Ever want to enjoy a good burger and beer with a good friend? Invite Paul DeBettignies a/k/a Minnesota Headhunter out and then the conversation flow like water on a table -- all over the place.

Paul and I shared some good laughs, tips, and tricks a couple of months back during the deepest, darkest days of the Minnesota winter and one of his comments really stuck with me. Well, many of them did but this blog article is about only one of them.

Continue reading "What Do P4P, CPM, CPC, CPL, and CPA Mean?" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 17, 2010 at 3:38 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Jason Bakker of Campus Media Group recently published a great blog article about how organizations should use targeted emails to reach college students:

1. Leverage or build your brand name because name recognition matters. Stronger brands result in more of your emails being opened, read, and responded to.
   
2. Time your campaign to hit not just the inbox of when your target audience is most likely to respond but when they'll be looking at their inbox. Sure they want pizza at midnight, but are they checking their email then?
   
3. Hit your target and not someone else's. It sure is nice that your email campaign was delivered to 100,000 students, but wouldn't it have been better if the accounting majors received your email asking if they'd be interested in working for your accounting firm instead of 100,000 random students?
   
4. Make your campaign memorable so they'll remember and respond to it hours, days, or even weeks later. If you can't sum up your message in one sentence, try harder. The most successful campaigns that we deliver are those with the fewest words. The email is to generate enough interest that they'll click to your landing page. That's to generate enough interest that they'll tell you they're interested, buy your service, or otherwise do whatever the heck it is that you want them to do.
   

Continue reading "4 Tips for a Successful Targeted Email Campaign" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 11, 2010 at 9:23 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

There's a nice discussion on a component of mobile marketing going on at the American Express Open Forum as a result of an article about how small businesses can deliver successful targeted cell phone text messaging (SMS) campaigns to their customers. The same suggestions, however, apply to large organizations and to organizations which want to use SMS campaigns to reach potential employees.

Steve Strauss, the author, suggests:

Continue reading "How to Create a Cell Phone Text Messaging Ad Campaign" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 9, 2010 at 7:36 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I've long been a proponent of social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, and others as they've proven themselves to be wonderful sources of information and referrals. But it appears that the gravy train may be coming to an end, and perhaps it is because users of the social media sites are increasingly realizing that the so-called objective referrals they're receiving from their friends are often made at the request of the marketer and not adequately screened by the friend.

For years, advocates of social media marketing have been telling anyone who would listen that peer-to-peer networks are an incredibly most effective, efficient way of marketing a product, service, employment opportunity, anything because consumers simply trust their peers more than they trust marketers, news outlets, government officials, or industry analysts. However, Edelman just released its annual Trust Barometer and the percentage of people who view their peers as credible sources of information plummeted. In 2008, the percentage who trusted the opinions of their peers was 45 percent. Today, it is only 25 percent.

Continue reading "Twitter Followers, Facebook Friends No Longer Trusted" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on February 8, 2010 at 2:23 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I'm a pretty active member of the only trade association for job boards, the International Association of Employment Web Sites. One of the many pieces of information that I've digested at the meetings is that about 90 percent of the job boards generate about 90 percent of their revenues from two failing products: job postings and resume searching. Very few boards have successfully transitioned to products which deliver added value to their employer clients and so will continue to face a cash crunch even as the economy recovers. What are some of the more innovative, value add products that they should deliver? Our two biggest products by revenue are targeted email campaigns and targeted cell phone text messaging campaigns, and both are poised for a surge in spending this year according to a new study.

Increasing investment in social media, mobile marketing, email marketing and search will fuel a 17 percent surge in digital marketing spending this year, as marketers migrate budgets from television, print and radio. Featured in Marketing Budgets 2010: Effectiveness, Measurement and Allocation, new joint research conducted by Econsultancy and global digital marketing provider ExactTarget, the survey of more than 1,000 marketers found two out of three increasing their digital marketing budget in 2010, earning digital channels nearly a quarter of marketers' total budgets.

