by Donna Bogatin at ZDnet talked about a presentation given this week at Shop.org’s conference. The presentation was by Kelly Mooney, author of “The Ten Demandments,” and focused on her firm’s research on Millennials: “Decoding the Digital Millennials.”

If you’ve been here before, you know that I enjoyed the view Howe and Strauss provided in their “Millennials Rising” and “Millennials go to College.” Mooney’s research seems tailored for the mass of mass marketers which is great. There are many opinions in the higher education blogosphere about marketing to Millennials. I’ll be happy to read other points of view from outside the industry. We higher ed marketers could learn a lot.