Posted by Brad, CEO

It’s time for the 4th annual Fuego Four! Who’s going to win it all this year?

Prizes:

1st place: $250 Professional Development Money, and a BlueFuego HOODIE (Black or Blue!)

2nd place: $125 Professional Development Money, and a BlueFuego HOODIE.

3rd and 4th place: $75 Professional Development Money, BlueFuego shirt and sticker.

5th-10th place: BlueFuego t-shirt  (regular or baseball style) and BlueFuego sticker.

We have some other prizes up our sleeves for the contest, but you’ll have to be a part of it to find out.

To learn more and register, visit http://www.bluefuego.com/fuegofour.

May the best bracket win!
Brad

Posted by Brad and Joe, Co-Founders of BlueFuego

As mentioned in our last post about how Higher Ed Facebook Pages are posting too much, Joe looked at 335,955 Facebook Posts in 2011 for our research and the following slides share some nuggets from the data.

This data is the most comprehensive and accurate research available for Facebook Pages in Higher Ed.

As we approach our 36th month of data, and as the Excel Spreadsheet extends further than we thought possible, we see new trends each and every month to share with clients. It’s encouraging to see so many clients taking the data and the research to heart and radically changing the way they approach their Facebook presence so that they can meet their goals.

We hope you enjoy browsing this data and learning how to be more effective in what you do. And please feel free to share! The more the merrier. If you’re ready to Ignite the Fuego, contact us today.

(Fullscreen for best viewing experience)

5 Data Points To Know

1. The 10 most engaging Pages in the nation have averaged 14.8 updates for the last 2 years.
2. Growth is not success. Many Pages are gathering fans and doing nothing with them, averaging minimal engagement each month.
3. Every single segment averaged more content per month vs. 2010. The larger the school, the more content.
4. 60.7% of Pages that increased engagement in 2011 decreased their average # of posts.
5. 81.2% of Pages that decreased engagement in 2011 increased their average # of posts.

5 Tips to Making Your Page Better

1. Start saying NO. Across the over 100 higher ed Facebook Pages I’m an administrator for, an average of 63% of fans live more than 50 miles from campus. Posting about the ice cream social tonight makes you instantly irrelevant to that audience.
2. Quality over Quantity. Similar to above. Everyone knows it, no one wants to do it. Sorry, but your page content isn’t THAT interesting. Cut back. Do better.
3. Post 1 photo, not 150. Pick one good photo and write your update along with it. These always do better than posting an entire photo album.
4. Let the update be the news. Look at your personal news feed, now look at your Page content. Bulky and link-infested, huh? Talk like your audience talks, short sweet and to the point with no external links. Let the update be the news.
5. Live and Die by the Likebait. The increasing trend of “Give us a Like”, “Like this to…”, ” How about a Like for…” does not work long term, our research shows. Treat it like your fine china, and only break it out on certain occasions.

Did you make the cut in 2011? What are you going to do better in 2012? Numbers don’t lie!

Congrats to Merrimack College and President Hopey on their #1 rank for 2011! We presented them with the Fuego’s Finest Trophy last week. Best of luck to everyone in 2012!

Another year is over, which is always an exciting time at BlueFuego. It means another year of Facebook research gets wrapped up, and we get to pull out all the best nuggets to share with our clients.  It’s always encouraging to see schools that we’ve worked with in the past year take our recommendations, apply them to their content, and succeed.  One client went from 10th worst in the nation in 2010 to 3rd best in 2011 by simply by listening to what the data and their audience was telling them.  Another client moved their engagement from the 66th percentile in the nation to 11th. The #1 school in the nation this year wasn’t even in the Top 200 last year. And nearly every other client moved among the top 10% in the nation.

What’s the biggest barrier to engaging your audience, time and time again?  You post too much.  We’ve been saying it for nearly 3 years now, at conferences, in meetings, on phone calls.  Some schools listen, others opt to continue on the path they are on.

I just had to share this data point publicly when Joe sent it over to me. It’s fascinating.

In 2010, Joe manually looked at 244,738 posts across higher ed Facebook pages and calculated the engagement on each of them. When we took engagement (using the BlueFuego Formula) and compared it to the # of posts each school was putting out per month, we saw a very strong correlation.  Simply, the more you post, the lower your average engagement will be.

