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I’m writing from my small town in Vermont, where schools are closed for Superstorm Sandy, but the sun is shining and it’s as pretty a fall day as we’ve had this year. The lights stayed on. My thoughts go out to those millions of people who have been less fortunate. Like the rest of the country, I spent a lot of time yesterday searching for information about the storm. Were my friends and family safe? Was it headed my way? Were there D batteries available anywhere in Addison County? Now that the threat has passed, I find myself thinking about how I seek, access and evaluate information online in a crunch. Perhaps there are some lessons for us here when the storm clears: 1) New Media. While I’m a loyal fan of print, I bypassed traditional media completely yesterday. Even the evening news (yes, I still watch it religiously) wasn’t up to date enough. The 24-hour news cycle has spoiled … Continue reading
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I joined Elliance about a year ago with just a layman’s knowledge of SEO. The Elliance search team gave me a wonderful primer during my first week, and I’ve continued to enjoy my own learning process through the work we’re doing on behalf of our clients and in support of our own objectives. There have certainly been some eye-openers along the way. Here are some things that jumped out at me. 1) It’s even more powerful than I thought. In my personal work and life online, I search just as much as anyone else. I’ve taken a fair amount of pride in my ability to find what I’m looking for more quickly than expected. But from a business perspective, I had no idea just how important search could be. Whether for a college or a bank, I’m amazed at the number of visitors generated by effective search practices. It can add up to a significant portion of the traffic to … Continue reading
Posted in: Search Marketing
In my role as director of new business development at Elliance, I receive phone calls every week from people who are looking for help from a digital marketing agency. Sometimes they have an RFI or an RFP to discuss. In other cases, it’s purely a call for help. It’s rare that I chat with a prospective client who’s thinking about a project just for fun. By the time you get around to calling someone me, you’ve already been feeling some kind of pain. Maybe you’re not seeing the applications that you want, maybe your donor pool is light, maybe sales are down. Making an investment in digital marketing is a significant choice for any organization, and there’s bound to be a good reason for it. In other words, you’ve got a problem. Interestingly, most of the people I speak to open the conversation not with the problem, but with the solution. They know they need an SEO program. Or a … Continue reading
Posted in: Digital Marketing
Whether you’re an association, a non-profit organization, a university, a bank, or just an occasional blogger with delusions of grandeur, the communications landscape today is fascinating, challenging, fast-paced and, above all, complicated. The standalone monthly magazine is becoming a thing of the past. Email newsletters have long since ceased to be the answer to our prayers. Thanks to search engine results, your website’s home page may or may not be the entry point for new users of your site. As communicators, we must now face the sometimes overwhelming reality that our readers may be connected to our words and images anywhere, any time, and in any format. So how are we to meet all of their needs? Here are a few things I try to remember when I’m puzzling it out. First, who am I talking to? Knowing your readers, anticipating their needs and their interests, and accurately offering the information that they’ll want is critical. Writing to your reader … Continue reading
A few weeks ago, one of the speakers at the North American Coalition for Christian Admissions Professionals conference in Chicago raised an interesting question: Is it necessary to live a “social lifestyle” personally, in order to be a social media professional? I took pages of notes at the conference, but this one idea is something I’ve come back to far more than I would have expected to. As with most interesting questions, I think the answer is yes and no. One could argue either side, and — as I am prone to do — I’ll argue both. No. Your social media manager needs to understand the media. What is the etiquette of Twitter? What do Facebook users respond to? What’s different about LinkedIn and what’s the point of a +1? But does that person need to engaged in any of these networks personally in order to gain that understanding? Not necessarily. There are plenty of resources out there with best … Continue reading
Posted in: Social Media
As the director of new business development for Elliance, I spend a lot of time thinking about the strengths and services that we can provide for our clients. I’m very energized by the Elliance team, and I love bouncing ideas around with them and hearing their thoughts about what’s coming next in the digital world. We meet challenges, and that’s inspiring. Of course I also spend time responding to higher education RFPs and RFPs from other verticals as well, in branding, search, website development and more. And sometimes, those can be a challenge in themselves. I’ve sat on both sides of the table so believe me, I understand that writing and releasing an RFP is tough. If you’re releasing an RFP for your institution, you’ve probably been thinking about the project for quite a while. But how thoroughly have you thought about the RFP process? That’s another story. I’m writing on the Elliance blog here, so I can’t purport to … Continue reading
Years ago, at my very first real job, there was one particular person who was known to be Creative. She was the go-to person for ideas, big and small. She led all the brainstorms, complete with tables full of idea starters. She could give you five taglines on a moment’s notice. She could take a half-formed, poorly articulated idea and turn it into a knockout. I was regularly impressed, often amazed. Her whole job was built around thinking in color where others saw only black and white. Ever since then, I’ve noticed that being creative is a quality that’s assigned to certain people at any business, and once it’s assigned, it’s assumed. There are people who are Creative, and then there’s everybody else. Except that this model won’t work in a business that intends to be visionary, ground-breaking, innovative. Traditionally, we think of our creative teammates as being designers or writers. But what about the rest of us? In business … Continue reading
As consultants to higher education institutions, we often begin new engagements by going to campus to try to understand the bigger picture at the college of university. We want to see both the forest and the trees, and then we base all of our work is based on that deep understanding. I know my friends and neighbors who work for colleges and universities do the same thing. We all want to support the mission of the institutions we’re associated with, whether we approach our work from the standpoint of admissions, advancement, academics, facilities… the list goes on. Having said that, it’s easy to get caught up in the more specific tasks at hand. What should this information architecture look like? How many donor calls do I make this week? How many folders have do I have left to read? We all have specific tasks that we’re going to be held accountable for, and they’re usually a lot more specific than … Continue reading