H&R Block provides example college admissions can adopt!

 The headline of this blog today was inspired by an article in Advertising Age written by Beth Snyder Bulik.

H&R Block as you know, prepares tax statements for millions of customers.  It’s a very seasonal business - but its big business!  There are nearly 13,000 retail shops around the country and the company has 100,000 employees.

H&R started to notice that behaviors of consumers were changing last year when they recognized that out of the 95 million tax returns that were filed electronically, nearly 1/3 of them were from home computers.  They realized they needed to offer a home computer tax program to not only build their brand, but offer a bridge to their retail shops.

To market their program they decided to incorporate both traditional advertising and social media marketing.  Their goal was to use social media to educate customers, answer questions, build brand awareness and leverage the conversations that develop into visits to their corporate page where the visitor could select a retail shop to help them prepare their taxes or purchase their software.

To accomplish that, H&R built a 1,000 employees social media army!   They provided this team an overview of their strategy, what they wanted to accomplish, outlined their goals and offered basic training on social media.  According to Bulik:

The social-media strategy includes a Twitter account, widgets, blogs, a YouTube channel and a Facebook fan page and apps — a recent one in the form of a quiz asks, “How deductible are you?”

Why did they do that?

If the average person on Twitter has 100 friends, 1,000 employees have an opportunity to reach not only 1,000,000 people but their tweets have the ability to reach the 100 people that each of the people they know are connected to.   That’s a big number!   And they don’t have to pay a marketing, PR or advertising channel to reach them.

This army could be on any of their social networks and respond when:

• Someone mentions they have to do their taxes
• A tax question is asked
• Someone is interested in finding a place that provides loans based on taxes due to the person
• Someone is looking for a person to do their tax
• Someone shares an issue they have had with the IRS

While Social Media monitoring software catches this information, it’s people that respond.  Because even in this new online world, “people still do business with people”.

So how would your company unleash an army of Social Media?   Let’s take a look at this from the college recruitment angle.

Admissions offices could do the same thing.

Think about it, a college has thousands of students, tens of thousands of alumni (if not hundreds of thousands) and dozens of staff  that could form the core of the Social Media team.  This army of people could be create a variety of content in audio, video, text and or photographs to build the college brand, engage prospective students and maintain mindshare of prospective students.

• Students could be sharing information about events, activities and courses.
• Alumni could share experiences, career advice.
• Faculty could offer min courses, answer questions.
• Prospective students could be talking about their visits, sharing research and students, alumni and faculty they are meeting.

And of course all could be engaging prospective students in dialogue.

Why does this make sense? 

1. It’s cheap! It’s repeatable and once you’ve built the system it runs by itself.
2. Everyone I just mentioned has a vested interest in seeing the college succeed.
3. This Social Media team represents authentic voices that prospective students will believe.

Experts today remind us that you no longer have control of your brand. 

Your brand exists in the people we’ve listed above.  Prospective students no longer pay attention to the “slogans and phrases” colleges work so hard to create and market. Students today pay just as much or more attention to what people they know say about the college.

So what are the steps to implement a social media strategy within a college admissions office?

We’ll cover that in upcoming blog articles.  ? leave a comment or call 800-805-9413.

Twitter, Facebook and other social media will help you make decisions

Growing up in the 60’s was an incredible time and yet stressful time.  Everything was in flux.  The role of a father was changing from the master and ruler of his domain to one where he shared power with his wife, sex came out in the open, equality finally was put on the front burner and students learned how to collectively band together to change the world!

It was a decade that sought to give “Power to the People”.  A time in which people were actively exercising their right to be involved in decisions.

In the 40 some years since that movement started, I don’t think 16 year olds forgot about the values associated with power to the people.  As they grew up, they changed the world, made it more transparent, worked to provide equality in race, pay and ability, thought more about the environment rights and much more.

Now as we enter the next decade, technology is going to take “power to the people” to a whole NUTHER level.  Technology is giving individuals, corporations and non profits the ability to reach out and use the power of the people to accomplish things that would not have been achievable.  Today we call that “Crowd sourcing”  (…More…)

Everyone benefits, a pizza shop, candy store, small business and large corporation

Over the weekend I wrote a 30 page white paper called, Facebook 101 for the Executive Suite.  A friend and a CIO I’ve been working with the last couple of months thought the “executive suite”  would benefit from having a overview of how Facebook could be used in their firm.

After reflecting on how to present the opportunities to VP’s, Presidents and the C level administrators, I came up with:

• 4 fundamental changes in consumer behaviors they need to be aware of
• 4 ways a firm can tap into an anticipated 300 million user base
• 5 ways an organization will benefit by developing a Facebook strategy
• 12 best practices and proven Internet strategies
• How various departments in your firm can benefit by participating in Facebook

As usual, for me, it’s hard to write a 8 page whitepaper.  This baby came in at 30 plus pages.  At any rate, over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be sharing this information with you.

I’ll start by explaining the 4 behavior changes that will drive how you lead and manage your business in the coming decade.  We’ll first examine Community, then follow up with looks at Content, Collaboration and Communication.  The four C’s!

What would 580,000 advertising impressions do for your business?

Al Gore gets kidded for suggesting he invented the Internet.  Around my house I get teased for suggesting to my kids that I invented Facebook.

Back in 1996, I created an online community for students and called it StudentAccess.  We modeled the community around GeoCities and Tripod with a focus only on college students.  We provided a free home page, email address and photo upload.  We ran ads in student magazines around the country and anxiously waited for students to show up.  Nobody came!   Not only was it a total failure, but I ended up getting sued by Princeton Review for using the name Student Access! (They had a line of books called StudentAccess to Law, Medical, etc.)  Thirty thousand dollars later, we surrendered the URL studentaccess.com to Princeton Review and decided to focus in a different direction.

Fast forward 7 years and Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, which has become one of the largest - online communities in the world.    Enough old boy stories,  let’s get back to the reason you are reading this post. (…More…)

4 benefits of adopting a Facebook API for your business!

Over the past 3 years, I’ve had 1500 people attend webinars who were interested in figuring out how to use Facebook in their businesses and organizations.  I like to remind people that Facebook is the new Yellow Pages and in fact it’s probably, like MySpace could be considered the largest phone book in the world.

In the spring of 2007 Facebook announced their Facebook Platform, a programming and business strategy that gave any organization the ability to create a program that would enable them to engage and interact with customers, prospects and others.  Colleges have an incredible opportunity to connect and engage with prospective students, students, fans, supporters and alumni but none are taking advantage of it.

But businesses, who understand you have to innovate to make a profit and work to keep customers due to competition, get it!

Pizza Hut is no stranger to utilizing social media tools to engage customers. Their Facebook page now has over 300,000 fans and to attract more, they offered anyone who became a Pizza Hut fan (through the end of the year) would be eligible for the weekly prize of a $50 gift card. (…More…)

About 6 years ago I sent an overnight letter to Starbucks headquarters suggesting they consider offering their customers a private, password protected online community to continue to build their brand, engage customers and gather more data about their customers.

At the time my firm provided online communities to groups and organizations in the higher education space and we were looking for a way to leverage our product in the commercial market.  The company executive I sent my letter to was preoccupied with other issues at the time and my subsequent follow up phone call was met with a response,  well - similar to what you’ve heard from time to time in your  career – don’t call us, we’ll call you!

Fast forward to 2008 and we see Starbucks coming out with what they call their new customer online community called Mystarbucksidea.com.   The community offers customers an opportunity to help direct where the company is going and is modeled after a number of successful examples including Dell’s  Community Forum and Salesforce’s Ideastorm.   (…More…)