MARKETING HIGHER EDUCATION A monthly electronic Newsletter to help you market your school, community college, college, or university. Vol. XIII, no. 5, May, 1999 -------------------------------------------------- TABLE OF CONTENTS Electronic Names for Email and Web Sites: Alphabet Soup? by Robert "Bob" S. Topor and Elizabeth "Liz" Pollard Advertising and the Academy: Go Tell it on the Mountain! by Robert "Bob" S. Topor & Elizabeth "Liz" Pollard -------------------------------------------------- Electronic Names for Email and Web Sites: Alphabet Soup? by Robert "Bob" S. Topor & Elizabeth "Liz" Pollard Something to think about! As we were preparing the electronic mailing lists for AGORA we were surprised to find a great variety of electronic addresses being used in higher education. Some addresses were simple and direct using the name of the institution. Others were complex assemblies of numbers, acronyms, and code names. Some were short and easy to recall. Others seemed to be very long, including complex arrays of numbers, letters and names. Some used actual names of individuals; others used numbers for people. Some included system names that were, we are sure, considered "cute" by the computer staff who had fun coming up with them! Some included acronyms or initialisms which did not distinguish the institution from others with similar names! Many URL's for Web sites have the same problems. The use of "clever" server names, directories, and the like make the name almost indecipherable, and very easy to forget. The longer the string one must remember, the more likely it is to confuse the user. The further a URL strays from the simple and straightforward, the harder it becomes for a user to make sense of it and use it again. Here's our concern: We think most institutions are leaving decisions about the names of computer systems and e-mail address configurations, as well as Web site URL's, to computer folks. Whole systems are being designed by people who are not necessarily concerned about the marketing implications of what they are doing, as often happens in higher education. Here's the marketing problem: For the present, this may not matter much, since most systems are not being used for marketing purposes, but rather for pragmatic, in-house, and inter- university computer and e-mail purposes. Therefore it may not really matter if an address such as in%"wendell_jahnke@ms1.mankato.msus.edu" is used. However, in the future, when addresses may have much greater MARKETING significance, this may become a significant marketing problem for your institution. It may not matter in this instance that more than one campus or university system has the same initials (Minnesota, or Missouri, or Montana, etc. ... State University System) if someone familiar with the state university system is using this address within the same campus, but to someone off campus, it may not be at all clear where a message with this address originated! Likewise, it may not make much difference if a URL looks like a hodepodge of alphanumeric characters and meaningless symbols, at least if a user is coming to it from a link. A name like www.podunk_university.edu/~faculty/ostrowskyT%20/symbiotics.html when clicked as a link will get you to something meaningful. However, if one wants to find the same site later and didn't mark the URL, it may be practically impossible to find, and it certainly doesn't provide much in the way of name recognition to use as a clue. The user who stumbled upon it originally may not even be tempted to try, since the URL isn't likely to recall the subject matter or place of origination! Here's another example of a problem. One of the subscribers to this service has this e-mail address: U0A69@WVNVM.WVNET.EDU The problem with this address is that the character zero and "o" are very similar in appearance. In fact the only difference, in most type fonts, is that the zero (0) is a bit narrower than the "O." Given the fact that the zero, in this case, is between two alpha characters, one normally assumes it is an "o." In fact, in some sans serif type faces the zero and "o" are exactly the same, so which do you use? If you use the wrong one, your message will "bounce," (be rejected) as we are sure many of us have experienced. In the case of this address we had to make a phone call to find out what was wrong when our first attempt failed. Somehow, it seems counter-productive to use the phone to find out what an e-mail address should be! If one is a potential student, one may not bother! Then this admissions director would have missed a potential applicant and four years of tuition payments! Get involved! We propose that you play a role in helping determine how your institution is identified electronically as systems evolve and become used more often for other than traditional computer and e-mail purposes. Your school's electronic name and its system of identifying divisions, departments, or other portions of the Web site electronically may be as important as your formal name, for schools as well as for individuals, as electronic systems become more widely used for marketing communications purposes. It's something to think about! Consider your e-mail address: 1. Does it do a good job of identifying you and your institution? 2. Is it easy to remember? 3. Does it contain odd arrays of numbers and letters? When hand written, is it easy to understand? 4. Does it include "cute" names that your computer people find funny, but others (e.g., prospective students, donors, professionals) may ridicule as stupid and ridiculous? By the same token, consider the URL assigned to your institution's whole Web site and its subordinate pages: 1. Does it identify accurately the name of your institution, and is it distinguishable from the URL for a similar school? 2. Will a user be able to tell from the name what the subject of a page is concerned with? (Example: www.podunkuniv.edu/admissions.html definitely identifies the school and the subject of the page, and www.podunkuniv.edu makes it clear that the institution involved here isn't Podunk Junior College!). 3. Are abbreviations used clear and simple to identify? (www.pdu.edu vs. www.podunkuniv.edu). PDU may stand for Pennsylvania Dental University, or Podunk Dance Unit or some other non-similar entity. Short abbreviations are easy to type, but they may get confused if other schools have similar names or initials! 