Does College Make You Stupid?

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Red Berries - IMG_4552 sHere’s an equation for you: Tanking economy + overpriced colleges + online education = more college dropouts. Today, thousands of college-aged students are opting out, or dropping out of college.  And with heroes like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, who can blame them? The “UnCollege” experience, as outlined in Alex William’s recent New York Times article, allows these students to conduct self-directed learning over the internet, and on the job.  A love of learning should be the outcome of any educational program, so I’ve no issue with the do-it-yourselfers. Maybe sitting in lecture classes makes you stupid, unable to seek knowledge in more interactive and personal ways. I’m also for on-the-job learning. I did that myself, jumping into TV production right out of college and getting my School of Hard Knocks MBA by launching and managing three small businesses starting at age 23.

But I’m also torn about the idea of missing out on college. For me, the experience was so much more than classes. It was learning how to get along with roommates, having out-of-class debates with professors, and lasting experiences and friendships through extra-curriculars. Not to mention a great network of people to know after graduation. Even if the internet had been around back then (computers were in their infancy–by my junior year we could play Pong), I’m not sure I would have had the skills and knowledge to search the web properly, or make a rational plan for acquiring the things I needed to know. Not that my college course selection didn’t have a certain randomness to it. Along with social pressures not unlike today’s, what with choosing classes that your friends liked.

Watching my kids manage technology, I’m in awe of this digital native generation that knows its way around these devices and the internet. Maybe they can self-educate.  Oh, wait. They are playing another round of Madden instead of doing their homework. Maybe not.

The problem is, faced with all this technology, many schools aren’t helping kids make choices. My high schooler is typical in that his school bans the use of iPhones, laptops and the like during class time. Shouldn’t his teachers be embracing these technologies and integrating them into the classroom? Isn’t the Smart Board so, um, yesterday?

So I’m worried about a generation of digital natives without filters or true internet research skills, who then opt for self-teaching instead of college.  What strategies do they really know to determine what’s good and bad information? Can they make productive plans about what knowledge to acquire about which subjects? Do they understand who is behind the information they see? Do they have the basic cultural competencies to have decent conversations about books and films and ideas?  Maybe more than I realize.  They certainly know enough to be cheating in record numbers. I just watched a one-hour documentary “Faking the Grade” that taught me ways to cheat in school I hadn’t even considered—though the technologies involved are often ones I use all the time to make videos.

So this all makes me wonder: Can the do-it-yourselfers get the same benefits as those who go to college? Are they more self-directed as learners? Maybe these kids don’t feel the pressure to cheat as much as the ones trying to get into/succeed in college? Or maybe they just cheat in different ways? 

I’ve no answers, only questions. Interested to hear your thoughts.

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Video Messaging Best Practices

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  1.   Connect Your Videos to Your Brand. That doesn’t mean you have to mention your organization or company every 10 seconds in your next web video. In fact, studies show that indirectly branded video content goes viral at a faster rate. But the stories you create should still be meaningful and connected to your overall brand story. If the video lives somewhere other than your website, such as Vimeo or YouTube, be sure you have some kind of tag and call to action at the end, so people know how to reach you/donate to you/take action on your issue.
  2. Know Your Target Audience. Think about sub-demographics and what kinds of content appeal to them.   Also consider the viewing environment for the video. One size doesn’t fit all, so plan ahead to create multiple versions of your content that are most appropriate for each target and viewing situation. If your story has multiple parts/levels, consider breaking into smaller pieces and placing the content with different headings, links, and keywords in order to attract the right audience.
  3. Invest Now for More Rewards Later. Many organizations make the mistake of thinking that if something is going to appear on the web, it can be produced on a shoestring because it’s a one-use item.  To the contrary, every penny you spend should be powerful, credible, and the source material can be useful downstream. But only if you’ve bothered to a) create it at a decent quality, and b) organize it so that more than one editor/producer can find what they need.  Having transcriptions made of interviews and keeping the PDF’s with the footage is very helpful. So is tagging all “b-roll” with keywords of time, location, and content.
  4. Shorter is Usually Better. In live event or conference environment, audiences can enjoy videos of 5-8 minutes in length. When viewing your video on the web, in a tiny box–most likely while it is competing with other content on the screen–a viewer will only tolerate 1-2 minutes of content. Mobile web viewers actually can be willing to watch content for longer, presumably because they are “stuck” using a mobile device rather than a larger screen. Either way, make every second count, using visuals, music, audio, graphics–everything at your disposal–to make a message with impact.
  5. Measure Impact. Speaking of impact, measure it! So many organizations produce video content without a handle on whether or not it is effective. Plan a way to find out. It could be counting how many venues you can locate posts with a link to your video. It could be a short email survey to a random sampling of people who received your web link via email. At live events, you can ask people to use a hashtag to tweet something about your content. Or you can drill down into data already provided by You Tube, Google, or other online services.  Number of hits is less relevant than what viewers DID after viewing your video.
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Binders Full of Women

