From his site:

The experiment was: if I put out a brand new standup special at a drastically low price ($5) and make it as easy as possible to buy, download and enjoy, free of any restrictions, will everyone just go and steal it? Will they pay for it? And how much money can be made by an individual in this manner?

Since the launch over this past weekend, he’s sold over 110,000 copies of the concert worldwide, more than making back his production expenses.

Again, from his blog:

The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12 hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As of Today, we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again.

What can we in higher ed marketing learn from Louis C.K.?

1. Transparency

Louis has been more than transparent during this process, disclosing his costs to produce this special, how many he’s sold and what he’s made in terms of money. In higher ed, and not just the marketing/communications side, we are bad at transparency. Other than annual reports, we aren’t very transparent about our financials and other data.

Yes, we now all have net price calculators, but how effective are they when every one I’ve tried at different institutions (and I’ve tried dozens) often throw in a big loan at the end to make my net cost $0.00. That’s not helpful.

2. Price your product right

Not a day goes by that there isn’t an article about the cost of college and student loan debt and so on. I know – not only do I work in higher ed, I’m still paying student loans from my undergraduate degree. Personally, I’d love to get a Master’s degree, but frankly can’t afford it. There are plenty of offerings online, from Masters in Criminology to Business, but most is still priced out of reach.

Stanford is currently running classes online, for free, such as an introduction to databases and a course on AI. That’s really neat. While it’s not feasible for every college to offer free programs, there’s opportunity to rethink our offerings and their various price points.

For example, I’d gladly pay $2,500 for a structured, certificate program from a place like Stanford. It’s not a full Master’s, but it’s the right price point that makes it easier to justify and pay for compared to a full Master’s program, that may cost upwards of $30,000.

Sidebar: if anyone wants to give me a full-ride Masters in IT, IT Leadership or the like, let me know. I’d get a Master’s at my current university, which is a very good one, but they don’t currently have a program for what I want to do, career-wise.

In Louis’s case, $5 was the magical price point. It’s enough to make him money and cover his costs, yet priced right for consumers who were able to bypass the middle man, in this case, the large media corporations.

3. Control is ok, but information wants to be free

We live in a much smaller world today compared to years past. I listen to cloud music and live edit a document with a colleague in the UK, at the same time. Yet, we are forced to live under archaic rules about where and who can consume digital content.

I’ll leave you with one final quote. Also, I paid my $5.

I learned that money can be a lot of things. It can be something that is hoarded, fought over, protected, stolen and withheld. Or it can be like an energy, fueled by the desire, will, creative interest, need to laugh, of large groups of people. And it can be shuffled and pushed around and pooled together to fuel a common interest.

In Alaska, an oil drilling team struggle to survive after a plane crash strands them in the wild. Hunting the humans are a pack of wolves who see them as intruders.

I was watching a trailer for the film, and was surprised to see the end credits for the trailer:

and this:

I can’t decide if this kind of social media marketing is genius or dumb.

What is the marketing gain for this movie if I tweet something with the hashtag #MickeyLiddell? Will that influence my social circle to go see this film?

So, we let the people decide.

Enter quick and dirty A/B testing. There are many tools to help you do this, but since this was one of our first forays into testing content and calls to action like this, I didn’t need a complete soup-to-nuts solution, I just needed to see which banner was getting more clicks.

Thanks to Bit.ly and a few lines of PHP, we’ve been running a simple A/B test over the break. If you create an free account with Bit.ly, you can get very nice anayltics about your shortened links, get QR codes and more. It’s also nice if you use a tool like TweetDeck or WordPress, you can put in your Bit.ly info and it will track your shortened links for you.

I set up 2 Bit.ly URLs and with a few lines of PHP, which look like this:

<?php
	$whichcard = mt_rand(1,3);

		if($whichcard == 1){
			$graphic = "image.jpg";
			$link = "http://bit.ly/URl1";
		}else{
			$graphic = "image2.png";
			$link = "http://bit.ly/URL2";
		}

?>

Very simple code – it’s basically just grabbing a random number each time the page is loaded and displaying the corresponding image and link. Seriously, that’s it. Over the break, I’d log into Bit.ly and see how it was going.

I think it’s pretty easy to see which banner people were responding to.

Is this type of test giving perfect results? No. By randomizing which banner is being shown, it may be giving one banner more views than the other. But it’s all good.

For our first time dipping our toes into the pool, I think it’s worked out pretty well and we’ll definitely be using it more in the future.

One thing I do not miss from my advertising agency web days are justifying change requests and change of scope documents that needed signed off on by 4 or 5 people, but only after we argued about the cost of such changes. We have our own idiosyncrasies in higher ed, but its often still not as bad as the private sector.