Continue reading "Marketers Plan 17% Increase in On-line, Mobile Spending" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on February 5, 2010 at 8:04 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Twitter is a unique social media tool. It isn't like Facebook or even blogs where you're writing for the benefit of people who come to your page or actually are seeking out your opinions.

Twitter has followers but the nature of the service is that only those with very, very few followers can even hope to read everything that you've written. So it is much more akin to radio than it is a newspaper in that what you write is broadcast and essentially gone forever immediately. As a result, you want to write interest tweets often, include links to your site and others, and then wait for the magic to happen. The magic comes when your followers see your tweets, like them, and share them with their friends. That attracts more followers and more re-tweets. And the more re-tweets you get, the more clicks from Twitter and more SEO love you get.

Twitter has grown from virtually nothing as far as a source of traffic for us to one of our top sources of traffic. Two of my blog articles this week alone generated some 250 new links to our site and the Googles of the world love links. So forget about having a conversation. Those with the most followers don't even try because the understand that Twitter is a much better vehicle for speaking than listening. I trust that my 23,000+ followers agree.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 21, 2010 at 7:33 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

If a tree falls in a forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? To those of us who are active on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, and other social media sites, a question that we will often ask ourselves is whether anyone is actually listening to the few nuggets of wisdom that occasionally spill out of our fingertips and onto our keyboards. And with so much competition for attention out there, how can we get our messages in front of the people that we most care about -- those with whom we're already doing business but with whom we want to do more?

One answer to this dilemma is to include links to your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, and other social media sites in every email that you send out so that the people with whom you're already working with will regularly be reminded where and how they can find your tweets, updates, blog articles, etc. But short of including some nasty, "read my blog" and then linking to your main page, how do you remind them in a way that will entice them to click to read your content yet also not steal the thunder from the body of your email? The solution that I use is WiseStamp.

Continue reading "How to Integrate Your Social Media Efforts Into Your Daily Emails" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 20, 2010 at 7:55 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the keys to any successful employment, consumer, or other marketing campaign is to well integrate it with your other marketing efforts. The emergence of social media options this past decade created a real double-edged sword for a lot of organizations because few understood how to use social media and even fewer how to integrate their social media campaigns with the campaigns they were already running.

One of the most effective and efficient ways of reaching your target audience has been targeted email campaigns. For some organizations those campaigns take the form of emailed newsletters to internal lists while other organizations have their messages delivered by third parties like CollegeRecruiter.com. Either way, few organizations have figured out how to integrate their social media efforts with their targeted email campaigns. Yet the opportunity is tremendous as your email campaigns should help you build a bigger presence on the social media sites and your social media efforts should help you increase the number of subscribers to your email lists.

Continue reading "How to Integrate Social Media With Targeted Email Campaigns" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 12, 2010 at 10:23 AM | Leave a Comment (2)

One word: video.

I just read an incredibly enlightening article by Steve Strauss, lawyer, author and speaker who specializes in small business and entrepreneurship. In the article, Steve makes the case that the proper addition of video is the best way to move your web page to the coveted first page of the Google search results and therefore capture three to four times the clicks that it would receive on page two and many more times the clicks that it would capture on even lower pages.

Steve's advice is not to simply put a video on your web page because the video alone won't be search engine optimized (SEO). He also advices not to simply upload your video to YouTube and then use the embed code from YouTube because the videos people who find that video on Google or other search engines will click through to YouTube to watch the video rather than to your page.

Continue reading "How to Get a Web Page Onto Page One of Google's Search Results" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 6, 2010 at 3:29 PM | Leave a Comment (1)

I founded this business almost two decades ago and every year I run into the same roadblock starting in mid-November and continuing until early January: people mentally check-out just before Thanksgiving and don't really become productive again until after New Year's. Look at yourself in the figurative mirror. If you're one of those who mentally checks out, don't. You'll have a huge advantage over those against whom you're competing and you won't be sacrificing about 10 percent of your year.

