Swift Kick Central

Video Blog From Baker University

The Traveling Logistics of a Speaker - 53 Hours Later

We semi joke that speakers don't get paid to speak, but rather to show up on time as that is the hardest part of the job. To show you what I mean, here's what the last 53 hours of my life looked like:

Feb 26th

5:00pm - drive 1 hour to Lake Forest
6:30pm - Myspace/Facebook Training at Lake Forest College
9:00pm - drive back to Chicago
11:00pm - fall asleep

Feb 27th

3:00am - wake up head to airport
5:45am - fly to Atlanta
8:30am - drive 3 hours to Albany, GA
1:00pm - Myspace/Facebook Training at Darton College
3:30pm - drive to Albany airport
5:15pm - fly to Atlanta
9:55pm - fly to Dallas
11:55pm - drive to hotel in Dallas

Feb 28th

1:00am - fall asleep
4:40am - wake up and drive to airport
6:40am - fly to Shreveport
7:40am - drive to Bossier Parish Community College
11:00am - Myspace/Facebook training at BPCC
4:50pm - drive to Shreveport airport
6:50pm - fly to Houston
9:15pm - fly to Chicago
11:34pm - drive home

It's hard for me to wrap my head around this logistic nightmare, but fortunately for me I don't have to because of our logistics guru goddess, Emma. If it weren't for her, I would probably cry :)

UPDATE - Someone asked me how much coffee I drank. The answer, none. I don't drink caffeine. I figure if my body can't do it "el natural" I probably shouldn't be doing it.

On a few of the Same Pages with HASTAC

Wish I would have read this post before I wrote my last post on Mac DML. (Cathy - RSS feeds would really help.)

Cathy writes:

"Over the next several weeks, we will be posting several overviews or suggestions. Just as we wrote four postings on what we learned from reading all the applications, we have some ideas, in general, about applying for this or any competition. We might also see if any of the judges might wish to share a few insights. And we're talking around about tools where people, if they wish, can upload their own applications and put them out there for the public to respond to and give feedback on. If you have suggestions, send them along and we'll consider them."

I am happy to give the HASTAC bunch the benefit of time and look forward to more thoughts. Even more so to more collaboration.

If they can follow through with some sort of public community / entrant process I will certainly play.

As for tools - Why not just a wiki with links to any project page I want? (Play if you want, tag yourself / your project, HASTAC acts like a node and gets out of the way) Why make it complicated?

MacArthur DML Competition - Reading the Tea Leaves

Traveling has me late with this post. Procrastination too. I've been worried about "sour grapes" and hoped that with a little time, I might better be able to get the right tone.

Awhile back, when it seemed that we did not win the MacArthur DML grant, I said I was interested in reviewing the winners to try to guess what the judges valued. I set aside some time this morning.

On a deeper review of the innovation award winners, my reaction to the innovation winner pool is a more forceful version of my first thought: they are kind of lame.

They are just not exciting to me.

Clearly they were exciting to the judges. So it must be a values disconnect. The judges understood the idea of Innovation in Digital Media and Learning differently than I did. It's their competition of course, they can interpret their own words however they want.

So I tried to go back to the innovation contest explanation to see how they described it. I wanted to see how much I was projecting what I value/ believe on to the words they used to describe what they were looking for. When I was reading the page, it sounded completely different from what I had in my head. It sounded like their description fit the winner pool pretty well, actually, so clearly I had just read my own meaning into what was there. Then I saw the "Updated" note at the top: February 21, 2008.

The description of what they were looking for was changed on the date they announced the winners. No wonder the description and the winners match up nicely.

I understand it's a new area and so of course definitions will change. It just seems strange to change the questions on a test after you've given the answers. It would have been easy to update their thinking somewhere else.

Changing the "what we are looking for" page makes it very difficult for the student (me) to learn where they went wrong with the answer. I didn't think to take screenshots, so all I could go on is a six month old interpretation of a memory.