Their use is especially on the rise, and I’m encouraged each time I see a large company begin to roll them out for their customers.

Imagine my surprise when I noticed that just about every price tag at the Best Buy by my house had a QR code. TVs, appliances, cameras, Blu-ray players and more. Here’s an example:

That QR code takes you to a mobile version of that product’s page at Best Buy’s mobile website. It’s nice if you want to see some additional information or reviews and don’t want to be bothered by the sales droids. I don’t know about you, but I often find myself knowing more than they do about electronics, but that’s a discussion for a different day.

Here’s the page. You can click for a larger version.

Did you see what they did there? The price on the mobile page is $70 less than the store price. When I asked the sales droid about it, he said the online site often is updated before the prices in-store. He said Best Buy will match prices in their online store at any time.

So, had I actually been buying this TV, that little QR code would have saved me $70. Not all QR codes are sales drivers, but perhaps they could be a nice little incentive for tech-saavy customers offered by tech-saavy businesses.

For years, it’s been a very symbiotic relationship. We use the rankings done by U.S. News & World Report to promote ourselves and they use us to sell magazines and college guides. It’s a fair trade, and everybody wins.

But, something’s changed this year.

Want to use the little U.S. News Best Colleges logo? The one we’ve all used with no problems in the past? That’s fine, but now its going to cost you.

I can understand charging for reprints or using the logo in print materials/magazines, but for use on the web? That’s strange.

We’ll be referencing the rankings starting tomorrow once the embargo is lifted. One thing we won’t have is the logo. I don’t know if having that along with our news release is worth $700-800 and way up from there for print rights.

Will some schools pony up for the logo? I think so. But I would guess many won’t – seeing how bad budgets are right now.

I quite like Karine’s idea:

I am printing this out and posting it everywhere in my department. Everywhere.

Source: XKCD

I really want clean pages with nice photography and the ability to get a quick overview of programs/majors, with the ability to learn more and dig deeper.

We often try to cram as much information into a main academic area page as possible. I would like to do a better job at informing prospective students of the strengths of our academic programs.

I found a great post at Neven Mrgan’s Tumblr about how three companies present their all-in-one computers: Apple, Dell and HP. Here’s a side by side comparison:

This is not just me being an Apple fanboy. Apple has made their iMac page clean, compartmentalized and easy to get key points at a glance. They’ve used several photos of the actual product, the top marketing points and made it easy to buy. The HP page on the right was probably sent through a myriad of committees then through the marketing wringer. The best they came up with is a small image (in Flash no less) and 4 tabs of information, with the main one including 18 bullet points. 18. If I gave you the 10 second test with both of these pages, you’d be more apt to remember more points from Apple’s page.

I would guess that many academic pages have “18 bullet points.” Maybe not bullet points, but a ton of information thrown on the index page because some felt it needed to be there.

Mr. Mrgan also makes one other very good point.

Look at the URL’s for each of these products:

Apple’s iMac page URL: http://www.apple.com/imac

HP’s 200xt computer page: http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/computer_can_series.do?storeName=computer_store&category=desktops&a1=Category&v1=All-in-One+PCs&series_name=200xt_series&jumpid=in_R329_prodexp/hhoslp/psg/desktops/All-in-One_PCs/200xt_series

Which one do you think you (and your users) would be able to enter if they were looking for a specific program or area? Clean URLs are a very good thing. Many CMSes do an OK job at creating user-friendly URLs, but often I come across a college site with URLs like college.edu/29592.xml. That doesn’t help a user.

At the end of the spot, we give out a URL for people to visit to learn more.

The voice-over reads it like this:

For more, visit jcu.edu backslash onestop

When reading out a web address, do you prefer it read it as backslash, forward slash or just plain slash? I’ve heard it said all ways.

I suppose if we wanted to be really technical, we’d call the backslash by its proper name: reverse solidus.

I think people would get confused hearing this on the radio:

For more, visit jcu.edu reverse solidus one stop

Which way of reading a web address do you prefer?

Photo by darkmavis.

Fast forward to today, and Old Spice is killing it when it comes to advertising and social media. Their campaign this week featuring their spokesman (without a shirt, of course) has been great and will likely be the new definition of how to integrate social media into your mainstream advertising. Go and search YouTube for the video responses they posted to questions from Digg, Fark and Reddit users, not to mention dozens of Twitter celebrities driving traffic to them.

Much as we saw Glee-esque parodies by higher ed institutions and their departments appear this Spring, it was just a matter of time until we saw our first Old Spice parody. First out of the gate is the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University.

Here’s the original Old Spice spot, which is actually a well-produced one-take commercial. Swan dive!

And here’s the parody from BYU:

Good production values, well-written, nicely shot. A very nice promotional spot. It’s nice to see the library have a sense of humor.