Many estimate that only 10 percent of job seekers properly network and yet 90 percent of job openings go unadvertised and therefore are landed by those who network. Would you rather be one of the 90 percent who are competing for 10 percent of the jobs or the 10 percent who are competing for 90 percent of the jobs? Of course the latter. But the same logic applies in just about every facet of the business world with the impact of the holidays. About 90 percent seem to mentally check-out this year so whatever it is that you're trying to do you stand a much better chance of accomplishing it if you only face 10 percent of the competition now than you did a few weeks ago or a couple of months from now. So if you're an employer and are interested in buying recruitment advertising, this is a great time to do it. Job boards and other media outlets are all suffering from reduced revenues at this time of the year because 90 percent of their customers have mentally checked out. If you're a buyer now, you'll get better service and likely a better deal. If you're trying to hire people, you should find better quality candidates as your competitors in other organizations are checked out. If you're looking for a job, your competitors are checked out so you're going to face a smaller applicant pool against which to compete.

Continue reading "Don't Mentally Check-out During the Holidays" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on November 24, 2009 at 12:34 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

When evaluating various metrics and tools for tracking social media, what should marketing and communications professionals look for?

First, know what you want to measure. The most complex tools in the world won't do you any good if they don't measure what your business needs to measure. So start with that.

Second, look for tools that simplify your job rather than complicate it. If you can find one tool that measures everything you want to measure, invest in it. The alternative may seem cheaper on the front end, but the amount of work required to manage several tools and a dozen separate data sets may end up costing you more in labor and headaches.

Continue reading "How to Measure Results from Social Media Ads, Efforts" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on November 20, 2009 at 8:26 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the under reported aspects of cell phone text messaging (SMS) and other forms of mobile marketing is that it is not a level playing field. The conventional wisdom is that younger people tend to use their cell phones more and be more receptive to receiving ads on them than older people. While that is certainly true, there are also significant socioeconomic and racial differences in usage.

One of the key reasons that Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton in the primaries and then John McCain in the general election is that Obama had an extremely well thought out and integrated mobile marketing strategy. Clinton and McCain did not. Obama understood that it wasn't just the key demographic group Gen Y who used their cell phones more than the average eligible voter, but also the African-Americans and Hispanics. A year after the election, it is hard to remember that our first African-American president did not have the support of African-Americans early in the primaries. Clinton did. So Obama needed a way to reach and get out the vote amongst his supporters and part of that strategy was sending his message to the only device that we almost all carry around everywhere we go: cell phones.

Continue reading "Hispanics Respond to Cell Phone Ads 5-10 Times More Than On-line Ads" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 28, 2009 at 7:33 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 27, 2009 at 7:25 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Email marketing is regarded by many as the real killer application when it comes to social networking. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and the other so-called titans of social media have no where near the number of users and amount of usage as does email. It is amazing that in just a couple of decades, we've gone from a world where the vast majority could email only within their organizations or not at all to a world where we take email for granted.

Our biggest product by revenue for years has been targeted email campaigns. We typically deliver multiple campaigns a week and often a day on behalf of our employment and consumer marketing clients. That's not to say that every campaign is an incredible success. Some simply are destined to fail right from the beginning. When they do, it is usually do to one of four problems:

Continue reading "Four Tips for Reaching College Students Through Email Marketing" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 23, 2009 at 9:02 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) is finally acknowledging that many of their members market products, services, and other opportunities to businesses and consumers and that those advertising and other marketing campaigns should and now do fall under the purview of the DMA. No longer will members of the DMA be able to apply different standards to an ad campaign sent to the mobile phone of a consumer than to the same consumer's email address. That nonsensical "the same rules don't apply to difference devices" policy was used by a number of less ethical members of the DMA in order to circumvent the DMA's consumer protection policies. No more.

According to Direct Marketer, the five big highlights of the new rule are:

Continue reading "Cell Phone Text Messaging (SMS) Campaigns Watched by Direct Marketing Association" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 20, 2009 at 7:42 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Keith Luscher wrote an interested blog article about why it is better to have a smaller but more engaged group of Twitter followers than a larger but less engaged group of followers. Keith is great and I normally agree with his opinions, but on this one we diverge.