This makes it impossible for me to argue about the judges choices based on the original description of the competition. And maybe that's kind of a good thing - helps me avoid a little of the sour grapes deal. I'll just argue based on what I believe.

Common Themes in the winner pool:

- Games (roughly half of the winners are a game of some sort)

- Academic projects (most are housed in, or born from, a university and none have a "business model" that would make them economically sustainable, with the possible exception of FabLab, which might squeek by on laser etching unless one of their machines breaks.)

- As Tom Hoffman pointed out, four of seven are from Duke or University of California schools.

- They are all Nonprofits? Seems like it, but it is hard to tell. Didn't see any mention of pricing, not even "free" on anyone's website. The word nonprofit is large-ish on their tag cloud.

These are not really exciting themes to me.

(Nonprofit btw is a neutral to me. Only annoyance is the consistency of it compared to stated desires of the competition. They decided not to explore other structures to acheive impact. Go with what you know, I suppose. I know I do it all the time, it's just not very innovative.)

Here are themes I would have been excited about:

- Ideas that solve an existing pain. NOT technology looking for an application.

Educational games are "neat". If they are not cooler than what is on the X-Box, it's a hard sell to kids (at any age.) So then just force them to use it in the classroom, and you have a hard sell to schools. It's massive supply competing for minimal demand. It's not innovative if it doesn't get used.

- Ideas with leverage. Smaller effort, big impact.

Two of these "Digital" innovations have serious hardware bottlenecks. All of them, existing in the "sort of neat" category, will have very serious, potentially terminal, marketing/ adoption friction.

- Transparency in the process to build community.

Communicate. Participate. Network. Collaborate. Community. These are all buzzwords the actual competition ignored in their process. More than the money, connecting the 1000 project initiators with each other in a meaningful collaborative project / learning community around the contest would have done huge things for digital media and learning.

- Economic sustainability.

This is just the entreprenuer in me. I get this is my value. I just don't think the grant process, at the 250k level, provides enough time to make much of a dent. I think there needs to be some other plan besides grants - the sucess rate is just too low. Getting paid forces the initiative into quantifiable relevance to someone. This is good and helps reduce "neat" ideas that don't really go anywhere.

- Defensible Positioning.

It's a business term, I know, but it matters if there is going to be impact. Where do these ideas fit in the world today? Do they have a space? Can they hold on to it? How can they avoid wimpy "me too"-ness? YouthActionNet Marketplace is wonderfuly idealistic, but TakingITglobal dominates that space, does a great job, and has better sponsors. How is YouthAction different? Hypercities is cool, but google earth already combines story, space, and soon mobile. The folks that are interested already use google. It seems like hypercities' positioning is only safe in academia for academics (they have been receiving grants since 2003.)

- Mashable or Open Source-able.

Hypercities could be mashable (see google above). Maybe the MILLEE project could become a mobile platform for learning (though they seem to be aiming at developing their own language learning games.) This goes back to leverage, but these ideas seem to have a "create-it-alone" mentality built in. This isn't a very modern approach, and I don't think it's a recipe for big impact. Getting people to invest time in your project serves the same purpose as getting paid - you have to be relevant and meaningful to someone. (Our project, for full disclosure, is mashable, but not very open source - mostly because our niche is not too technical. I do respect the challenges with this and would have loved to see someone else do better.)

Going into the competition, we said we didn't have any experience with grants and thus we were interested in trying it and learning. I'm disapointed that I don't feel like I learned much. I can't see a clear, coherent, cause and effect in the selection of the winners (I can't even check the question). The "right" answers don't seem right to me and nowhere is there an explanation that might add to my understanding of the digital media and learning space.

The cultural gap between my business background and this competition, as much as it fits my stereotype of academia, feels painful. I want to be excited about decent money that is being spent on innovation to improve education.

I care deeply about education. There are exciting possibilities for innovation and change with tehcnology and education. I really hope that one of these initiatives creates a meaningingful impact on digtial media and learning. I would love to be wrong.

