I am assisting four students with their paper/dissertation this semester, and I will be assisting them when it comes to writing their press releases as well.

I believe that when it comes to press releases, for the region we live in, there are two main goals that we need to focus on.

The first goal might be specific to the fact that we live in Norway, and a certain region of Norway. I am not really sure though, it might be fairly similar in the US and other countries as well.

During the years, I have experienced that it’s really important to be personal when it comes the press releases. I am not talking about one-to-one personal, I am referring to being personal as being local (as using ties to the town or the region we live in).

The first main focus area is: Being Personal

The people working at the local newspapers (actually, it goes for all the local media) in our region are only interested in local news. If we were about to launch a brand new revolutionary product (for instance, a product that could help against world hunger), they wouldn’t be interested in writing about it unless it was launched in their town or it was discovered in their town. Well, if it could help against world hunger, then it might actually get a few words in the papers, but that’s about the only story they’d consider writing about, unless it happened in their town.

What I am saying is this.

If the students want media to, not only notice them, but also do a story, they’ll have to link their product or at least parts of their story to each of the towns in the region. For instance, if one of the students was born in a town in the region, they should focus on this as well, when they write the press releases to media in this town. They should try hard to find something related to each town. In other words, the students need to write a press release for the media in each town, and use a personal/local touch on each of the press releases.

The second main focus are is: Being remarkable

It doesn’t matter if one of the students or their product can be linked to the region or to a specific town in the region, if it’s just a normal story and nothing extraordinary. Well, they could get lucky and get a few fairly interested reporters on their story (we see examples of this daily in the local newspapers, because let’s face it, not much is happening).

But, if the students are going to be close to 100% sure that they’ll get media hooked on their story, their story should be remarkable. Their press releases should focus on something different, even though their product might not be that different. One tiny part of the product might be different, if it is, they should focus on that part. If they come up with 100 innovative facts about their product, they should focus on their top most remarkable facts in their press releases.

So, what the press releases in the region is all about, is to focus on being personal (local) while at the same time it should focus on being remarkable.

I have been thinking. Our college doesn’t have a slogan, we have never had any slogans. Many colleges and universities have.

Does it really matter, do we need a slogan to brand our college?

I will argue that a slogan is one of the basic elements in building an effective brand campaign. It consists of a short sentence or a phrase that serve to reinforce the business name or logo. In fact, many companies has created highly successful marketing slogans that has been recognized by the consumers as much as their name.

For instance, do you remember these ones?

Just do it

Think different

Have it your way

I’m lovin’ it.

The main purpose behind a slogan is mainly to enhance and boost the name or provide a tiny glimpse of what the brand promises to deliver. Even simple words or phrases can go a long way when it works well with your brand.

A few examples of university slogans:

Inspiring Minds.

Open Minds. Creating Futures.

Forward. Thinking.

Where You’re a Name, Not a Number.

The main purpose for us to create a slogan is brand recall. This enables our college to create a more lasting memory to the minds of the consumers and enhances the market reach.

We need to capture attention and produce interest. We need not just a creative slogan, but an intelligent one. It should appeal to either the needs, attitudes, or emotions of the consumers. Therefore, we should try to compel them to make an action, which in this case is to apply to become a student at our college.

It should trigger the motivation of the consumers and drive them into action.

Yes, I really think we need a slogan.

Today I had an interesting experience.

Our college had a seminar with 40 kids from high school. I created an assignment, and I asked them to create a marketing strategy for our college.

I wanted to know, what would the kids from high school do if they were going to market our college?

I received a lot of interesting strategies, and even though I haven’t read them all thoroughly, my guess is that we’ll be using a few of the tips for next years marketing strategy.

Asking your targetted customers how you should improve yourself is one of the wisest things you can do, no matter which business you are in.

In our case, it was completely free as well.

This is a story with a great start, a terrific middle and a rather sad ending. The story makes me frustrated, even though I think that the marketing effect was fairly powerful.