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Mitt Romney’s now infamous comment at last night’s debate  has opened a new line into our nation’s ongoing discussion about affirmative action. When he was Governor of Massachusetts, Romney says he had to reach outside the usual application process to ensure that men weren’t the only ones applying for his cabinet positions. Luckily, he was in a state ranked first among all 50 in higher education attainment, where more than 50% of the population hold at least a 2-year degree (Lumina Foundation, 2010). So with a little outreach, the Governor easily found plenty of qualified female applicants. If he’d been governor of Alabama, though, his task would have been much more difficult, since that state’s percentage of folks with any college is only 31%. And if he’d been leading a state with a large Hispanic population, that number would also be low. According to the 2010 Census, just 19 percent of Latinos between 25 and 64 years old had at least a two-year college degree. For whites, the figure is 43 percent.

One of the keys to our economic success as a nation has been ensuring that All Americans, including newer immigrants and women, get access to higher education. My own all-girls school was founded by a woman, Jesse Moon Holton, who was a leader in educating young women, and  created the best school motto I’ve ever heard “I shall find a way or make one.”  That motto reminds me daily of brave little MalalaYousafzai of Pakistan, who risked her life just to go to school. Thankfully we don’t live in a society where extremists mount school buses to shoot kids trying to get an education.

But we do put far too many obstacles in the way of people who want this path to economic inclusion.  As a society, we should do everything possible—affirmative action in higher education, The Dream Act,  funding early childhood education (and yes, a few bucks to Big Bird)–to ensure that every corporate CEO and government leader who wants to hire talent has available to her binders full of qualified and well-educated African-Americans, Hispanics and women of all ethnicities ready and able to succeed.

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The UVA Battle and the Struggle Between Nonprofit and Corporate Leadership Models

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Concentric circles of leadershipThe Sullivan vs. Dragas battle at UVA is a classic case of nonprofit versus corporate leadership styles. UVA president Teresa Sullivan’s approach–getting to know the university’s key constituencies–is best suited to nonprofits, in which shouting “Follow Me!” rarely gets you more than a sore throat. But Helen Dragas, Chair of UVA’s Board of Visitors, is known for her no-nonsense business style. She expected the newly minted (18 months IS recent in NST–Nonprofit Standard Time) university president  to “stop listening and lead.” (If you haven’t been following, the Chronicle of Higher Ed helpfully summarizes the battle here.) Particularly in a university setting, where you have power centers including tenured faculty who frankly don’t have to follow anyone thank you very much, as well as a constant stream of new students and important donors, Sullivan’s style of taking the time to “listen and learn” before launching major change initiatives will likely win the day.