There are definitely two schools of thought on this issue and both have merit. One group follows Keith's opinion and emphasizes quality versus quantity when it comes to Twitter followers. They believe that the results they see from having a smaller but more engaged group of followers is greater than if they had a larger but less engaged group of followers. I respectfully disagree.

Continue reading "Why Quantity is Better Than Quality When It Comes to Twitter Followers" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 14, 2009 at 9:32 AM | Leave a Comment (2)

I first became interested in social media service / lifestyle Twitter about a year ago. I created an account without a clear vision for what it was, how I wanted to use it, or what were my goals. In short, I was like pretty much everyone else. It was interesting but no one really knew what it was and therefore how it should be used.

Over the past year, a couple of prominent camps have emerged. Some, like my friend Jim Stroud, believe that Twitter is best used as a niche marketing tool. Jim, with 6,600 followers, feels that it isn't about how many followers you have, but the quality of your followers. I've heard Jim say that having a lot of followers is worthless if no one is listening to you. To an extend, I agree but I favor the other approach.

Continue reading "Why Maximizing Your Twitter Followers is Important" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on October 2, 2009 at 10:23 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Our sales people are regularly asked by clients, especially ad agencies, for demographics on our site visitors. These buyers of advertising want to be sure that they'll be running their ads on a site that will help them reach their desired target market, whether that is college students, recent graduates, U.S. residents, or some other group.

But how do you get a rough idea of site demographics if they can't provide them to you, won't provide them to you, or you don't want to ask for them? Try sites such as Quantcast. Their methodology is somewhat flawed as they typically don't have access to the web site's server logs so at best all they can do is estimate the number and make-up of users to whatever site you're researching. Sites such as Quantcast typically do that by adding their tracking software to the computers of thousands of users. These users typically do so in return for being paid or provided some other type of incentive. That system ensures that they're not random and therefore not representative of the overall Internet population so you need to take the results with a grain of salt, but some information is usually better than no information.

Continue reading "Want Demographics? Try Quantcast." »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on April 28, 2009 at 7:33 AM | Leave a Comment (1)

I've got to admit: I've been thinking a lot recently about mobile web sites, cell phone text messaging, keywords, and other types of mobile marketing. CollegeRecruiter.com has been helping clients reach college students, recent graduates, and alumni through mobile marketing campaigns for several years now and we continue to see more and more interest from more and more clients. And as we accumulate more and more experience, we're starting to see some best practices develop.

Valista recommends the following for getting the most value out of each mobile campaign:

Continue reading "Best Practices for Mobile Marketing Campaigns" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on February 20, 2009 at 3:42 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

We've been selling mobile marketing ad campaigns for several years now, primarily cell phone text messaging campaigns to our database of 10 million college students, recent graduates, and alumni who have asked to receive such messages via email, text messages, or both. I've been astounded and pleased by the incredible growth of this industry and love seeing success stories for prominent brands. The latest is a mobile ad campaign for Adidas.

Adidas recently deployed a mobile advertising campaign to promote its Originals collection of vintage clothing, retro shoes, and urban wear. They blend designs from the 1970's and 1980's with contemporary sports styles.

Continue reading "Adidas Gains Traction Through Mobile Marketing Campaign" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on February 19, 2009 at 10:39 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

There are currently two primary legs to mobile marketing: push technologies such as cell phone text messaging (sms) and pull technologies such as web sites built specifically for mobile phones and keyword advertising. There are many, many other highly effective ways to use mobile marketing but, for most, these are the lowest of the low hanging fruit.

So why would I write that mobile marketing ad campaigns don't exist? Because any ad campaign which is confined to mobile technologies is doomed to fail. Barack Obama's mobile marketing strategy succeeded not because they made excellent use of mobile marketing technologies. They did, but Obama's strategy was successful because his people understood that his mobile marketing campaign had to be tightly woven into the fabric of his overall campaign. So the campaign encouraged those attending rallies to text three of their friends. They included their short code and trackable keywords on virtually all of their campaign materials. They were integrated and therefore they were successful.

Continue reading "Mobile Marketing Ad Campaigns Don't Exist" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on February 19, 2009 at 7:17 AM | Leave a Comment (0)