1. What has been the biggest change you’ve seen in how universities market and promote their sports programs since you started out at UConn?

The internet is biggest change. When I started at UConn in ‘93 the internet/email was in the very early stages (if we even had it all – I can’t remember ever using it at UConn in the beginning). Now, it is generally the first medium we think of when deciding how to best promote one of our games/events.

We still promote our events through traditional vehicles, but the internet is the one we think of first. It allows the most flexibility and the best opportunity to hit the most people during the course of a day.

2. How are you moving the WVU athletic department forward in terms of new methods of advertising, marketing, public relations, and measuring their effectiveness?

We are constantly looking at new ideas for our web site. Recently, we have started adding more video features to the site. We receive instant feedback with our web site via the traffic. We can see right away if something we did on there was well received. That is tougher with traditional television, radio or print advertising.

Most of measurement techniques are basic at this point. If it’s web based we look at the page views, unique users and or “click throughs” if it’s a pop up ad or something similar.

We are fortunate that we get most of our feedback about events by looking in the seats at a game. We can tell pretty quickly at a game if our promotion worked or not. I can expand more on this topic at the conference.

3. You mentioned in the last session that you’re moving ticket sales to an all electronic-based system in the near future and that you’ve experienced some resistance to that, particularly with older generations. If you could sit down with one such person, how would you explain why you’re moving these sales to online processing and why it’s a benefit to both them and you?

Great question. I still think it will take us a few years to become fully automated in this area. I think the benefits are the overall ease for the customer. No more waiting on the mail to arrive with the ticket application in there. No more writing out two different checks and sending them back. Click a couple of buttons, put your cc info in and you’re done. No filling out forms, doing the math on how much you owe. It’s all right there.

4. Which Web 2.0 / social media / new marketing applications are most exciting to you?

Facebook and MySpace I think are extremely interesting applications. It’s amazing to me how many students/people use one or the other. As I mentioned at the Charleston event, I think people have to be careful with this as well. While it can be a great marketing tool (both individually and for groups), people that post to and speak to our athletes about their image and how much one picture on their Facebook page could change the perception of them that is out there.

That said, they can be valuable promotional tools. We had interns post events on both sites this year in an effort to attract people to a soccer game, wrestling meet, etc…

5. You’ve now had the opportunity to speak at one city (Charleston) and listen to a couple of the sessions. Do you think this is the type of event marketers in West Virginia can use to their benefit?

I think these events are great. I think it is invaluable for marketing people to get out of “their world” and share ideas as often as possible. So often I think busy executives get hung up in their day to day duties and don’t have the time to think on a bigger scale. I know I do. It’s amazing how much more creative I feel after sitting in a room with a bunch of other marketing people and throwing around ideas. I think these conferences are outstanding and will only get better as they get more and more participants!

6. What do you think are the benefits of holding conferences such as Next Generation Marketing in West Virginia in cities like Morgantown and Charleston?

Both have so much to offer. Charleston is great because of the multiple ad agencies, gov’t groups and just the fact it is the capital. Morgantown because of the obvious draw of the University. But, Morgantown gives you more than just the Univ. It has been one of the few areas in West Virginia that continues to grow and thrive. Construction continues at an unbelievable pace. More and more students are coming to the Univ each year only leads to more and more growth in the business community.

Morgantown and Charleston are both vitally important to the growth of our state. I think bringing bright, energetic, talented people together (as these conferences are doing) will benefit not only the individuals, but also the cities in this state and the state as a whole!

• Search No Evil

• Inspire No Evil

• Speak No Myths of Evil

Pictured above (left to right): Justin Seibert – President, Direct Online Marketing, Wheeling, West Virginia; Skip Lineberg – Chief Creative Officer, Maple Creative, Charleston, West Virginia; and Jeff James – CEO, Mythology, Charleston, West Virginia.

Photo courtesy of Jason Keeling, photographed at Next Generation Marketing, Huntington, W.Va. May 13, 2008.

I almost fell out of my chair. What was plain to him was entirely troubling to me. He was inferring that marketing is devoid of ethics.

Maybe I should not have been so shocked. After all, Seth Godin, one of America’s most popular and respected marketing gurus, published a book entitled, All Marketers Are Liars. (And he’s a marketing guy!)

It troubles me that marketing is plainly perceived to be full of lies. How did we get to this point? More importantly, what can we do about it? Help me out with your thoughts and suggestions, my dear marketing geniuses.