4. As with email addresses, does your URL include clever server names or other devices which do not add to the meaning or the ease of finding the site? -------------------------------------------------- NOTICE: As a subscriber to this electronic newsletter, you have permission to reproduce and use this article on your campus. All others please note ©1999, Topor Consulting Group International. Comments about, or requests to reprint should be directed to Bob Topor at topor@marketinged.com. ********** SPECIAL OFFER For Marketing Higher Education newsletter subscribers ONLY. Download the updated second edition of Bob's "classic" book, Marketing Higher Education - A Practical Guide, directly from his Web site at http://www.marketinged.com Special Deal: As a subscriber to this newsletter you have permission to make copies and distribute on your campus... a great aid for marketing committees! Make as many copies as you like (limited to your campus). 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It's easy to order (secured credit card) and download... just log on to Bob's web site at http://www.marketinged.com and find it on his home page. Questions? Call Bob at (650) 962-1105 or e-mail him at topor@marketinged.com NEW! Download "Wasabi & Ginger" ($35.95 US) .... a book by Bob and his partner Dr. Moshe Engelberg .... for life development. It combines ideas from the business world with ones for personal satisfaction and success. You can use these ideas both in your business ventures as well as your personal life and success activities. Bon Appetit! This book is easy to download from Bob's web site: http://www.marketinged.com -------------------------------------------------- Advertising and the Academy: Go Tell it on the Mountain! by Robert "Bob" S. Topor & Elizabeth "Liz" Pollard A strange fog hovers over much of higher education. It is the "advertising-is-bad" fog. It has permeated higher education for decades.. maybe centuries. It is best described as the "notion that higher education is inherently 'good' and does not, or SHOULD not advertise." It contends that the purity of higher education is diminished by crass, commercial, profit-motivated, tainted, advertising. This attitude is, literally, medieval. It's even medieval in origin, as historically institutions of higher education developed from the teaching of monks in churches and cathedrals. Somehow the notion developed that education as a profession is holy, sacred, and educational institutions will cheapen themselves by stooping to the use of advertising to promote themselves. Even the church, however, realized the need to spread the word. Without evangelizing, there would be no church congregations, no contributions from the devout to keep the church going! Over the centuries, people, as they are wont to do, continued doing things the way they always had. An aura of holiness built around higher education in the days when it was all church sponsored has never been completely dispelled. Education is not the only profession that decided it was unethical to advertise, but it appears to be one of the last to break that tradition and recognize the modern necessity to compete, to let the public know what education can provide for it, and to promote the benefits of higher education through the most modern means. We at Marketing Higher Education newsletter take this opportunity to take a stance on this controversial issue: Higher education institutions MUST advertise. We owe it to our constituents, Board, faculty, administrators, students, parents, donors, and community folk to ADVERTISE. The old idea of advertising being a bad activity needs to be put to rest..... finally and forever. Advertising is simply communicating what you have to offer to attract students and donors. There is nothing inherently evil in it, and it's essential to the healthy growth of enrollment, as well as to increases in the funding higher education needs on a regular basis in order to continue delivering education and its benefits to future generations. We may provide the best possible learning, delivered by top notch faculty, in a well equipped environment, but without telling others about what we're doing, we can't survive, quite literally. The image you have worked so hard to develop needs to be communicated where it can do the most good. Image establishment, evaluation and maintenance can be supported through a thoughtful advertising plan. Don't hide your light under a bushel and expect new students to materialize at Admissions and donors to fall in line to help fund your operation. Without advertising, our enrollments will sink, our donors will forget what higher education is doing, and our funding will shrivel away to nothing. The church did it using medieval methods, word of mouth, preaching, and whatever was available to them. These days there are much more effective media we can use, and SHOULD. We need to budget for advertising, making it part of our obligation to our "customers" and, more importantly, to OURSELVES. Law firms, doctors, hospitals and many other nonprofits have discovered the benefits of advertising, although many of these professions originally espoused the lofty position that higher education now clings to. Advertising is a critically important component of a marketing mix. It simply can not (and should not) be avoided. Educators must learn to spread the news by many methods. Word of mouth is still effective, but it's not nearly as rapid as print, radio, television, and Internet. One of the most effective places to advertise is at your Web site. The Web provides the widest audience one can find, and the Web site itself can be further promoted in advertising in print, radio and TV. If we expect to keep our institutions lively and prosperous, we must, to borrow from the environment where higher education began, "Go tell it on the mountain!" -------------------------------------------------- Original posting: 5/9/99 Marketing Higher Education Newsletter is published by Topor Consulting Group International (http://www.marketinged.com). Newsletter posted by WEBB Internet Marketing & Consulting (http://www.firstchapter.com). copyright 1999 Topor Consulting Group International