Speaking is Just One Piece

Even though, right now, the majority of our income is from our trainings for schools, we've always believed that speaking was only a piece of the bigger goal of solving student apathy. We speak, but we aren't speakers. In fact we think there are speakers out there like, Dave Coleman, who are hands down better speakers than us. He's mastered the art.

We consider ourselves somewhat decent cooks with a great set of ingredients (our content) to work with. Schools seems to appreciate it as we we've been named Speaker of the Year and rebooked many times by the same schools.  

But we believe speaking alone doesn't solve the issue. Thus we developed Red Rover, The SA Blog, The (soon to be) SL Blog, The (Wiki) Kitchen, and Integrated Partners so we can work with schools on a deeper level throughout the year.

Those who've meet us and talked with us know we are really committed and a one hour or one day training is only one piece of the solution.

I hope our work not only does good for schools, but I would like to see it have an impact on the whole college speaking market.  I've heard too often from schools about a speaker they hired only to be disappointed. I know many speakers follow this blog so this is for you. What issue do you solve? What real value do you deliver? Why are you doing what you do? What is your bigger vision?

Sorry to be on my soapbox but school budgets are tight, speakers generally are the most expensive program they book, so let's be honest with ourselves and make sure that what we deliver matches what we ask for.

Reviewing our 2007 Goals - Looking Forward to 2008

At the beginning of 2007 we created company goals for the coming year.

In 2005 and 2006 we did a similar exercise.  This last year we wanted to create more specific, measurable goals that we could follow up on. 
 

At our company retreat last month, we reviewed the 07 goals. Below is a list of each goal with our one year assessment.

The overall mission of Swift Kick is to increase student engagement. All of our goals work toward that mission.

When we created our 2007 goals, a year ago, we mapped out what we thought was the best route. As the year went on, and new ideas and information came to us, we shifted our strategy and goals accordingly.

One mistake we made was not revisiting the goals list every quarter.  This left us with a bunch of "dead" goals at the end of the year.  These are things we didn't necessarily fail at, we simply decided they were not the right step for us at the time.

The goals process - as it creates a roadmap and focus - is hugely important.  It's also never urgent.  This makes it easy to put off, as we naturally focus on the deadline driven tasks first. 

A big goal for 2008 is to get better at focusing our energy on the right things.  This is a natural progression for any reflective business and much of it is simply trying things and learning about our own strengths and weaknesses.  With that in mind, our review of our 2007 goals:

