February 2010 Archives

 

Greetings from the ARC lounge, nothing makes blogging cooler than saying you are doing it from a lounge setting.  So we are going to start this session of the lounge with a little Q and A...

Tyler, it is obvious you do quite an array of very valuable projects; what is your favorite?
The first week of every month I hitch up my pants, crack my knuckles, throw on some of R. Kelly's greatest hits ("Step in the Name of Love" is a classic), and begin compiling our department metrics for the month.  What has started as a simple two page spreadsheet taking about fifteen minutes has amassed eight pages and three hours of work; with numbers used across a spectrum of presentations and strategies within the school. 

Why should I capture metrics?
This blog is all about how to communicate with our audiences, specifically emphasizing how social media campaigns can extend awareness and reach to audiences.  But proving a ROI is key to these campaigns so pages and pages of metrics become necessary.
So without discerning all my metric secrets and calculations, I feel it proper to share some of the revelations I have come to while compiling the numbers month after month.   And most importantly remember that these are purely quantitative numbers and do not speak for the qualitative interactions with your audience (though several social media platforms try to).

Man you sold me, so what Metrics should we capture?
Ideally having some set of numbers for everywhere on the web you are present is the goal; and most platforms have some sort of way to capture numbers so why not do it?

The big boy.
Our beautifully and intricately designed website leeds.colorado.edu is just bursting with content and information and we love to see what people are looking at using Google analytics.

We capture unique views for:

• the top 10 pages visited
• the top 10 alumni pages visited
• clicks on homepage
• Avg. Time on pages
• Geographic areas for certain pages
• Navigation summaries for homepage spotlights (as well as what percent of views are coming from the homepage versus alternate routes)

E-mail marketing
We love Constant Contact and we always capture open rate, top 5 links, and unique click throughs per our monthly newsletter sent out.

Blogs 
We are incredibly proud of our blogs at cuboulderblogs.com, and using google analytics we capture which blog is getting the most traction as well as individual posts that are popular.  (Like this post will undoubtedly be). 

Press
We use a wonderful combo of Meltwater News and Vocus to analyze press hits per month versus target peer/aspirational schools.  As well as making some beautiful visual charts of our progress that are great for presentations.
Social Media

Twitter
Followers and number of tweets, as well as tweets per day via tweetstats.com
and if your exceedingly bored reading this, check out our twitter page.

Facebook
Eventually everyone will realize that facebook fanpages are so much more useful than groups because fanpages allow you to get "facebook insights", which means they give us/you some very valuable numbers unavailable to facebook groups. 

We capture fans, views, photos, posts, comments per month.

Becoming a fan of Leeds is the cool thing to do by the way.

LinkedIN
Members, discussions, job posts - don't you want to get in on this action?

YouTube
Videos, unique views, comments, which video is getting the most traction.

Zmags
Putting our publications in a sweet online format gives the ability to see some qualitative aspects of our publications; as well as the general quantitative numbers you would get with google analytics.

We capture views per publication, zoom and click throughs (inferring people actually reading), and avg. time on each publication.


This is a very raw display of what we capture, (we do capture a little more than presented above), but this is the basic set.  Then I use these numbers to compare these to previous months and years and find patterns, what is working, what isn't, and find the right numbers to report.  And then push out what is popular in every communication channel possible.  In the end, these numbers need to compliment your communications strategy; and finding what proves your strategy is working is the goal...so good luck, and feel free to click these links and add to our numbers.

Isn't all this metric madness hard Tyler?
Yes, I probably deserve a huge raise.

Posted by Tyler McAnelly

As a kid of the 90's, I can't imagine not having an instant way to connect with all my friends on the Internet. I've been through all the web phases, starting with MSN messenger and AIM in 5th grade. The next cool thing was the jump to MySpace in the early middle-school days, followed by the migration to Facebook once you hit high school. Today I have a MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIN account, not to mention my old AIM and MSN messenger accounts, as well as a Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, and school email account!

Not until I entered the real world, if you will, at age 16 when I got my first professional job, did I realize that this many forms of web contact was not normal for the non web native. It amazed me that "grown-ups" had limited ways to access their friends or colleagues in a matter of seconds. But why would they? They didn't grow up thinking of a catchy screen name, or changing the display picture every three weeks like my peers and I did. They do not have over 500 tagged pictures available of themselves on the web, or wall-to-wall posts dating back five years, but they could, and hey, it could even help their businesses. I'd like to believe that this epiphany of teens my age helped spark the social media uprising in professional businesses everywhere; I know my former boss sure liked the idea. Three years later I find myself working in the Alumni Relations/Communication department at Leeds School of Business. Never before have I seen so many professionals using social media outlets! Leeds' Facebook friends outweigh mine 3:1, and I don't even have half the amount of Twitter followers. So good job kids of the 90's, we've created a new form of marketing for businesses, and it's working.

Posted by Kelley Dodds.