This battle comes at an interesting time. As nonprofits have been moving steadily to adopt a “more corporate” model of governance, corporations have been embracing social sector models of getting things done. (And hey, after the Wall Street meltdown, my money is on the nonprofit sector so to speak.) In her recent letter to shareholders, Calvert Investments CEO Barbara Krumsiek (disclaimer–Barbara and I know one another through a nonprofit board) noted the increase of sustainability proposals at shareholder meetings, and the implementation by more than 400 business sector CEOs of the United Nation’s Women’s Empowerment Principles, which were adapted from Calvert’s own Women’s Principles in 2010. In their new white paper subtitled “Is Your Board Prepared?”, Ernst & Young point out that social and environmental issues accounted for 40% of shareholder proposals on corporate proxy ballots last year–up one-third from 2010.

That trend away from business models to social sector models is addressed by Jim Collins in his recent monograph “Good to Great in the Social Sectors,” a follow-up to his famed book on high-functioning businesses. In the new book he questions the implementation of business practices in the social sector, saying”we must reject the idea…thgat the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become ‘more like a business.'”  In fact, the metrics for success in a mission-based operation are very different than those in the for-profit. Delivery on the mission is primary. Lowering cost-per-delivery, while essential to good accounting, is not a measurement of success. Neither is efficiency in certain areas. Sometimes nonprofits need to spend a lot of time listening to their “customers” in order to deliver better services, and this listening is often done by social workers or nurses or pastors–professional listeners, but not folks in a marketing setting. The way they may evolve a solution to a particular customer problem may not be the most cost-efficient delivery of service, but it might create the best outcomes in the community served.

The same can be said of effective nonprofit leadership styles. Someone who understands how to harness the different concentric circles of supporters–from staff to donors to volunteers (and students and faculty, in the case of an educational institution) are going to be more successful in moving a strategic plan forward to get the mission accomplished.

So my bet is on Sullivan. What about yours?

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Nonprofits Can Organize to Harness Social Web

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Social web is maturing, and that’s great news for nonprofits. In the early days, we complained about navel-gazing Facebook posts and Tweets about the dog throwing up. Now I see posts like a series from a videographer friend who tapes useful side by side camera tests and puts them on his Facebook Page.  Or this interesting study by Twitter showing that some of the heaviest volume retweets are coming from evangelist pastors, not famous celebs.  With the evolution of crowdraising sites like Crowdrise, virtual engagement around conferences, and flexible editing tools like FinalCutPro X and Adobe Premiere, nonprofits can compete with corporate communicators.

Where I see the lag now is in learning how to curate and manage all the assets these great organizations are busy acquiring. I have several nonprofit clients who have literally millions of untagged photos, and they are still out shooting more at every event. Can you imagine if you walked into a library and there were just random boxes of books on every surface? And the librarian–if you could find one–told you “yeah, we probably have that book here somewhere. I think the cover was green.” So I’m doing a lot more training on building systems to archive, tag and curate all the digital assets that can then be re-used by nonprofits, bringing down the costs of telling their mission story.

Along with asset management comes a need to have the Right Kind of assets.  So if you are planning to post a flip-cam video to a large conference screen, you’ll probably be disappointed when you see lots of pixilation and unusable audio.  And if you want to post a fun series of shots from your conference on YouTube, along with a soundtrack from Billy Joel, you’ll need to be sure you’ve got sync rights cleared first.  Things were a little more loose in the early days, but now social web consumers are expecting High-Def videos that they can actually see and hear, and license-holders are expecting payment when their copyrighted materials are used online.

Asset workflow, curation, management and rights clearances can all be stumbling blocks to nonprofits communicating around important, mission-driven work. Don’t let them trip you up. Take action steps instead:

  1. Build a library system—it can be as simple as creating a useful folder structure on your server—and educate everyone on the communication team on how to use it.
  2. Assign asset curation and metatagging duties to team members BEFORE an event occurs at which you will be photographing/videotaping/interviewing. Interns can tag, but leadership must be involved in setting up the system.
  3. Create standards, so that outside vendors know what formats you like to acquire in.  For non-professionals, be sure to get the highest quality versions you can—not just the miniature files they post on Facebook.
  4. Engage your donors in building a wonderful archive of images, stories and video content that tells the story of your mission—from the past to the present.
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Making an Old Brand New(ton)

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I’m a fan of the Fig Newton. Sorry, I mean the Newton–its new moniker in a  rebrand campaign rolled out by Nabisco this week. Other old brands needing renewal could take note of their strategy.

