When I was a kid, I loved Albert Einstein.Tiny five-year-old Jeff didn’t dream of being a social media strategist when he grew up, but, instead, of growing into a crazy-haired physicist that was prone to sticking his tongue out  (Hey, two out of three ain’t bad, as Meat Loaf would say). So, imagine my horror when I saw the above image relating to social media ROI. How could my hero, the dude who came up with a scientific equation for something we couldn’t even measure, suggest such a thing?

Thankfully, it turns out Einstein didn’t actually say this (that honor actually goes to sociologist William Bruce Cameron). Phew! Geek BSOD averted.

Don’t get me wrong, the quote is still a good one, because we’re probably not measuring the right things yet when it comes to social media return-on-investment, and many of the things we do measure, like Klout, assign a value to something which is worthless (at least according to folks like Duncan Watts). But the quote also opens the door for all of those self-proclaimed social media gurus to suggest that attempting to measure social media success is like kicking dead whales down the beach – something messy, time-consuming and, ultimately, pointless.

There was a time, maybe about five years ago, when us social media folks could get away with waving our magic social media wand and enchanting people to people that the intangible social media fairies were going to come and grant everyone’s wishes. That time, while entertaining, is thankfully gone. I’m still a big believer in the value of social media for social media’s sake (in the same way that I think customer service for customer service’s sake is valuable), but today we need to prove success. We need to face the question, “how do you track the ROI of social media?” with more than just a deer-in-the-headlights stare. If you’re in charge of your school’s social media program, you had better be prepared to answer this question. As schools dedicate more and more resources to social media channels,  it’s increasingly important to have clear ways to track and measure success in this area. Yet many enrollment marketers have trouble providing a clear explanation for why their social media efforts are working .

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Greetings, earthlings! It’s been another exciting week in the higher education world, and we’ve got another tasty serving of news for you. This week, we saw APSCU President and CEO Steve Gunderson responding to suggestions that for-profit colleges do not role in philanthropy (for fairness, I’m also going to include links to the article he was responding to as well as the original author’s response to him), a former University of Phoenix student chimes in on the for-profit debate in Iowa (home of Sen. Tom Harkin and, more importantly, where I grew up, Go Trojans!), a look at potential methods for hybrid for-profit/non-profit schools, the first school investigation from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, CATO’s primer on college policy, and some discussion about one of the speakers at the upcoming APSCU conference.

And, yes, for those wondering about the above image, it’s from a t-shirt titled “AT-AT the Rodeo,” available for purchase at RedBubble (go ahead and order one for your humble editor).

• For-Profits and Philanthropy ( Inside Higher Ed)
• Vilifying All For-Profit College Is Not Fair ( Des Moines Register)
• The Right Questions: For-Profit/Non-Profit Hybrids ( Confessions of a Community College Dean)
• CFPB’s First For-Profit Salvo ( CAPPS)
• A Quick College Policy Primer ( CATO@Liberty)
• Education Expert Michelle Rhee Criticized for Speaking at Education-Related Conference ( Reason)

Your faithful editor has arrived back from his temporary vacation in Southern California (where he participated in a 5k charity run that involved being covered in multi-colored cornstarch) and, because he’s in such a good mood, we’re giving you a break from the standard cowboy-themed round-up photos. Instead, above, you have his modern day reimagining of Magritte’s “The Treachery of Images” and, below, you have President Obama doing a slow-jam about student loans.

And now for the news!

• Colleges ponder the pros and cons of Pinterest as a marketing tool ( Inside Higher Ed)
• Obama Administration Wants To Trademark ‘GI Bill’ Term ( CBS)
• Politicians consider for-profit college for New Bedford ( SouthCoastToday.com)
• Community Colleges Should Emulate For-Profit Institutions’ Innovation ( Los Angeles Times)
• Tokuyama Dental America Partners with Viva Learning for Online Dental CE ( The Houston Chronicle)
• Open for business? Why universities must collaborate on OpenCourseWare ( The Guardian)

• What if your first couple years of college were dirt cheap? ( Baltimore Sun)
• Flipping the Classroom Requires More Than Video ( Wired)
• For-profit and undeterred ( CNN Money)
• Screw University, Course Hero Curates YouTube Into Free Business and Coding Class ( Tech Crunch)
• Do Price Controls Help Students? ( Inside Higher Ed)

Annnnnd…. we’re back with another weekly dose of higher education news that you may have been busy enough to miss. This week, we saw the beginning of the first “Ivy League” proprietary school, an increase in college enrollments, the Sloan Consortium’s thoughts on how to evaluate quality online education programs, a retrospective on the most engaging college & campus Facebook posts over the last year, and a reduced tuition for online courses.

