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.

Michigan State would rather I think about their nearly 500,000 alumni around the world and what they’re doing. This summer, they’re collecting stories from alumni and will be showcasing them on a new site, Spartan Sagas.

Here’s the video they’ve recently put out to solicit stories. It’s pretty nice.

The New York Times writes about the project here, noting:

In addition to the microsite, the campaign includes commercials, on television and YouTube; print ads; posters and signs in airports; and online ads. The budget for the media spending is estimated at a thrifty $478,000.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have that sort of budget. Here’s one more snippet from the NYT story that’s stuck out in my mind:

The campaign is indicative of how institutions of higher learning are trying to sell themselves in the marketplace with the kinds of tactics more commonly used to sell soap, soup or sedans.

Do you think that’s a fair statement? Yes, the pool of students to attend our colleges are getting smaller, and we need to set ourselves apart or ensure we’re reaching the right audience. That’s different, I think, than selling soap and soup – both of which are more common denominator type products and get common denominator type marketing.