Here’s what we saw after pulling out any page with more than 300 fans and at least 5 posts per month in 2010:

(Click to Enlarge)

The 10 most engaging pages in the nation averaged 14.8 updates per month to their audience.  The 10 least engaging pages in the nation averaged 57.8 updates per month. Schools in the middle 50th percentile averaged 28.3 updates per month.

Fast forward to 2011. Using the same data set of schools, Joe looked at 335,955 wall posts in 2011. So the amount of content shared via Facebook Pages increased by 37.3% in 2011.Of the 10 Most Engaging Pages in 2010, only one remained in the Top 10 for 2011.  Siena College moved from #10 to #6, and the other 9 schools are newcomers to the top rankings.

Joe took a look again, this year using a qualifier of 3,000 fans and 5 posts per month in 2011:

(Click to Enlarge)

14.8. Again.

90% of the schools in the top 10 are gone, but the number remains.  And if you look across the graph, although the N has increased by 40%, it remains very consistent.  And has for nearly 3 years now. But there is one change that stands out to me.

On average, the Top 100 Pages in the nation decreased their posts to 18.9 updates per month in 2011, compared to 20.2 in 2010.

On average, the Pages sitting in the middle 25-75th percentile increased their posts in 2011 compared to 2010.

Mediocre Pages produce mediocre content, which delivers mediocre results. Don’t waste your opportunity to build long-term relationships with your audience because you want to promote that violinist on campus tonight. Stop sharing links to press releases no one cares about.  Learn what content your audience wants and deliver. Recent Facebook changes have made it harder than ever to break through the clutter, and without good content, without using EdgeRank to your advantage, you’re going to continue on the same path of mediocrity.   Stand up, be bold, and make some changes in 2012!

March Madness is upon us, and 68 teams have been reduced to the Sweet 16, with games tonight determining the Elite 8.  We’ve seen our fair share of  buzzer beaters and bracket busters already, but we got to thinking at BlueFuego… what if the tournament were decided according to the BlueFuego Formula?

The BlueFuego formula has been run across over 355,000 individual Facebook Page posts for over 1,200 college and university main fan pages in the past 23 months.  It’s our way of determining engagement on a Page, and we’ve manually pulled the data on every single post.

Here’s the formula: (Comments + Likes per post) / # of Fans

(Click Photo to Enlarge)

Facebook Pages are a great indicator of how engaged a university is with its online community, and how the community/fans react to the content that’s being posted.  Using the combined engagement percentage of January and February 2011 for the top-level university page for each of the 68 teams, here is how the NCAA Bracket shapes up to the Sweet 16. (On April 1, we’ll pull the March data and use that to determine the rest of the tournament.)

- Of the #1 seeds, only Duke loses in the first round.

- Butler, Kentucky, North Carolina, Arizona, Duke, Connecticut, Richmond, VCU, Florida State, and BYU are all winning on the court, but fell out in the 2nd round of our bracket. (Yeah, we’d rather be winning on the court vs. Facebook too.)

- Of the actual Sweet 16 teams, only 5 (Ohio St., Marquette, SDSU, Kansas and Wisconsin) make it to the Sweet 16 in our bracket.

- Only 4 of the 16 third round games matched our bracket.

BlueFuego Bracket: Sweet 16 (Click to Enlarge)

]]> http://bluefuego.com/index.php/2011/03/march-madness-who-wins/feed/ 2 http://bluefuego.com/index.php/2010/12/storytelling-is-not-the-new-marketing-hotness/ http://bluefuego.com/index.php/2010/12/storytelling-is-not-the-new-marketing-hotness/#comments Fri, 03 Dec 2010 16:30:13 +0000 Bradjward http://bluefuego.com/?p=1063

Posted by Howard Kang

The trend as of late touted by marketing experts everywhere is “storytelling is the future.” It’s supported by the thought that the need for authenticity has been elevated due to the accessibility of information and connectivity on the web and the audiences need to feel emotionally engaged. I’m sorry, but the storytelling trend isn’t anything new or innovative.