The product

It all started with a marketing product for our college. We’ve been using the Internet for most of our advertising, and by using the Internet we’ve been reaching most of our targeted customers (future students). We decided to try another approach as well, in order to reach the people that we didn’t reach using the Internet.

The product was a paper distributed along with one of the most popular newspapers in Norway. The paper was about the internatial aspect of our college; international students and employees at our college, international research and projects, and the opportunity for students to exchange with colleges and universities in other countries.

The beginning

The product was interesting, and I believe that it’s a powerful way to promote our college and tell our story. The production company told me that the project had one production cost, and one cost when it comes to advertisements. If they didn’t sell enough advertisements, we would have to pay some of the costs (along with the production costs).

I told the guy from the production company that we had a specific amount of money to use for this project, and that we didn’t have one dollar more to spend, no matter how few advertisement they ended up selling. I was very thorough and unambiguous regarding the cost of this project. 

The middle

The production, the stories, everything about the contents of the paper was close to perfect.  The team from our college did an amazing job, and the guys from the production company did a tremendous job. We ended up with an awesome paper, and powerful marketing. 

The ending

A few weeks before the paper was going to be printed, I heard the news. The production company had huge problems selling advertisements. They had only sold a few, therefore, they would need us to pay a higher price for the project.

I told them that we had already agreed upon the price, and that this price was all we were able to pay (I had already told them this, and I had sent them two emails). The problem now, was that the guy told me that we had agreed upon a much higher price. He said that we had agreed upon the original production cost plus an extra fee to cover teh advertisment costs, this extra fee was much higher than the production fee.

As I stated, I had been very thorough and unambiguous regarding the costs of this project. I never referred to the details of the project and I never divided the costs as the guy from the production company wanted me to. I told him (and included this in both the emails) that all the money we could spend on this project, with all costs included, was a specific amount.

To me, this is a solid case. There is no way that this company can get any extra money from our college. I believe that I have done everything by the book.

The real problem, is that disputes like this takes a lot of time and it makes me frustrated.

Worth thinking about

Even if I had told this company that we could settle the dispute by paying them half the amount, we would never hire them for another job. They should have done things differently, and if they did, they could have had long term success. They would have ended up with a lot more money than if they tried this dispute. 

I wonder what will happen next. It will probably be weeks or months of emails and phone calls from this company. Hopefully, it will all end sometime soon, but I doubt it.

Let me tell you the truth about contests. If you do it right, it might be the cheapest and most effective marketing you can buy.

We’ve been using contests on the website of our college for the past three years. We’ve been giving away various products from Apple, worth apx $5000 in total per year. This year, we’ve been giving away six iPhones. One iPhone each month, starting January and ending in June.

The reason we’ve been doing this, and the reason we will still be doing this the next years, is that the results are awesome.

First.

If you ask the right questions, you can use the answers to something interesting. We have questions like, what’s the most important thing for you when you are going to apply to a college or a university? Doing research like this is worth a lot of money to any college. Usually, when we have contests like this, we collect the answers from thousands of people. So far, more than 2200 people have answered.

Second.

The answers will affect our marketing, but that’s not all. We are also sending a newsletter each month to every single person on this list. We are updating them with the latest winner, and interesting information from our college. This information should have some effect. This way, they might still remember us when it’s time to apply to college.

Third.

Our latest winner is a great example that this kind of marketing works. I am contacting each winner personally. I call them, email them, and finally send them a handwritten letter along with the iPhone.

I asked this guy if he had any plans for the future. Like many people his age, senior at high school, he wasn’t really sure. He was thinking about applying to college, but he didn’t know which one. Now, I have been in contact with him several times. He is very interested in computer science, he is a road racing cyclist, and he would like to study a year in another European country.

Our college has an awesome computer science department, and we offer all sorts of studies abroad. I have told him this, and the road racing cyclist team in our city is fairly awesome too. We seem to have everything he is looking for.