This is what development looks like in the environment of a vibrant economy. The photo at left is the Boathouse Bistro in Morgantown, West Virginia. Sure, one might say, “anyone can build a new restaurant.” But if I had turned around and snapped another photo, you would have seen a shot of the new, under-construction Marina Tower office building. Connecting all of this is the Morgantown Riverwalk path. It is undeniably cool and convenient to be able to set out on foot from the Waterfront Place Hotel and walk to several appealing destinations, such as the ampitheater, the rail trail, Oliverio’s (and several other eating/drinking establishments) and around a dozen office locations. In addition to the capital injection downtown, there’s a $1.2 billion capital investment underway in the county with the new Longview Power plant.

Yes, there is traffic to contend with (and they are working on solutions), but Morgantown has energy and momentum. It is envigorating to come here. Part of the success comes from the University’s presence here. From my perspective, the other part … the Morgantown “Tipping Point” was the decision by its leaders to embrace and leverage the power and impact of their river, the Monongalia River. That has spurred capital investment, which fuels development … and momentum ensues.

My visionary friend, Jeff James and I landed on an outlandish (maybe not, once you ponder it) idea that our state should connect Morgantown and Charleston via light rail. As Jeff said, “They ought to just extend the Personal Rapid Transit system (or PRT) from Morgantown to Charleston.” And so what originated as an off-handed remark makes all the sense in the world.

• Saves gas – in a time in which gas prices are only going to rise.
• Improves and enriches the travel experience.
• Adds convenience for the traveler.
• Alleviates traffic congestion.
• Decreases traffic accidents.

Who agrees? Who disagrees? Let us hear from all marketing geniuses on this topic, please!

Cross-posted from the Maple Creative Marketing Genius Blog

Details of the University’s decision (a no-brainer in my opinion) and Pat White’s credentials are well documented in today’s Daily Mail column by sportswriter Jack Bogaczyk.

Here’s my question to all of you marketing geniuses: What would you to generate publicity and create buzz in support of Pat White to maximize his chances of winning the coveted Heisman Trophy, college football’s top individual honor? Put your sports information director (or athletic director) hat on … and let’s have some suggestions. Please post your suggestions as a comment below.

By the way the award is decided by a voting process by the members of the Downtown Athletic Club of New York. It will be awarded in early December of 2008. More about the award here.

Cross-posted from the Maple Creative Marketing Genius Blog

At the moment we have a Google calendar and a 30 boxes calendar on the marketing conference calendar page. Ideally, I’d love to have a play with Trumba, but it’s $99 a month.

The functionality we’re looking for is something easy for the user to add events to and to have each conference mapped. At the moment, I’m personally leaning towards the 30 boxes calendar because it allows both of those along with flickr, twitter, facebook and myspace mashability and a few other cute options.

We’ll also be having a conference round-up once the thing is up and running properly.

So, if anybody has any thoughts on which of the two calendars they prefer, or if there’s a better solution out there, please let us know in the comments.

#1 Articulate that each group has different goals.
While both marketing and sales want common outcomes—more sales, market share and customers—the timetables and metrics they rely on are very different. Marketing hopes to develop a brand over an extended period of time; sales tries to develop near-term revenue based on current demand.

#2 Stay on the same page—and “on brand.”
The generation, and passing along, of leads probably creates the biggest gap between sales and marketing. Marketing develops its materials based on its perceived perfect prospect, but sales may simply ignore both the prospect and brand image that marketing worked hard to create to close a deal.

#3 Respect the differences, but realize they’re working at the same “joint.”
Sales personnel greet the customer and serve the burger; marketing folks get the prospect in the joint in the first place. Both are fundamental activities to a successful business, but are managed by people with often very contrasting disciplines, personalities and even educational backgrounds. Sales needs more time to sell and negotiate; marketing seeks more opportunity to analyze and be creative with their marketing strategies—and they both should be paid accordingly.

This is very similar to what Jeff James of Microsoft will be talking about in his session: Execution for ROI: Aligning the Sales & Marketing Planets.

The session synopsis is as follows:

Marketing remains one of the least disciplined organizations within many companies, and CEO’s aren’t standing for it any longer. It’s no longer acceptable to put your finger to the wind, pray the CFO approves your budget, and then hope something good happens.

This session will cover how to

* Understand your marketing objectives so campaigns can be built to achieve them
* Segment and prioritize your most influential customers, your highest potential prospects and other key customer groupings so marketing can be more targeted
* Come to agreement with your top sales executive on what the definition of a quality lead really is
* Measure the impact of marketing that is not directly revenue related such as brand, relationship, and customer loyalty
* Measure the impact or contribution of your marketing investment across various communication channels (web, TV, radio, direct mail, etc.)

