Bid on a Year of College Tuition
I saw an interesting item up for bid on eBay this morning…an entire year of tuition, room, and board at Oklahoma Wesleyan University.
Apparently, the bidding started Saturday, with the price now up to $7,500 (as of 3:30 pm on 2/5/07). Tuition, room, and board at this university usually cost about $23,000, so this eBay bid is setting someone up to grab a major bargain.
In a Q&A press release on the school's website, university official Mike Colaw says the university is doing this in order to get some attention, which is clearly working quite well. Local news sites KTUL, KOTV, and KFOR CNET, MSNBC, and TechNewsWorld have all picked up the story.
Despite the financial deal this auction is giving one lucky student, it isn't a complete free ride. The winning person must meet all application requirements, and must have filled out all appropriate financial aid paperwork in order to be eligible to win the prize.
I think this is a great way to get the word out about a small college. It seems to me that universities often limit their online outreach to their brochure websites, which are usually clunky and, due to the large amounts of information stored on them, difficult to navigate. Using such a creative marketing technique seems like an effective way to break out of the mold and get attention from new sources.
Peer-to-Peer Campaigning
Common sense tells you that friends, co-workers and family members have a huge impact on the decisions you make. Edelman's Trust Barometer has put numbers to this, finding that people trust their peers more than they trust the clergy, corporations, politicians and the government.
So it should come as no surprise that politicians have figured this out and have actively been using the web for the last few years to increase peer-to-peer contacts around their campaigns/issues. The idea is to give volunteers tools they can use to spread the message on your behalf.
In implementing these sort of peer-to-peer features, you can take a top down approach and try to give users very specific activities to perform and not much room to freelance. Or you can take an anything goes approach and give users some basic tools and then let them do whatever they want. Basically, we're talking about the difference between meetups and house parties.
This cycle, we have two very clear examples of each approach within the specific context of mini-campaign site functionality (allowing users to create their own page off of the campaign website).
(1) John McCain is taking a top down approach. McCain's website allows you to create your own mini-site that you can use to raise money for McCain, build an address book of volunteers and send them emails. The only way you can customize your page is by editing your goals and writing a few paragraphs of intro text. You can see my mini-site I set up as a test here. McCain is very focused on trying to get me to raise money.
It is pretty clear that the McCain campaign is closely watching everything that happens with these sites. Mike Turk was rejected when he attempted to set up a site at kungfuquip.exploremccain.com (because the "fuq" part is too close to another word we all know too well). On my own mini site, I tried to customize my intro text and got a message that said my changes had been saved and would be available shortly, the clear implication being that they would be reviewing my revised intro text.
(2) John Edwards is taking the anything goes approach. Edwards site has a group blog and any registered user can post blog entries to the community and/or maintain their own diary. You can see the diary page I set up here. I was able to post an entry I'd written previously about Edwards and Robert Scoble directly to my diary without any review process. Presumably, I could post anything I want here. I could write about the Super Bowl or how much I dislike John Edwards if I choose. In addition to diary entries, I could also post poll questions and videos.
So what do I think?
If I had to choose one or the other I would definitely go with Edwards. I think he's going to successfully build a nice community over on his site with his DailyKos-inspired blog, even though the whole thing is a bit of a mess (more on that later). The McCain function is just too heavy handed for the world we live in now.
The truth is there is a sweet spot between these two approaches that none of the Presidential candidates this cycle have quite gotten to yet.
Which Dem is Winning Online?
Micah Sifry over at Personal Democracy has an interesting post looking at how well Democratic Presidential candidates are doing on MySpace and at generating blog links.
All of this should be taking with a huge grain of salt, as online buzz/support doesn’t always translate that well. Although I would argue is is more meaningful for primary elections than general. With those disclaimers, here are some observations about Micah’s post:
(1) When you compare the latest national polls to Micah’s data, it seems pretty clear that Barack Obama is generating online buzz/support at a higher rate than his national polling numbers indicate he should. Obama is 20-30 points behind Hillary Clinton in polls of likely Democrat voters. Obama and Clinton are pretty much even though in terms of MySpace members and blog buzz.
I think this is a case of the online buzz perhaps being ahead of the national polls. Clinton and Obama being about dead even feels right to me and I’d guess that is where things will be in six months.
(2) I was somewhat suprised that John Edwards was a distant third to Obama and Clinton in Micah’s online measures, pretty much in the same spot he is in the polls. Why? Edwards is branding himself as the “social media” candidate and is playing aggressively in the blogosphere and on the social networking sites.
(3) In his post, Micah notes that Democrats are way ahead of Republilcans in terms of online buzz. I think comparisons within parties are much more valuable than those across party. The liberal and conservative online communities are very different in the tools they use and they way they congregate. Republicans just aren’t going to use MySpace and Facebook the way Democrat’s do. And frankly they shouldn’t. This isn’t just a field they are going to play that much on.
I think this fact also makes Micah’s comparison of Democrats much more meaningful than the one he did comparing the Republican candidates.
Cable TV Sites and their Use of the Web
I recently spent some time looking at the top 20 cable TV network sites, as ranked by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, in order to find out how these networks are using the Internet.
Here's what I found:
As you can see from the chart, all of the sites offer some kind of video. Some sites used this tool better than others, but all of them had at least one video feature.
Two things particularly surprised me about these results. Seven (35%) of the websites allow you to watch entire episodes of shows online. I could be wrong, but I think this is a relatively new feature on TV sites. It's great for TV viewers, but it surprised me that the websites allow this to happen. I guess there are a few ways that the networks protect their content while allowing it to be viewed on their websites:
- Limited Sharing. While 45% of the websites allow you to email clips to someone else, they don't allow you to download the clips or send them to another site, like Digg. None of the sites give you an option to embed clips on your own personal site or blog, and no sites allow you to download anything to your computer.
- Advertising. Most sites incorporate advertisements into their online video clips. For example, the other day I watched an episode of Grey's Anatomy on the ABC site. The site advertised that you could watch the full episode with "limited commercial interruption." What they don't tell you is that every 20 minutes, your viewing will be interrupted by commercials for the same company, over and over again. When I watched Grey's Anatomy online, there were about 4 commercial breaks, all of which consisted of a 30 second ad for All State car insurance, and all the commercials were basically the same ad.
The other factor that surprised me was that just 4 sites (Discovery, ESPN, Nickelodeon, and the Weather Channel) allow you to upload your own videos to the site. For example, ESPN has a "Sports Center Home Video" feature, and the Weather Channel allows you to send in your own videos of crazy weather experiences (and has a YouTube-esque rating system). With all the hubbub about user-generated video and collaborative content, I was surprised that more sites didn't integrate this feature into their Web programs.
So what was the worst site? Probably SpikeTV . It was so slow that I could barely get it to work, the video player was awful, and there is very limited content on that site compared to the others. C-SPAN's site looks like it was made in 1992 and never changed, but it does have a lot of videos and podcasts to choose from, so I can't judge it too harshly.
The best site? Hard to say. All of the sites took different approaches to their online programs, so it's sort of like comparing apples and oranges. But, for the record, HGTV and TBS have sites that are visually attractive and easy to navigate. Discovery and ESPN have a ton of content, while Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network made very kid-friendly sites with an emphasis on games and fun extras.