The Indigenous Australians, Native Americans, Incas, and Maasai also found storytelling extremely important. Actually, many historic cultures did. It’s called oral tradition; oral tradition has existed since the beginning of language. Songs, folk stories, chants, and cultural knowledge have crossed generations through oral tradition. People have always found stories important.

“Human nature is perpetual. In most respects it is the same today as in the time of Caesar. So the principles of psychology are fixed and enduring. You will never need to unlearn what you learn about them.” – Claude Hopkins, Scientific Advertising

Since the time of the Maasai, Caesar, to modern times, humans have always loved to connect with other people and share stories. The web’s accessibility has made it easy for us as institutions to be human and tangible, have personalities and voices, tell stronger stories, and connect people to the greater community and culture of the institution. When we look at storytelling as less of a marketing tool and more as a reality of human nature, our stories become much more engaging and the process of finding great stories to share becomes less daunting.

Posted by Brad, CEO

As a follow up to Howard’s post a few months ago, Why Foursquare and Gowalla Campus Tours Will Fail, I want to talk briefly about QR codes. These are just some quick thoughts that I’ve had on my mind, and after I ran across Likify today and the news last week that bit.ly now offers QR codes it brought me back to the same thought… we’re not there… yet.

I like QR Codes. I want them to work. When I pitched an idea to a client in April ‘09, I was very excited about the possibilities. When I saw them in action overseas in early-mid ‘09, it was great. But there are some barriers that still exist. And if they remain, QR codes will fail.

(If you aren’t up to date on what a QR code is/does, start here and then come back.)

5 Reasons Why QR Codes Will Fail

1. Until every single phone on the market knows what to do with a photo of the QR code from the built-in camera, usage will remain low. The step of downloading an app to take a photo is one step too many.

2. Until the options filter down (or the app/camera processes any type), we’re in the Beta/VHS or BluRay/HD-DVD war. MS codes, QR Codes, BeeTag, JagTag, Datamatrix, the list goes on. Simplification will happen, and the strong will survive. When this happens, adoption will increase in the early and late majority.

3. What’s In It For Me? (Taking a photo of the QR code above will let you ‘like’ our Facebook Page… so what? WIIFM?) What happens when they DO actually use it? In the above QR code, you become a fan on Facebook. That’s it. Nothing extra. You could have also done that by going directly to our page, or by texting like bluefuego to 32665, or by clicking the like button on the box over to the right of this blog post. It’s another vehicle, but not always the best one. QR can be in the mix, but it can’t be the only piece.

4. Long term context. This is similar to WIIFM, but on a larger scale. My ‘Deliver’ magazine has one on the cover this month. Esquire did that a few months ago too. Are you just putting it on print one-time because it’s the cool thing to do, or do you have long-term goals that keep these in front of your audience?

5. Technology that’s cool or useful doesn’t always make the cut, unfortunately. I keep a brand new, unopened CueCat in my desk drawer as a constant reminder of this.

From Wikipedia: “The CueCat was a cat-shaped handheld barcode reader developed in the late 1990s by the now-defunct Digital Convergence Corporation, which connected to computers using the PS/2 keyboard port and later and less commonly, USB. The CueCat enabled a user to open a link to an Internet URL by scanning a barcode — called a “cue” by Digital Convergence — appearing in an article or catalog or on some other printed matter. In this way a user could be directed to a web page containing related information without having to enter a URL.

Sound familiar? (Oh, and if you find a computer with a PS/2 jack, I’d love to scan some barcodes with you sometime.)

CueCat Fail!

What do you think?

I spoke with one school at a recent conference who is using QR codes, after I mentioned them in a presentation in conjunction with a slide that said “technology accelerates innovation… should you accelerate with it?” They said they’ve tried QR codes, but have had no response. Literally, zero. Thousands of alumni have received magazines, postcards, letters, etc and not a single person has taken the time to scan a QR code yet.

It all comes down to the need for another app, in my opinion. Remove that barrier, and QR codes become useful. Sure, I might have a reader on my phone, but does my audience?

Let me know your thoughts!