• Can This ‘Online Ivy’ University Change the Face of Higher Education? ( The Atlantic)
• New NCES Report Shows College Enrollment Up ( EducationNews.org)
• LRC’s Capitol Notes: For-profit college regulatory legislation heads to governor ( KyForward)
• Sloan’s 5 Pillars of Quality Online Education ( OnlineUniversities.com)
• Rethinking Higher Education Business Models ( Center for American Progress)
• The Most Engaging College & University Facebook Posts & Pages – A Look Back at 2011 ( Varsity Outreach)
• No Financial Aid, No Problem. For-Profit University Sets $199-a-Month Tuition for Online Courses ( The Chronicle of Higher Education)

In three days, Facebook’s new changes to the look of brand pages take effect. If you haven’t even contemplated them yet, now’s the time to the panic. I’ll pause while you run screaming around the office (if you record yourself running screaming around your office and send it to me, I’ll even send you a CUnet coffee mug Sorry, we’re all out of mugs. You can pick a CUnet golf towel, aluminum water bottle or fancy glasses cleaning kit, though).

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Okay, now that we’ve gotten that out of our system, here’s a step-by-step guide to help you convert your page over to the new look while there’s still time. If you want a more in-depth look at the changes that go into effect on March 30, take a look at our original post on the subject: “Five Thing You Must Know About The New Facebook Brand Timelines (if the solar flare didn’t get us)”.

If you choose to accept this mission, here is the equipment we must acquire to begin:

• 1 851 pixel by 315 pixel cover photo
• 1 180 pixel by 180 pixel profile image (that looks good if scaled down to 32 x 32 pixels)
• 111 pixel by 74 pixel images for any custom tabs you currently have.
• 1 inspirational WWII-era poster

For the purposes of this mission, the last item on the list is available to the right (credit goes to James Montour from DeviantArt). Feel free to look at it every time you begin to get discouraged (in the interest of full disclosure on my desk that I view every time I feel my awesomeness slipping).

Once you’ve acquired the above items, we’re ready to embark on this mission. Buckle down for CUnet’s quick, dirty guide to the bare minimum you need to do to get your page ready for the new changes and avoid having people kick sand in your face and laugh at your puny Facebook physique.

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There’s a possibility that you may, in fact, not be reading this blog post right now because a massive solar flare this morning may have destroyed civilization as we know it. This would be bad on so many levels. In the event that it has happened and you are still reading this post, I fully encourage you to stop and begin scavenging batteries and fresh water immediately. A post about Facebook’s changes to brand pages pales in comparison to the horrific post-apocalyptic existence we’re going to have to eke out until we begin mass producing Twinkies and fast food again (i.e. civilization returns). On the off chance that we still have a working global communications infrastructure, though, the announcement by Facebook last week about new changes to Facebook brand pages may have you in a bit of a tizzy.

Last week, Facebook disgorged a stew of alterations to Facebook pages that will go into effect, whether you like it or not, on March 31. The change that got the most attention was the transition of brand pages from last year’s the “old timey” profile format to the Timeline format introduced for personal profiles in September. However, buried within the steaming mass of Facebook’s announcement were a couple other changes that may significantly impact many branded pages.

So, to help you out, we’re creating a two-part series that explains what the major changes are and how to adapt to them. In this first post, we’re going to discuss the changes, give all the specs for new image sizes and present some information that will help smooth the transition into the new page. Next week, we’ll publish a post walking through exactly how to transition a page with lots of helpful screenshots.

The major changes fall into four major areas:
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Well, faithful readers, it’s been a full week since LeadsCon officially started and we’re just now starting to recover. The booth is back in transit, we’ve bid adieu to the beautiful Mirage Hotel & Casino, and we’re now reflecting on what turned out to be an excellent event. We’ve compiled some of our own highlights, along with a list of links to some of the great content that came out of LeadsCon this year.