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

GOAL	REVIEW
SALES:
Training / Speeches:  60 engagements, Avg. Revenue $2600 = $156,000	We were spot on with this goal. We ended up with just over $160K for the year, our actual # of speaking gigs was more like 58 but that is not counting the multi-day trainings. From our initial conversations with successful, established, independent speakers, we were told to expect 5 speeches our first year, 20 our second, and 40 our third.  To hit nearly 60 in our second is a good start.
Technology: 3 Major College Conferences = $40,000	This was a strategic turn.  Working with APCA was a wonderful way for us to explore technology driven community and the implementation of our x+1 relevancy/ engagement ideas. We felt that there was a huge opportunity for conferences to increase their effectiveness using these ideas and tools and APCA agreed and paid us a small amount of money to explore it with them. In Jan of 2007, we thought we could provide a good system and talk to other college conferences (outside of programing, i.e. CFYE and others) and make the same deal.  This would give us the cash flow we needed to build the software connectors between our various systems and automate everything with the hopes of delivering the same solutions to schools. We found out there were many challenges working with conferences, not the least of which was that the more we were genuinely innovative, the greater the strain on the conference.  We tried to implement too much new thinking and methodology all at once.  While the technology worked technically (for the most part), it did not work as well procedurally and the solution was hampered by human integration / comfort zone / change challenges that we did not (silly, I know) expect. One hugely important realization that came out of the APCA work was that email did not work very well for advisors - we never got above a 58% response rate to a survey.  Our goal was the students and they checked email less and less every day. We needed another data collection channel and strategy.  Students preferred Facebook as their communication channel and they had already put much of the relevancy data we needed on their profiles.  So in March, we dropped the idea of working with other conferences (to avoid the change friction) and we began work on Red Rover - the new, straight to schools, x+1 survey, segment, and deliver strategy.
Sponsorships: 2 Sponsors = $25,000	As part of the customized newsletter product that was part of the APCA solution, we felt that an old line news company would appreciate being able to deliver relevant news feeds to taste makers on campuses. We were talking with the USA Today Education division as a possible partner for Swift Kick.  Part of the challenge with committing to relevancy is that we need to have access to content all down the long tail.  A content partner could help with this.  When we dropped the email newsletter as our delivery method, we lost the immediate need for lots of content.   We just let the USA Today partnership conversation slide away. We may kick these conversations back up with the next version of Red Rover, as we get into delivering relevancy filtered RSS feeds.
Info Products: 2 Books = $10,000 in sales	We've been working on a Dance Floor Theory book for a long time.  It's a normal "speaker" thing to write a book and sell it with a speech.  This one was a strategic focus decision.  Red Rover would do what Dance Floor Theory training taught - automatically.  In this case, the software looked more powerful than the book.  So we chose to put off the book.
PRODUCTS:
Deliver a compelling conference product to APCA for nationals in March.	The word 'compelling' is too vague to define if we completed this or not.  This is a good example of a goal that shows we didn't have enough definition of the project.  Our goal should have been to have a better goal.  This definitely would have helped the partnership. The 07 APCA Nationals was the first time we implemented the survey, segment, deliver idea into APCA as part of our year long partnership.   We did some neat things that had never been done before at a programming conference. It was a start, we got better, and in the end finished with a full outline.
Complete 2 book sized information products (hard copy, just to be old skool)	Same as above with the info products
Present Center for the First Year product.	We were accepted to present Red Rover at the 08 conference in San Francisco. The conference was a big success for Red Rover. The presentation was not specifically for the Center, but for the whole conference. At the moment, our plan is to work on adoption and data modeling with Red Rover and then approach the Center itself, perhaps this spring, about our road map moving forward. After the conference experience, we're even more excited about this partnership.  The Center is very high caliber - and great people are involved nationwide.  It will be a joy to work with them.
Deliver a relevant RSS feed newsletter.	We paid 8k for Exact Target as our main tech component in this. We sent out a few newsletters. Exact Target promised the integration with our database would work automatically.  It sort of worked but in a round about, time intensive way.  The combination of low response rates and clunky technology killed this effort. If email worked better as a delivery method (for students too) we would have invested the time and money to make the technology work smoothly.    As it was, it was a complicated solution to a problem that was better served with existing technology that was simply underutilized. It would have been better to spend the 8k to fly to each school and set up an RSS reader for each advisor in person. Because of the chunk of cash spent trying it, this one hurt.  It was an important lesson.