Now, I don’t know if he will be applying to our college, but I know what got him interested.

The iPhone Effect.

I have just been contacted by our computer science department, and they are looking for a way to attract students from India and China to our college in Norway. They didn’t say why they wanted to focus on those two countries, and not some other countries in Asia or any other country for that matter. But I guess the reason might be that both India and China are huge countries with an amazing amount of people, and both countries are among the top countries in the world when it comes to research and development within the area of computer science.

Attracting students from those two countries all the way to Norway will probably be a boost to our computer science department. Personally, I think that students from India and/or China will have a tremendous effect on both current students and teachers.

Now, the question I am currently working on, is how to attract students from Inda and China to Norway and our computer science department.

I have found five possible ways to market our computer courses:

• AdWords (narrowing it to only showing the ads in India and China)
• Baidu (using Pay Per Click)
• Facebook (target China and India)
• Craigslist
• Websites and discussion forums

There are probably many similar websites to India Education, but so far I haven’t found any.

I think AdWords might work, a lot of people use Google, and I think we can use english in order to attract the students. They have to understand english in order to study at our college anyway. I am not so sure about Baidu, it seems that close to everything is in chinese, and I am not sure if we should translate a website into chinese or a Pay Per Click campaign into chinese. I have to do some more research when it comes to this search engine, because if a lot of people are using it, it might be worth the time and the cost.

I also find Facebook interesting. I am not sure if many people in India and China are using Facebook. I have read in several blogs that Facebook has been blocked for people in China. But hopefully, this only happened a few times in the past.

I am more sceptical to Craigslist. I have heard that for the United States, Craigslist is close to perfect when it comes to specific topics (like buying and selling used stuff). But when it comes to India and China, I am not sure if people are using it at all, and if they are using it, how likely is it that we will find our students on Craigslist?

Finally, I think that finding websites and discussion forums related to education in China and India would be awesome. So far, I have only located two. That’s India Education and Transit Abroad. I am not sure how good they are.

At the moment, I am not sure what we are going to do. All I know is that I will keep you updated.

We have just launched a quiz at the website of our college. There are three easy questions, and each month for six months, we give away one iPhone to a really lucky person. A few months ago, I thought about how to turn the quiz into a viral marketing campaign, and I wanted to try it so badly, but it all stopped the day before we launched the quiz.

The reason I didn’t go through with it, was that I wasn’t confident enough about how to do it.

I know about several scripts that I could have used, like viral friend generator, instant affiliate generator and viral inviter, but I didn’t use any of them. As I just said, I wasn’t really sure if this would have just destroyed the quiz or if it would have been a huge success. I thought it could have gone either way, and I wasn’t ready for failure.

But I am still thinking, why didn’t we go for it?

The reason I wanted to try viral marketing, is that it can be really powerful, and it’s usally completely free. Well, except for the times you need to buy a script. The scripts are usually fairly cheap though, so that’s not really a problem. When you use the Internet, it’s completely free to share information, like sending the link to the quiz to your friends. The more times the link is shared, the more people will enter the quiz, and the more people will visit our website.

What we wanted was a really good reason for people to tell their friends about our quiz. Now, people won’t tell anybody, because the more people they tell, the less likely it is that they will win an iPhone themselves.

But, if we had an affiliate competition going, where the person who have sent the link to our quiz to most people and got most people to answer the quiz also won an iPhone, I think we would get more people overall to answer the quiz.

We need an incentive for people to share the information about the quiz, and not an incentive for people not to share.

But I am still thinking, why didn’t we go for it?

We are having a major challenge at our college. I am not sure if our staff feel it’s a challenge at all, but that’s how I feel about it.

Let me give you a few examples:

Email

If we have a major announcement that all our students need to know right away, we send them an e-mail with the announcement. The problem is that a lot of people are not reading their college e-mail, that’s because they have registrered their Hotmail, Gmail, or Yahoo Mail with their teacher. So, it seems that there might be good communication between the teacher and their students, but not between the administration and the students (because we don’t have the right email address for all the students).