Born in 1891, the Fig Newton was billed as a “cake” rather than a cookie. These tasty morsels featured heavily in my after-school snack repertoire as a kid.  Something to do with the texture–soft on the outside, chewy on the inside, with a touch of crunch from the fig seeds. But now Nabisco has decided figs aren’t sexy. They’re too much like prunes. But the Newton still has healthy ingredients that can be touted. So Nabsico took away the modifier, added new flavors like raspberry and blueberry, threw in some whole grains, and rolled out a new ad campaign. Plus they launched Newtons Fruit Thins, which target boomers like me, rather than our kids. (And hey I have to admit, they’re pretty tasty. Though my advice to Nabisco would be to go easy on the Rock-Hard Pieces of dried lemon in that variety—we oldsters have fragile teeth!)

Declines in sales were reversed, largely thanks to the Fruit Thins. Other aging brands could take a page from this campaign by McGarryBowen, part of Dentsu—launched this week.

  1.  Understand Your Unique Brand Promise.  Newtons were always about containing real fruit. That hasn’t changed. The packaging of the message has.
  2. Be Relevant.  Don’t stick with a name that doesn’t help you sell who you are. Consider your core values and those of your customers/donors/prospects.
  3. Be Different. If you want to stand out from the other “cookies”—don’t try to blend in. Dare to be different and flaunt it. The Newtons campaign avoids animation and other kid-targeted elements common in cookie ads.
  4. Your Market May Be Aging. Change with them. Give them new offerings that meet their needs, while still putting out a core product that can attract new, younger fans.
  5. Invest in Your Change. If you’re going to roll out a rebrand, you can’t just change your name and logo and hope the customers will follow. Of course you don’t have as much money as Nabisco, but every department involved in communicating to customers or donors or volunteers (which is pretty much everyone) needs to be briefed, vested, and ready to engage as a new brand.

 

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Convergence. Customized. Customer-Focused. Welcome to TV 3.0.

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Filed from the National Association of Broadcasters Convention, Las Vegas.

Convergence. Multi-platform distribution. Mobile TV. Integration of social media into the viewing experience. These were the buzzwords on the floor and during workshops I’ve both given and attended at NAB this year. The future of broadcast, and all mediums really–whether web or mobile web– is creating dynamic content and interactivity with the user/viewer at the center. For content-creators, the challenge is creating programming that works whether someone is viewing it on an iPhone or a ginormous flatscreen Hi-Def TV, and that has social content that the user can interact with while viewing. For content distributors, the challenge is rethinking broadcast, and creating standards that work for an entirely customized and mobile user experience. For viewers, the opportunity is taking their content with them, on any device, to any location they wish.

What’s the takeaway for the non-broadcast community?

The Consumer is at the Center. For-profit and nonprofit organizations large and small need to ensure that their communications strategies encompass a multi-screen, interactive world. The time for the billboard approach to PR and marketing messages is long since gone. The personal user experience is the focus–whether that means your donors, your association members, or your customers.  If your content is not focused on what the audience wants to take with them, they’ll leave it–and you–behind.

Powerful Stories Matter More than Ever. In a multi-channel, overly-busy world, compelling stories–real people, real issues–are still what is engaging viewers. Authentic stories are what is sticky in social media and in video, in all its formats and delivery devices. It’s true on television. And it’s true for nonprofits and companies who have good stories to tell. And now you have so many tools to tell them, and to distribute them to your audience. So for every new product roll-out, for every fundraising campaign, ask “what is our story?”