Launch a college activities point system with mesh up presentation layer.	Red Rover 1.0 is the first step.
Launch collaboration workspace where volunteers can organize and work on projects.	We tried several different ways to make this happen. Groups, docs, ghub etc. In testing, we continue to get better. Our solutions right now are our wiki page, The Student Affairs Blog, and soon to be Student Leader Blog.
Camp preparation to launch in 2008	We talked about camps, but no action. We both really want to do this because it's just so dang fun.  It may end up being part of the integrated solution for schools, in which case we just might see a camp like experience in 2008.
1000 Swift Kick generated blogs (4 per week)	Very ambitious of us, especially since we were newbies to the blogging world. We wrote about 150 blogs in 07. That is between the SA and SK blog. We want to step this up. We are getting faster at writing.
FINANCIAL:
Outsource Financial Responsibilities (Taxes, Ledgers, Reports)	Minus the ledgers, majority of the financial work the taxes this year are being done by our fantastic logistics guru, Emma. We are of course not absent from the process, but a lot less time compared to last year.
Company financial reports distributed timely	We did send out the 2006 company financials. But they were sent in June. Having them done faster and more quarterly would be nice. We have the system to do it, which is 70% of the challenge.
Sync all financial tools (Quickbooks, SF)	Still using the same system as last year. Just better at it.
MARKETING:
Establish baseline gig acquisition costs from 2006 reduce acquisition cost by 30%.	We do have a lot of reports through our CRM and through the financials we created for 06 - but this is not one of the reports we generated, so we can't measure year over year how we are doing. The good news is that this information is in our systems, it just needs someone to focus on it for a day or two to generate the right reports.
Create and implement conference process by nationals.	This is another ill defined goal.  How do we know when we have a good process?  This needs to be rewritten in 2008 if it's to mean anything.
Increase total contacts in database to more than 10,000	We stopped collecting student contact info in Fall of 07, so the database grew much slower than expected. The collection process didn't make sense because we were unable to deliver on the community / relevant info experience we wanted.  The wikis and the soon to be launched Student Leader Blog should help to deliver a great follow up experience.  Then we can start collecting contact information at conferences and speeches again.
Avg. click through rate on newsletter of 10% per month by Q2	N/A - We stopped the newsletter
Launch a revamped swiftkickonline.com by end of Q1	We did complete this on time and have done many changes to the site since then.
Create an online logistics page for our trainings	We created marketing sites for both MSFB and DFT. They could grow much more and will probably be transferred over to our wiki pages soon. We didn't finish this project until the end of the year though.
RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT:
20 active and productive interns.	We had 3 interns for the year. 20 seems like way to many at this point.  When we say interns, we really mean experiential learning. It's a higher level of the student community pyramid. As we continue to grow every segment of the pyramid, and continue to figure out tools to enable students to easily increase their participation, this number will grow. Hopefully, we can create another level to the pyramid so that unpaid interns can move to freelance pirate status and build businesses of their own.
1000 student generated blogs	We never started the Student Blog - it is on the radar for early 2008
100,000 blog views in network	Our total blog views for the year were around 12,500. So we were off by just a few :) We were overly ambitious newbies. Both the Swift Kick and Student Affairs blogs are growing every month, so that is a good sign.
3 conferences with ambassador programs	The goal here was to segue the community that we built online into a real world experience at a conference.  So that we would be running a "camp" in parallel with an established conference.  The students participating would have special sessions, experiences, and benefits.  They would act as Swift Kick community ambassadors and recruit others into the experience.  It's still a good idea, we have not tried it yet.
750 Basecamp completed tasks by Q1, 3,000 completed by end of the year	We had well over 750 task complete within Basecamp for the year. The problem is, we still are not very good at using Basecamp on a daily basis, but it's vital for effective project management.
400 messages on social networking sites by Q1, 1,600 per year	At the time we didn't think we would be doing a lot of our communication on SNS, but now we fully use SNS and often times have booked trainings via Facebook. So it's silly to track the number of messages we create. The next step is for even better integration of Facebook into our other Lego pieces
OPERATIONS:
Complete Salesforce sales flow between all tabs	We are closer - but our Salesforce account needs a good clean out and overhaul. There are lots of pieces we still don't use, and there are lots of fields that are collecting dust because they're old.
Salesforce integration with current and new tools	We did some more with this - but the push is going to come from other developers and not so much from us making the new tools. All of our focus is on getting Red Rover to the next stage. We'll come back to tie our various tech systems together.
Create and plan for company logistics (Insurance, S-Corp, Payroll)	We filed as an S-corp, didn't looking into insurance, didn't work on a payroll structure, didn't look at company health care (all of which we need to take care of asap)