Last week, Leeds sponsored Ignite Boulder 8 (or Igneight as some dubbed it) at the Boulder Theater, Boulder, Colorado. Ignite, for the uninitiated, brings together techies, geeks, artists, and hipsters to hear select speakers address often zany, crazy topics and hilarity ensues (for more, see Melanie's earlier post). Ignite 7 was the first  I attended, though I did watch part of Ignite 6 online. I7 was the reason I decided Leeds should sponsor I8. Not only did one of our professors, Peter McGraw present, but also Leeds MBA Joel Gratz as well, plus the crowd of over 800 attendees included many alumni and current students.

What is amazing about the event is how fun it is; the presentations range but can include techy clever, borderline insane, marginally uncomfortable and downright touching. What sets the event apart is how consistently authentic it is. Though I have only been to two now, they both exhibited the same great level of excitement and energy.

During our pre-party, photo above, at the Boulder Draft House, we had a chance to talk with presenters and attendees about what makes Ignite Boulder special. So, don't just take my word for it, check out what they had to say. Many thanks to Andrew Hyde and the other Ignite volunteers for such a great event!

If you've ever watched one of our YouTube movies, you're probably wondering how we feed our channel with such riveting and regular content. Almost every week we interview a faculty member about his or her latest compelling research on social entrepreneurship, emotional buying or word-of-mouth advertising. Then the production team, usually Dean and Melanie, hand off the digital camera to me--the video editor.

First I fire up the 17-inch MacBook Pro, a sleek silver goddess among laptops that I use to edit Leeds videos. I plug the Flip or AVCHD cam into the data port and drag the raw video files onto the hard drive. I double click on Final Cut Pro, the same video editing software used in Hollywood filmmaking, and import this new mysterious media.  A horizontal strip of tape, the timeline, appears along the bottom, with several preview windows and tool palates filling the rest of the screen. I drag the new media into the timeline and squirm in anticipation as it renders.

15 minutes...

 7 minutes...

19 seconds...

Render successful! Time to edit. I hit "B" to activate the blade tool, which I use to cut the video into chunks, kind of like hitting return on the keyboard.  Once I've found the natural flow of the story, I start rearranging chunks, just like dragging and dropping sentence fragments in Microsoft Word.  I snip tangents here and there but micro-edit as little as possible. Then I slap some transitions in between the cuts and add some captions and text slides to make it as seamless as possible.  By now our videography is so slick that I hardly need to adjust coloring (which negates the unkind glow of fluorescent lighting).

Then I submit my story to the "deflavorizing" process, where we take out anything that sounds kitschy, confusing or off-color. We watch the short video several times with a hypercritical eye. Are there any dropped frames? Does that anecdote make sense? Should we edit out her laugh or keep it?

Now all I have to do is hit File<Export<Quicktime Conversion and voila-- I've made another movie! Go check it out at youtube.com/ColoradoLeeds.

Posted by Molly Rettig.

We are happily sponsoring tonight's Ignite Boulder, AND it is sold-out! Looking forward to a fun and informative show. For those, like me, who have never been before, Ignite is:

"...a night of presentations with a twist. Presenting on a subject of their choice, speakers have exactly five minutes to teach something, enlighten us, or simply inspire--backed by twenty slides auto-advancing every fifteen seconds."

From the videos I have seen of previous presentations, the slides advancing every fifteen seconds really puts the pressure on and quickly separates a greenhorn PowerPoint newbie from a hardened corporate/start-up seeker of V.C. funding PowerPoint jockey. But the fun part is you never know who's going to to flail and who will shine under the bright lights of the Ignite stage.

So, from the Ignite blog, tonight's presentations are:

Ryan Wanger: Topic: (Almost) Nothing is Irreversible: A Guide to Decision Making
Kate Brown: MacGyver your way through dangerous situations: Lifesaving hacks from the sport of triathlon
David Mejias: A baby, a bird and an Afro: How to plan for and make conceptual photographs.
Ali Schultz: Game (ig)Night: The shortest distance between two people is a good laugh.
Tara Anderson: Pain & the Art of Long-Distance Backpacking
Cris Silva: Brazilian Portuguese for Foreigners

Josh Mishell: Minimize Your Hangover & Maximize Your Awesomeness: How to Thrive at a Beer Festival
Lisa Seaman: Clap Happy!
Leela Turnage How Drug Smuggling and A Run-In With the Mexican Army Helped Me Ace Spanish Clas
Matthew Lenda: There IS such a thing as bad music, and it will be the end of us all.
Nick Armstrong: Nerd-gasm AKA The Life Lessons of Geek Heroes
Julie Wallace: Working with SCIs
Gina Bugiada: Drugs, Sex, Love and Environmentalism: 20 things I've Learned During My Move From NEW YORK to Boulder

Learn more about Ignite and join us beforehand for free food and beer from 5-6pm at the Boulder Brew House, or on Twitter @bldrdrafthouse.