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Ask the Right Questions to Create Web Video with Impact

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With YouTube now the second most-used search engine, plus the exponential rise of mobile web and convergence technologies, organizations realize that producing video content is as important as updating the website. Here are a few key questions you need to answer to be sure your video has impact.

1.  How does the video fit with your brand? You have a great story—someone touched by your organization, or some important piece of information that needs to be disseminated to the public, a hilarious short video sure to get loads of follows. Great. But how does it fit into your overall brand plan? Will your name or the name of a particular product/service be mentioned? Do you want people to take some kind of action, linked to a new product roll-out or campaign? Are you trying to promote organizational recognition? Gain new supporters? Engage the existing ones?  What will support the video content? (i.e. direct mail and/or email campaigns to drive traffic?)  Will there be other lives for this content (see #4)?

2.  Do you know your target audience? Or, as often happens, do you have too many audiences for this video and need to break it up into multiple streams of content?  Think about sub-demographics and what kinds of content appeal to them.   If your story has multiple parts/levels, consider breaking into smaller pieces and placing the content with different headings/links in order to attract the right audience.  If your story has multiple parts or levels of detail, consider breaking into smaller pieces and placing the content with different headings/links in order to attract the right audience.

3.  Can you afford what you need? Can you afford not to produce this well? It’s like what your mother once told you about buying a dining room set–buy the best you can because you want it to last. Many organizations make the mistake of thinking that if something is going to appear on the web, it can be produced on a shoestring because it’s a one-use item.  To the contrary, every penny you spend should be powerful, credible, and the source material should be useful in multiple ways. For example, if you have an interview-driven story, outtakes can be used for other projects. So can the background footage (“b-roll”). My personal preference is to shoot high definition, widescreen video because it makes a bigger impact when it is compressed for the web, since it degrades less.  But whatever your format, a polished production, professionally produced, will also allow you to “multi-purpose” the end-product more reliably, pulling parts for your website, your intranet, an email campaign, or a large-screen projection at a major donor event.   Many organizations have effectively teamed their in-house capabilities with outside vendors to achieve both cost efficiencies and good quality.

4.  Is it short enough? I produce a lot of short form projects for live event venues, but these are not short enough for the web, where the average drop-off comes after 90 seconds. When watching an event production, the audience is engaged together, with a common mission and few distractions. When someone watches your video on their laptop, desktop or mobile device, chances are there are other distractions in the room.   So make every second count. That means using visuals, music, audio, graphics–everything at your disposal–to make a message with impact.  And then cut the length in half.

5.  Are you prepared to measure impact? So many organizations throw video on the web and then have no real method for measuring its impact beyond views.  What is the drop-off rate? Where does it happen? Where do people go next after viewing? Do they return? If you can’t answer these questions, you’re losing valuable insights to help you refine your approach the next time.

Join me for social media and video production workshops at NAB/Las Vegas.

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Employees are the Key to Pre-Empting Brand Threats

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My family and I have come to love Pizza CS (Come Sempre), http://pizzacs.com/  a new Neapolitan-style pizza joint in our neighborhood started by a couple of guys who love great ingredients and honor the art of creating a truly Italian crust.  But what I take away from Pizza CS, besides a great food experience, is that a great brand is always about two things: delivering what you promise, and how your people communicate.  This place has both, and that’s why we keep coming back.

When a “brand promise” is broken, it is often because an employee doesn’t realize that everything they do communicates your brand.  Or doesn’t. When my husband was on a job search last year, I can’t count the number of institutions that created a bad name for themselves because of how the point person on the search conducted him or herself. Everything they said was a poor reflection on the brand. By contrast, several institutions shined through that process, and presented a unified “face” to their brand for prospective employees and customers alike.

So, what’s the best way to pre-empt the potential brand threat that is your own work force?