But first, fancy LeadsCon statistics!

• Over 2,500 people attended LeadsCon this year!
• CUnet’s two presentations drew a combined audience of about 200 participants generating more than eight days worth of collective eyeball time.
• In total, we tweeted the official CUnet Twitter account tweeted about 50 times during the show, inspiring over 100 total engagements and reaching a potential audience of more than 25,000 people. And that doesn’t include the bevy of tweets produced by staff actually at the convention.
• With a booth staffed by six people for about 12 hours, the CUnet team collectively burned about 16,000 calories would be 4.6 pounds lighter, if not for Stack Restaurants Tomahawk steaks covered in giant blobs of butter.

CUnet Highlights

Some of Our Favorite Posts About LeadsCon

• Mobile Marketing for the CPL buyer (whitepaper- DoublePositive)
• BestOnlineUniversities recap
• Mobile Marketing and Closing Leads in the Post-PC Era
• Guide to Generating Leads with Display Advertising (whitepaper)
• Google+ and SEO
• Understanding the future of media session recap
• Creating the next big thing session recap
• The Ikea effect- Michael Norton
• Twitter handles of LeadsCon speakers
• Top 10 CPA networks announced
• RingDNA mobile marketing app press release
• Datamark press release
• VigLink recap
• Twilio blog post
• TRUSTe blog post
• AdRants blog post
• Making money with affiliate marketing infographic

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Hello, faithful readers! We’re coming to you live on the last day of LeadsCon from the beautiful Mirage Hotel & Casino (site of the “America’s Best Bagger” national grocery bagging competition this month). For anyone interested, Las Vegas hosts more than 18,000 conventions each day. Check out the bottom of this post for a list of other conventions you may want to crash once LeadsCon is done.

Yesterday was an exciting day at booth 113 on the LeadsCon floor! We started off with an exciting keynote by Michael Norton, the Marvin Bower Fellow and an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Norton touted the idea that building perceived value hinges upon getting consumers involved in the process and transparency into the production process is a great way of doing that. After all, there’s a significant discrepancy between what a product creator thinks something is worth compared to what a product consumer thinks something is worth.

We also got confirmation that our bright baby blue shirts make a powerful statement, we tried on some different hats, and, in general had an awesome time.

Today is shaping up to be even better. First, if you haven’t stopped by booth 113 and helped us celebrate the one million inquiries that are passing through our Sparkroom inquiry management software, you should. We think it’s kind of a big deal (basically, one quarter of all education-related inquiries each month are now being processed through us) and one lucky school stands to win $1,000 in CUnet services for it – this could be anything from mobile search advertising to social media management to SEO. So come on down and help us celebrate.

Two of our most fabulous employees will also be presenting a session tailored to the higher education industry later on today. At 3 p.m. in the Events Center Room C3, Steve Smith, Managing Director of Product Management, and Jeff Herz, Director of Internal Operations (the member of the Five CUnet Jeffs that grew the bestest moustache for Movember), will be presenting the results of our Higher Education Compliance Survey. For anyone who can’t attend the conference, we’ll also be posting a copy of the presentation later today.

Also, don’t forget that we’re giving away free marketing and compliance audits to schools at our booth. If you interested in getting an assessment of how you’re doing, holler at us.

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Greetings, fellow online marketers. We’re coming to you live from Leadscon at Las Vegas’ Mirage Casino, the most expensive hotel-casino ever built (due in part to the use of real gold dust in tinting the hotel’s gold windows).

This year, the CUnet crew is stationed at booth 113 and we’re celebrating quite a few things this year. Back in January, we hit the milestone of processing 1,000,000 inquiries each month, which is pretty amazing when you consider the fact that an estimated 3,000,000 to 4,000,000 education inquiries are generated across the entire industry. To get everyone in the celebration mood, we’re giving away $1,000 in CUnet services to one lucky winner, to announced after the convention.

We’re also offering free compliance and marketing services audits to eligible schools that stop by the booth. So, whether you’re interested in seeing how well you comply with federal guidelines or if you’re interested in getting an assessment of your social, SEO or PPC campaigns, drop by the booth and say hello to our lovely CUnet representatives for more information.

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