Don’t worry, I don’t plan to run a five-part series on RealNebraska, the video show produced by the admission office of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. But, I HAD to tell you about this.
David Burge, the host of the show and the associate director for admissions at UNL, posted a comment to my previous post where he explained that while RealNebraska hasn’t gone viral on YouTube, he was featured on the TODAY show for 6 days as part of a contest just a month ago.
Interesting development for a show mainly produced to be distributed on the Web, don’t you think? That’s why I asked David about the strategy and the result behind this original initiative.
1) Why did you decide to enter in the TODAY show Anchor Contest? What were your goals?
Believe it or not we have been trying to get this type of thing together in a national venue since the beginning of the project. We entered an episode in the USA network “Characters Welcome” competition as well as the MySpace promotion for “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” We feel as this is still an unconventional approach to recruitment/college marketing and likely to gather some national attention for its content. Our recruitment videos are already featured on our local cable network, both On-Demand and the Educational network.
Ultimately, we just wanted our video shown once on the TODAY show. After that, we had no idea what to expect. Once it became clear that they were going to make the competition about personality, we tried to highlight the university iconography as much as possible. For example, each day I wore my “N” pin. Ann Curry and I had a conversation about it on the first day. At every turn I tried to mention the university.
We also knew that if identified as a finalist, we could turn the activity on the show into side publicity. We had press releases, each mentioning the Real Nebraska project, I was a fixture on three morning radio programs, and featured on the evening news in both Nebraska and Kansas.
2) What kind of returns did you get from it? Can you share some numbers and a few examples?
We sent out an email to our inquiry pool and tracked how many people clicked on the link to Real Nebraska. By tying our project to the TODAY show, the link got clicked at 5 times the rate of any other link in any of our other emails. Web traffic to the site almost doubled as well. I was on the show for six days and each day enjoyed a 4 million Nielson share. We were featured on the front page of the Lincoln, Nebraska newspaper three days out of six (at the same time as the university getting some bad press about illegal student downloads). It’s tough to say the inquiry bump as we are in one of our heaviest periods of inquiry anyway.
What can’t be tracked, however, is the viral component. I had old friends contacting me that had received MULTIPLE emails prompting them to vote for the bow-tie guy from the University of Nebraska. I realized connections in my friends that I never knew existed, two friends from different worlds connected by just a few people. I hate to guess, but I guess that close to 20,000 emails were sent each day I was on the show through list serves, web-groups, and even company newsletters. The state of Nebraska was connected somehow but I also heard from folks as far away as Canada. When it was all over, I even got a congratulatory note from one of our Senators.
Anyway, some of this is anecdotal but there is good reason to think that this bit of national attention will pay some dividends in terms of enrollment.