Anyone having a hard time justifying their marketing budget requests with their CFO, or feeling the heat from their VP of Sales regarding the quality of leads, should attend this session.

So, you’d better look sharp if you’re particularly interested in Jeff’s topic as he’s first up on Thursday morning.

You see, this conference has it going on from all angles people.

Kijiji is basically Craigslist with a lick of paint and a great map of locations on the front page. It also has better forums and an added bell and two whistles. (I’m sure Mr. Mallabo will set me right if I missed out on something on first cursory glance.) All told, if Craigslist announced a revamp and came up with Kijiji, I think most people would approve.

So, given Craigslist’s apparent laissez-faire attitude to making a dollar, is this move by eBay as cute as a braided My Little Pony or as heavy-handed as Hulk Hogan?

Read the article.

Compare Kijiji and Craigslist.

Then let the conversation commence.

I actually got to meet the chap this morning and he’s a lovely fella. As you can tell from his answers he’s most definitely someone who’s on the button. And I can assure you that he’s just as engaging as he is sharp. So, I reckon you might not only learn a thing or three but you might also have a decent little informal chat after he’s done.

Read Jeff’s full bio here.

1. With the advent of blogging and other ’speculative investments’ related to social media, how do you go about measuring things that don’t have a bottom line such as customer loyalty, relationship and brand?

I’m not sure I would agree that those things don’t have a bottom line. In some ways, the perception that things like “brand” aren’t very measurable are the reason there has been so much waste associated with advertising. It is not always easy to find a direct measurement from awareness or brand affinity to end sale, but there are effective methods for finding strong directional correlations.

The challenge today is that many smaller firms don’t – or feel like they can’t – set aside a portion of their limited marketing budgets to actually measure their efforts. Larger companies are finally beginning to mandate a testing phase of any major campaign so they can optimize their investment and test which sets of messages or media channels are working to drive financial results.

2. How can businesses on smaller budgets target their marketing more effectively?

It begins with understanding their customers better. It’s surprising that the smaller companies who have less to waste actually do less than bigger companies (who have more room for error in many cases) to deeply profile and target their customers. A small company or a company with a smaller budget should spend a significant amount more time thinking about their highest ROI customer scenario.

It begins very simply with documenting customer scenarios, or personas. Who are your most loyal customers? Who are your most profitable? Hopefully they are the same, but not always. Document what these profitable customers do, what they want, where they go. Document what they read, who influences them, what their future needs are. Learn everything you can about them via surveys, on-site visits or other low-cost tactics. Don’t just let an agency do it for you; have your executive team go out and meet customers, and they’ll be surprised by what they observe that is very actionable when it comes to targeting.

Once you have that level of customer knowledge and intimacy, targeting becomes a much easier task.

3. Which communication channels (web, TV, radio, direct mail, etc.) do you consider to provide the best ROI for smaller businesses?

That is probably a dangerous question, because it might lead someone to assume that one channel is better than the others in a general sense. In reality, it depends on a lot of things – the audience you’re targeting, the product/service you’re selling, etc. And more importantly, in most cases, research has demonstrated very clearly that a MIX of communication channels is more effective than using just one channel. Each media channel plays an important role in building a “sum is bigger than its parts” effect. For example, a direct mail campaign that is backed up by radio awareness sees higher results than just a DM piece by itself.

The Internet of course plays several different media roles – awareness, branding, direct response and search. So even within one media realm, you have to think of it very holistically in order to get the best results.

4. How do you see marketing in relation to the aforementioned communication channels developing in the near future?

Consumers have the power in today’s world. So marketing must shift to become an honest, responsive dialogue with customers vs. a one-way mass communication approach. Companies are struggling with the reality of losing this power, but the evidence is absolutely there. The most successful marketers today are the ones who use marketing to create a story that consumers want to hear and share, and one that they can contribute to. There will always be a place for quick hit announcement-style marketing (“big sale on Saturday”), but it is losing its relevance outside of a well-established customer relationship.

5. What do you think are the benefits of holding conferences such as Online Marketing: Innovations That Work in places such as Western PA, Eastern OH, and West Virginia?

I think it can only benefit companies in the region who may not have the benefit of hearing these insights in “big media” markets such as NY or San Francisco. The faster we can bring proven marketing innovations to the region, the faster companies can begin growing faster and more profitably. The opportunity to meet peers and begin sharing learning among local companies, the faster everyone will learn and be able to take advantage.

Everything you ever wanted to know about internet marketing but you were way too afraid to ask (or just couldn’t be bothered) can be found lurking in this complete A-Z of internet marketing terms glossary.

Honestly, it really does have everything in there; and anything it doesn’t you can ask about in the comments.