Posted by Howard Kang, Ignition Officer

When interviewing for a job we tend to use a formal tone as that’s what interviews demand. We have our resume prepared listing our achievements, past successes, work history, as well as a few bulleted points of what makes us unique.

When we’re on a date (don’t worry, it’s been a while for me too) we approach conversation much differently. The interview strategy doesn’t work. The person sitting with you doesn’t care all that much about your college GPA and if you spoke to her in a rigid and formal tone it would be awkward. In fact, I’m pretty sure that if you listed your accomplishments off during the entirety of the date, your chances of seeing this person again would be slim.

Think about the language used in both situations and how they contrast. When we communicate on the web I think it requires a balance of both an interviewing voice and dating voice, favoring the dating voice. Listing statistics and rankings is easy so that’s mostly what’s primarily communicated to our prospective students. Look what we have done, this is how we’re unique, and this is why you should care. The main issue with this is that when you communicate as if you’re interviewing, you’re not fostering connection. Connection becomes a ancillary goal because interviews are based on evaluation of credentials.

People know the hard facts about your institution. If they don’t they can find them on Google, your website, and on your print communications. So why do we need to keep reminding them? Why not show them why you’re known as a friendly campus instead of repeating the message and hoping it sticks, why not charm them with authentic and human stories unique to your institution that capture their attention, why not spend some time interacting with your audience as if it was a date and not an interview?

Everyone appreciates a little romance.

Posted by Brad and Joe, Co-Founders of BlueFuego

Here is a follow up to our post earlier this week about sharing your US News ranking via the social web, more specifically Facebook Pages. Here is a quick snapshot of the US News release from yesterday.

After the day, Joe decided to take a look at Top 100 National Universities according to the rankings and cross reference to Facebook Page wall posts.  

Of these 100 schools, 37 posted on their wall about the rankings the day they came out. How were the results? An average of .9361% engagement on the updates.

To put that in perspective, if these schools would consistently get at level of engagement on each post, they’d all be in the Top 50 most engaging pages of our data that tracks over 1,400 Pages.

But if you know BlueFuego, you know we couldn’t stop there.

Next, we dove in and look at the Top 100 National Liberal Art Colleges. Here, only 17 of the 100 updated on the wall about their ranking, to the tune of an average 1.0124% engagement.

We have our opinions in why a lower amount of schools in the more prestigious category didn’t update regarding their ranking (eternal embargo from the top? ). But one thing is for sure…. data doesn’t lie.

Posted by Joe and Brad, Co-Founders of BlueFuego

We see it all the time in higher education, more specifically on Facebook Pages.  A confusion of interests between 1) what the page administrator cares about or likes, and 2) what the audience cares about or likes.   And as a result, both suffer.

You’ve probably heard us say it at a conference before: You are what you publish, and your institution is what you publish. You might think that your audience cares about your favorite TV show, an event in the area that you are passionate about, etc., but the majority of the time, the post falls on deaf ears.

Take for example the recent mini-meme within the higher ed web developer world of the venn diagram on XKCD. Through our monthly research of nearly 1,400 universities and colleges on Facebook, we saw several schools post this cartoon to their Facebook Page.

Average Engagement on the XKCD post = 0.025%.
Average Engagement on all other posts for the month = .1734%

Yes, a fourth of a percent of the audience responded with a comment or like, well below the average.  In most cases, it fell on deaf ears, with no engagement at all. There’s a 594% difference in engagement between the XKCD post and the rest of the posts for the month.

US News Rankings

Let’s talk for a moment about US News Rankings, which were released today.  A common sentiment between higher ed employees is that the rankings are flawed, irrelevant, and aren’t even worth a mention on the site or web presence. Heck, Brad’s even said it before. But… is it your interest, or the audience?

Now, take a look at this data of an event similar to the US News Rankings being released today. The Forbes 100, which were released earlier this month.  Of the 100 schools on the list, 10 decided to update their Facebook community with the news of their ranking. How did it go with the community (the audience you should be serving)?