Turned Down by the MacArthur DML Competition - Staying Sustainable

The Conference on the First Year Experience was a fantastic event for us because Red Rover was very popular. The attendees were a mix of student advisors, deans, faculty, and librarians. Each group had a slightly different curiosity for Red Rover, but they all had one question in common and it was probably the most popular question we received:

"So if Red Rover is free for any school to use, what's in it for you or how do you make money?"

Great question, and I am sure many of our readers are probably wondering the same thing. To keep Red Rover sustainable we have several options:

Option A - Apply for grants such as the MacArthur DML Competition. There are many grants out there, but the DML was our first attempt. We knew it was our lottery ticket strategy and that turned out to be true as the winners were announced today and didn't include Red Rover :( We'll do some more thinking on why that was, and post our thoughts here. We need a little time to go through who did win and do the comparison. Either way, it brings us to . . .

Option B - Adding paid extension features like surveymoney does. In addition to the always free core Red Rover tool, there will be a menu for schools to pick extra paid features if interested. (Expected to be released toward the end of the year)

Option C - Develop the free platform then offer paid integrated support similar to Red Hat. We already offer a technology integrated solution for a select number of schools.

Option D - Raise capital. We've talked about this option a lot as it wouldn't be hard for us to raise capital. Our two sticky points are that it would distract us from the development and marketing for about two months and secondly we are not sure how investors would feel about us being in education and vice versa.

Option E,F,G,H... - If we need to, we can go here.

On our list of motivations for starting Swift Kick, financial gain is listed as the 4th or 5th reason. We are much more interested in changing education, helping students, and challenging our current skill set. In the theme of working in the open, we do plan to post more of our partnership charter on here. But at the end of the day we can't eat Ramon noodles forever.

In 2007 was grossed about $165,000 from speaking. A big piece went to pay for the development of Red Rover. This year we are already grossing $100,000 for the first quarter. It sounds impressive, however we are still using most that money to pay for Red Rover and the other members of the Swift Kick crew. Many times, as the founders, Kevin and I haven't taken a monthly salary to make sure everyone else is paid. It can hurt.

We are committed to Red Rover because we believe in the impact it will have, and we receive validation for our belief from the many schools we talk to and tell us they are excited to use it. So onward we march!

Conference on the First Year Experience and the Genius of our Community

We often feel really dumb in our work when we repeat the same silly mistakes. This time we wasted four days of work thinking we could come up with the answer on our own instead of asking for advice from the rich pool of knowledge around us.

Last week we reached out to our community of academic professionals for help on what our booth banners for the upcoming FYE conference should say. We posted our current design on the Red Rover marketing wiki page and invited everyone to leave opinions. Their feedback was invaluable as they are in the same job roles as the conference attendees.

Musicians often get to say how they have the coolest and most supportive fans. We'll I'd like to say the same thing about our community of support. Your knowledge is deep, your passion is alive, and without you we would still be swimming in the shallow end. Some of you we just meet, some were there in the beginning and some of you even before that. You are the coolest fans and we appreciate every bit of your advice. Just be patient with us as we'll surely waste another four days before remembering that you probably already know the answer :)

The three main themes from the feedback were:

- Have a catchier center tag line
- Emphasize free
- Ditch the word 'generation' as it's too limiting

With the feedback fresh in our minds and a printing deadline for the conference, we reworked the banners and here's the 'final' (I use that word loosely) version of the banners.

 

We are actually at the conference right now and testing the banners in real time. So far the response has been fairly positive. I suspect much more so than had we went with our original design.

We are annoyed with our use of every buzz word possible because everyone is using them and our message gets lost. Also, the center banner with the black text on red is too hard to read without the correct lighting.

So we want to start the brainstorming session for the next round now and figure out how to be the anti buzz word, the anti 40K solution, the anti in house portal that no one uses, etc. Thoughts?

Bosie State Newspaper Article About Swift Kick Training

It's nice for us to connect with school newspaper reporters during our on site trainings. It allows the message of the training to go out beyond just those who attended.

