Swift Kick Central

Say Hello to the First Official Red Rover Newsletter

We've joked about making the tag line for Red Rover be, "Students Actually Use It!" The proof of course is in the pudding which we've already talked about.

We see the students as our "customer" first and the admin/staff as our "customer" second. Most higher ed software solutions seem to think the opposite. Just look at the complex user interfaces with "comprehensive solutions" and you'll know the student wasn't their primary focus. We think a bottom up approach is more effective.

One of the strengths of Red Rover is going to be in the connectedness of it's members to each other. Our goal is to help facilitate a strong Red Rover community that is in line with our bottom up approach.

We already have a Student Affairs Collaborative Blog, a Student Leader Collaborative Blog, a Collaborative Project Wiki Space, and a New Features Usersuggest Forum.

We have more ideas in the pipeline and today we just released our first official Red Rover Newsletter to help us better connect to our users and help them connect with each other. There is a separate monthly newsletter for the Admins, Student Leaders, and Regular Students. The goal is to give them tips on how to be more effective within their respective roles through the use of Red Rover.

If you're interested in signing up for the different newsletters, you can do so below:

THE ADMIN NEWSLETTER:
Email:

THE STUDENT LEADER NEWSLETTER:
Email:

THE REGULAR STUDENT NEWSLETTER:
Email:

Marketing Red Rover with a Facebook Note

The list of schools signing up to use Red Rover is growing daily, with UCLA being the newest. A great byproduct of so many active users navigating the system is seeing the new creative ways in which admins and group leaders are marketing Red Rover.

Nick Chapa, a group leader at UCLA, wrote this note about Red Rover on Facebook:

Nick's note explains the group leader value in using Red Rover for automatic recruitment and invites them to sign up with a link. I've seen schools use Facebook notes before, but Nick's unique approach of tagging all the group leaders in the note is genius, because when he posted it, they all received an email saying they've been tagged in the note, thus the click-through rate was much higher.

Going to where the students are and connecting with them through one of their favorite communication channels is just plain smart.

Nice work Nick!

Red Rover Milestones

Downloadable as a pretty .pdf here.

Or as a small picture:

The order of things might change. When we need money depends partially on how fast we develop, on how much we speak, or timing of key employees. We might decide it makes more sense to have a paid feature extension before we go open source.

In whatever order they get done, having these milestones helps us keep our focus on the right thing at the right time - which is the most important thing when your resources are limited.

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"

The Video of the interview about Red Rover with Peter Barnes of Fox Business TV

Chicago Sun-Times Article on Red Rover and Swift Kick

Sandra Guy from the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about Red Rover and Swift Kick from an entrepreneurial  startup standpoint. She does a great job of capturing Red Rover's role in new student orientation:

"Red Rover does for education what eHarmony does for dating," Krieglstein said. "We connect students via online networks to other students, groups and classes based on their interests before the students arrive for orientation."

Red Rover takes it another step by acting like Amazon.com.

"We say, 'because you like soccer, here are other groups on campus you might be interested in,'" Krieglstein said.

It's fun for us to see more and more articles released about Red Rover. We talked about the viral aspect of Red Rover for schools, and the same is true with our current marketing plan. Work from the ground up with bloggers, students, staff, and reporters. At times it feels like more work than just emailing a press release, but at the same time it feels more solid and longer lasting. It all comes back to relationships.

Timing Matters and Immunity to Viralness

There are three stages to Red Rover setup:

1) School admin sets up groups at school. 2) Student leaders set up their individual groups (summary and tags) 3) Students set themselves up and join groups

Step three is basically the "online orientation" part.

We've been told by a few schools that they plan on including step three as part of their required online orientation process. This solves it pretty quickly.

For the rest, it will be a marketing push. Putting the links where they will be seen, e-mailing it out, getting to the thought leaders on campus and getting them to get their friends . . .

It's the need and desire for "spreading among friends" where the timing of our rollout is frustrating. The timing has made viral spread far more difficult.

Facebook has built up an immunity to viral apps. It's not a complete immunity, but compared to the early days - say the first two weeks where everything was a plague - the body politic of Facebook is far more resistant.

There are three types of spreading on Facebook, personal invite (direct message), assisted invite (app sends it for you) and passive (newsfeed or see it on someone's page). None of these three work as well as they did. Because a) Facebook has changed the interface to limit assisted invites because b) folks are feeling like this:

And those feelings mean that no method of spreading an application from person to person is as easy as it once was.

As a wannabe virus this is annoying. If we had just been earlier, we could have slipped by easily.

With a little bit more vision, and a little less self-ishness, this immunity is a good thing and perfectly normal.

I'm an active Facebook user. I'm sick of invites to silly things. I'm glad Facebook is putting limits - I wish my friends were more discerning with their invites.

Keep out the bad, and let in the good.

Most Facebook applications don't do much. With some notable exceptions, they are trinkets and games. I'm not into that right now.

Neither are the folks above.

Our challenge is to build (and describe) a good application that can navigate the strengthening immune system.

It's a worthy challenge.

I would have preferred an easy one.

Red Rover and Tom on the Radio

Tom was interviewed by WGN of Chicago about winning the Ideablob.com contest recently. 

It was a funny conversation before hand, where we were reviewing the important things to mention (knowing that he was dealing in sound bites).  We came up with:

1) What: Orientation software that integrates with Myspace and Facebook (The shortest "What is Red Rover?" answer we have.)

2) Benefits: Involvement / Retention / Engagement

3) Surprising bit: Software is FREE

Take a listen by clicking here and marvel at how Tom just knocks 'em down in order. 

And Tom and I are going to do all of our speeches in Radio Announcer voice from now on.