Website

We use our website for announcements as well, but a lot of our students are not visiting the websites on a daily basis, and might not get important messages before it might be too late.

Blackboard

We use Blackboard as our learning management system (lms), and some teachers use it to send announcement to their students. Not all teachers use an lms, and some might even use other systems, other than Blackboard. Because of this, we can’t possibly send announcements to all our students through Blackboard, some students will receive them, but not everybody.

Mobile phone / SMS

I guess that we could send important announcements straight to their mobile phones using sms. But this is fairly expensive, and just one department is  using this service.

The traditional letter

The president of our college has been sending a traditional letter to all our students. If we could wait for the important announcement to arrive at the houses/apartments of our students, then I guess we could send it as a traditional letter. But this is very expensive too, and actually we don’t know exactly where our students live at the moment. Some get their mail at the houses of their parents, and some receive their mail at the place where they live during the semester.

The conclusion

We should have a communication strategy, a single method in order to communicate with our students. All our students should understand that important announcements will be published on the website, or be sent to their email at their college address and not to their hotmail accounts. They need to know exactly how to get the information, and we need to know that they understand. So, when the administration will send something, they already know before they send it, that close to 100% of our students will receive the information.

We need a single method, not several.

I am not sure how other universities or colleges are communicating with their students, how they publish important announcements, but my guess is that they all need to have a single place where all students visit/read announcements. If not, how can they possibly know that students read the information?

When I think about it, email might be the best way to communicate with our students. We just need to enforce the use of our local email system and provide all the services that our students are looking for. Maybe an easy way for them to forward their hotmail, gmail, or yahoo mail to their college email (or the other way around).

I believe that if we provide the best software to  our students, they  will use them, and only this way, will we have “full” control of our communication with the students.

Full control of communication is one of the most important aspects of marketing.

First of all, I am using my iPhone to write this post. And thank you Apple for the iPhone, because my broadband connection has been down for close to 36 hours and I really need to get some work done while I am waiting.

I wanted to tell you what I have been up to lately.

Starting December 1st, we are launching a quiz at our college. We are giving away one iPhone each month for six months.

This quiz alone will probably get us a lot of extra traffic. But I am looking for a way to turn it viral.

I have been thinking about giving away an iPhone to the person referring most people to the quiz, and I have also thought about using a software like viralinviter.com, but I am not sure.

I want to give people an incentive to refer friends to the quiz. And I am still thinking, do you have any suggestions by the way?

Once people take the quiz we’ll send them a newsletter once a month for six months. The newsletter will be related to the activities at the college and our new courses.

We are doing all this to attract new students to our college. And I think that this is a fairly cheap and effective way to do it.

Do you have any thoughts on this strategy?

I have contacted Seth Godin and asked him if we can use “Small is the New Big” as the slogan for next years marketing campaign for our college, and guess what?

Seth Godin told me it was ok!

I’ll tell you why I think we should be using it.

It’s perfect for us.

Because we are fairly small, our students are having a blast. It’s easier to make friends, it’s easier to talk to professors, it’s easier to get guidance and counseling. Everything seems to be easier.

Because we are fairly small, it’s easier to become personal. Students are friends with teachers, teachers are friends with students. We are all helping each other. We can do that, because we are small.

We have a lot more flexibility than big colleges and universities. It’s fairly easy to turn everything around and put all our money at a completely different marketing campaign, if we wanted to.

It’s not like we have to spend six months to decide what we are going to do next year, we can adjust pretty easy.

Small is the New Big is a great slogan, it makes being creative easy, just look at the cover of Seth’s book.

… and we are going to design T-shirts for our students, and think of all the amazing stuff we can do with a slogan like that on the T-shirts.

But as Seth Godin, I believe that… Small is the new big only when the person running the small thinks big.

I am not sure if we are ready, but we better be!