Colby Stream of the Boise State Arbiter, wrote a follow up to our Myspace/Facebook training at their school. Colby did a great job in capturing many of the main points. We often forget to mention these articles, so here's a full reprint. Thanks Colby!

It's all about harnessing the power of the Internet. More specifically, the networking capabilities of the Internet.

Tom Krieglstein, co-founder of Swift Kick, gave a lecture last Tuesday sponsored by the Boise State Student Programs Board (SPB), which discussed how students can use MySpace, Facebook and other online resources to make job-seeking and money-making an easier task.

According to Krieglstein, the Internet creates a megaphone effect. This means that everything a person does on the Internet can be potentially spread everywhere, all over the world.

Krieglstein describes it as living in a glass house.

"Everyone's looking in to see what you're doing," he said.

This can be good or bad, depending on what you're showing the world.

Krieglstein pointed out that 60 percent of employers now search the Internet to find out more information about potential job candidates. Pictures, comments and blogs are up for grabs for these employers to see.

One mission of Swift Kick is to help students portray the image these people find desirable.

"The good behavior is what you want amplified out," Krieglstein said.

The company was co-founded about four years ago by Krieglstein and his partner, Kevin Prentiss. They were both in business at the time and felt like the businesses they were with only wanted to make money. After meeting each other, Krieglstein and Prentiss decided to start Swift Kick.

Today the company is totally virtual; it has no physical location. The team doesn't even live together. They are spread all over the United States in places like Chicago and San Francisco.

But why target college students?

"The strength of America depends on its educational system," Krieglstein said.

The mission of the company is not just to help students portray a positive image. It's also to help students increase their engagement on and off campus.

"College is the one time in your life when you should try as much as possible," Krieglstein said. Only then can a student fail and still have safeguards, he explained.

Krieglstein is the perfect model of an ambitious student. In college, he set up a text book selling business which generated around $1.5 million in sales in a single year. He also won a speaking competition, which opened up his eyes to the money-making opportunities in speaking.

Today, he travels all over the United States giving lectures. At other times, he goes to conferences for student leaders. It is at these conferences that schools hire the company.

One such conference is where Boise State SPB got wind of the company.

"We get a nice little taste of what they're about," Jill Krenecki, director of Student Programs Board, said about the conference.

SPB hoped that the lecture would help to "solve the problem of student apathy," Krenecki said.

The Myspace/Facebook lecture is just one of many events SPB brings to the Boise State campus. Other events include movies, shown every Thursday night at 7 p.m. in the Student Union Building, and the Rock Star 101 concerts. But SPB doesn't want to make up all the events by itself.

"We're always open for suggestions," Krenecki said, stressing that student involvement is critical to the success of SPB events.

Any students who wish to submit ideas can visit SPB's Myspace page by searching "BSU SPB."

Utlizing Facebook Flyers for Marketing Red Rover and Swift Kick

Last November, Facebook updated it's semi useful "Facebook Flyer" advertising system. The biggest updates were better target marketing by keyword and the ability to pay-per-click instead of impressions. What that meant was very little harm in setting up a flyer to test its effectiveness. And so we did...

We created ads for our Dance Floor Theory Leadership Training



our Secrets Behind Facebook and Myspace open campus lecture



and our Red Rover Orientation Software



The three ads have been running for just under 3 months and I thought it would be interesting to share some stats on their effectiveness.



So far we've spend $11.62 to have the flyers appear 177,835 times and be clicked on 97 times. That makes a click through rate (CTR) of .05%! I know it sounds really low, but when you take into account the average CTR of a Google Ad is around 1-2%, it's not too shabby for Facebook.

As far as I can tell, we've yet to turn any of those clicks into a new member of the Swift Kick community, but it's not easy to track unless they tell us. The depth of our community allows someone to come in at any angle and click around for a while, as Kevin commented about in a previous post. 

I think we could tweak the text, title, and picture of the ads to increase the CTR, but for now, we'll just let it keep running and see what happens.

P.S. - if you want to set up your own flyer system, here is a nice "how-to"