Principia College:
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .412%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .987%
Forbes Post Engagement: 4.064%

Washington & Jefferson:
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .312%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .594%
Forbes Post Engagement: 2.541%

Wofford College:
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .184%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .087%
Forbes Post Engagement: 1.996%

Westmont College:
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .121%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .225%
Forbes Post Engagement: 1.535%

Centre College (KY):
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .363%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .038%
Forbes Post Engagement: 1.499%

Claremont McKenna:
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .070%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .044%
Forbes Post Engagement: 1.214%

Drew University:
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .114%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .324%
Forbes Post Engagement: .973%

Tufts University:
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .154%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .117%
Forbes Post Engagement: .715%

University of Virginia:
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .147%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .108%
Forbes Post Engagement: .426%

William & Mary:
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .109%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .065%
Forbes Post Engagement: .204%

Wow. That’s some serious engagement.  (We based engagement on the BlueFuego Formula.)

Final Thoughts

This is something that has been on our minds for quite awhile, as we continue to watch endless amounts of universities and colleges miss the mark with their updates.

Who is running your page?  Are they even an effective communicator? Marketer?  Or did they just happen to get there first?  If you haven’t considered the fact that your Facebook Page/Presence is where most of your audience is having more touch points with your brand than ever before, and you haven’t yet thought about who’s running the Page and if they are truly a match to be communicating your messages and representing you, then it might be time to re-visit how you’re doing things.  All it takes is one off-message post for someone to click hide and never hear from you again.  The short-term agony of restructuring who’s involved has long-term implications for your brand and your institution.

While we are not advocating a restructuring that includes red-tape about who posts, what they post, getting approval, etc… we are advocating having the right person in place, people who understand the audience, to be representing you online.

Got a good ranking today?  Post it to your online communities.  I think you’ll be pleased with the results.

Posted by Brad, CEO
It’s hard to believe it’s been over 15 months since we initially pulled data on Social Web Callouts across 1,387 college and university websites in the USA. Just as a quick recap, here’s what the research consists of. We look at the .edu homepage, the Admissions undergraduate homepage and the Alumni homepage for the 1,387 schools (4,161 total URLs) each quarterly and manually pull the data on which pages have SWC’s, and what those SWC’s are.

Our 15-month review has continued to show some interesting trends in higher ed promotion of social web presences via the official website. Here is a quick recap, or feel free to skip down to the slidedeck below!

• For the first time ever, more than 50% of all three areas include SWC’s on their site. Alumni leads the way with 60.4% of Alumni homepages including SWC’s on their site.
• 85.7% of schools (1,188) now have a SWC on one of the three pages we review. This is up from 20.5% (285) in March 2009. (We crossed into the majority around November 2009. Our research in August 2009 (562) found 40.5% of schools, and then  63.2% (877) in ?December 2009.)
• More and more schools are including SWC’s on all three pages, which was not the case initially.  In March 2009, only .07% of schools (10!) had SWC’s on the .edu homepage, the Admissions homepage and the Alumni Homepage.  This suggests an increased web effort across platforms, but also the potential of an integrated presence/strategy between departments. Initially, we’d see 1 department of the three doing the web well. For example, Admissions would be using the social web heavily but Alumni wouldn’t be doing anything, or vice versa.  We’re now seeing schools using these tools throughout the entire institution.
• Admissions continues to lag behind in promoting their presences via SWC’s directly on their site.  Our supplementary research with prospective students has shown that they are more likely to visit and join presences that are officially promoted by the institution.
• Of the 769 institutions with SWC’s on their homepage, Facebook appears 96.1% of the time.
• The presence of SWC’s has largely been fueled by standard template headers and footers across .edu sites.  This typically means the entire site is linking to one presence, which is detrimental to each individual area’s efforts. For example, in March 2009 there wasn’t a single undergrad admissions site with a LinkedIn callout. Now, 62 schools do and LinkedIn appears over 8% of the time on the 735 admission homepages.  This is due to LinkedIn being added to the global navigation, not because it’s becoming an effective or utilized tool for Admissions.  Subsequently, we continue to see a lazy approach of deploying SWC’s across the site, which means the Facebook logo on an Admissions header/footer links to a Facebook Alumni Page, not the school’s Facebook Admissions Page.  Targeted SWC’s are key to promotion.

If you are viewing this as an email, click here to view the research.

Social Web Callouts: 15 Month Review