  1. Listening. The first tool is teaching good listening skills. Any employee who speaks to clients, staff or prospects in either category—from your receptionist to your HR department—should have training in good listening skills. Learning how to repeat back what the concern is (“I hear you saying you did not receive the package your ordered on time”) is the first step to solving the problem and defending your brand. This is more important than ever in a world where any disgruntled person can start a blog about how they have been wronged (the famous Jeff Jarvis “Dell sucks” blog post as case in point).
  2. Crisis Planning. Another key component to workforce training in a 24/7 media world is crisis response.  That doesn’t mean that every employee is part of your crisis response team. However, every employee should know How to Recognize a problem that has reached crisis level, and What to Do Next when that happens. I often see organizations in melt-down when a crisis occurs because the problem was still being dealt with at a low level, with the back and forth spilling onto Facebook and websites, when it should have been pushed way up the management chain immediately for a more unified and brand-focused response.

You need to be engaged with critics (and lovers) of your brand, at all levels of your organization.  Because, in this world of 24 hour news cycles, social networks and the blogosphere, one unhappy person can be a very powerful voice. And so can one very happy customer who dealt with a well-trained employee.

Amy DeLouise offers staff development workshops in branding and social media.

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Interviewing for Great Results

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Perhaps you have to interview your boss for a video clip on your website. Maybe you are hosting a podcast. Maybe you have to interview a job candidate.  Whatever the reason, interviewing is an art form and not just a list of questions. Here are a few tips to creating a better outcome for both participants that I’ve developed over my 20+ years as a successful interviewer.  These tips apply primarily, by the way, to the friendly interview and not the “gotcha” news interview.

  1. Do Your Homework. Just like an attorney doesn’t ask a question at trial to which s/he doesn’t already know the answer, you should have a good sense before the interview of what the content will be. Spend time learning the narrative of the person, conducting a pre-interview by phone if at all possible, and be well versed in the important content points you want to clarify.
  2. Make Eye Contact. If you do your homework, then you shouldn’t be referring to notes too often, if at all. (It’s a point of pride for me not to do this when I do video interviews.) Breaking eye contact breaks the personal connection between you and the interviewee, which is essential to keeping them comfortable and focused. Even if you, the interviewer, are not seen, the interview will be significantly more successful if you maintain eye contact throughout.
  3. Understand Your Interviewee’s Learning Style. There is significant research on people’s learning styles, which broadly fall into three categories—visual, kinesthetic and auditory.  When you can identify which learning style best fits your interviewee, your questions can be better tailored to generate a good response from them. This all comes from the science of Neurolinguistic Programming, and I’ll let you do the internet surfing for more details. But basically you can develop several quick questions at the start of your interview which will help clue you in as to the learning style of your subject. From this you can craft better questions. “Describe what a typical day at your factory looks like” is not a great question for an auditory learner, for example. So, if I’ve got a visual learner, I might say “what does success look like to you at this company?” If she’s a kinesthetic learner, I might phrase it this way “How did you actually build the company for success—give me the steps?”  For an auditory learner, “What kinds of feedback do you hear from customers that tells you you’ve hit on a successful formula here  at Company ABC?”
  4. Plan the Arc of the Interview. Every interview has a beginning, middle and end much like a story. I never ask my most critical question first, but rather build a story line to the entire experience, that both my subject and I move through together. If you have to edit video, this is the most successful way to create editable content that won’t eat up valuable editing time.
  5. Know How to Get A Better Answer. The worst thing you can say to an interview subject is “can you repeat that?” because it generally makes people become self-conscious and/or entirely forget what they just said.  If you instead use body language to indicate you couldn’t hear the answer properly 9even if you did), or a simple “Sorry…?” people almost always repeat their answer and improve upon it.

For more interview techniques and hands-on practice sessions, contact me for one of my workshops. I bring these into organizations and also give them at major conferences and events across the country.

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