There are a few things that are unmistakably synonymous with spring around here at CUnet…

1. Daylight savings time begins, springing us forward into a world of groggy morning commutes and extra-large-double-espressos.

2. March Madness fever hits and CUnet staff vie for bragging rights over the office bracket pool (the recent Duke loss really made things interesting for some of us).

3. St. Patrick’s Day arrives, a day when us Irish (and Irish-wannabes) around here don green t-shirts, indulge in a pint or two, and gorge ourselves on shamrock-encrusted cupcakes.

4. Our March newsletter publishes!

It’s been proven that curling up with the CUnet newsletter is the best cure for grogginess, hangovers and hyperglycemia (as for your dismal March Madness bracket, sorry…there’s not much we can do for you). So what can you expect to read in this month’s newsletter? Well, we don’t want to completely ruin the surprise for you. But here’s a taste:

• Find out what other schools are doing in response to the DE’s Program Integrity Regulations by reading our Compliance Report and attending our next webinar

• Learn about the top 11 things you need to know about SEO in 2012

• See how your school’s marketing challenges and successes compares to others by participating in the 3rd annual LeadsCouncil Benchmarking Survey

This business of passing a million inquiries per month in January has given me pause to reflect on CUnet’s Sparkroom platform, and how it evolved to lead the marketplace today.

To understand some of the strengths of the Sparkroom platform, you need to understand its history. We’re not all that old – the first education inquiries started flowing back in 2009 – but we’ve come a long way in a few short years, largely thanks to our early customers.

The first schools that came onto our platform were quite large, very serious about marketing operations and spending money wisely. We learned a lot from these early schools and appreciate their ongoing support and confidence in the Sparkroom platform. I figured I’d try to share some of these experiences and how they helped contribute to the success of the Sparkroom platform today.

Sophisticated Customers Need Sophisticated Features & Analytics

First of all, our early customers were very serious about analytics and improving direct marketing performance. We built some very sophisticated marketing tools into the Sparkroom platform, which have been “productized” (meaning it is part of the core Sparkroom platform) and can be enjoyed by all.

These go way beyond the closed loop, multi-dimensional reporting of inquiry conversion. Some examples include sophisticated capping and pricing logic varying by inquiry vendor, automatic adjustments for cyclical patterns in volume (weekly monthly, etc.) so you can see trends more clearly, graphs that show you hourly performance in comparison to days earlier and forecasting curves that allow you to extrapolate enrolments for new inquiries.

Every Inquiry is Sacred: Guaranteeing Scalability & Redundancy

The second strength I’d like to discuss is scalability and redundancy. Every inquiry is sacred. This was certainly our predisposition as software guys from the enterprise software market but our early clients helped reinforce the importance of uptime, disaster preparedness and escalation procedures.

We have four levels of redundancy/failover in our inquiry capture software, meaning that we never lose inquiries (even while we are upgrading the software). Every inquiry makes it to the appropriate scoring vendors, call centers, DNC services, backend systems and email nurturing systems. Not only do we guarantee that we will receive the inquiries 24×7, we also guarantee that we will automatically deliver them to every destination, even if the destination system is not available at that moment. Many of our customers have systems that are not always available but they can be completely confident that the inquiry records will arrive automatically when their system comes back out of downtime.

Adopting The Customer’s Rules & Logic Allows Seamless Transitions

Finally, and this is particularly relevant for schools considering switching to the Sparkroom platform, our initial foray into the education space was humble: we could not change the form-post instructions (FPI) of our customers because it just wasn’t reasonable to expect them to migrate to new FPI in four weeks. We adopted the same transport mechanisms, parameter names and allowable values, right down to the routing rules, validation logic and codes used to identify programs and campuses.

We still do this today for every new customer. This may not at first seem important for a business owner but it dramatically affects the time to complete vendor migration. In contrast, some inquiry management systems require vendors to migrate to complex SOAP-based web services, different submit codes, etc. and it just doesn’t get done on-time – meaning that costly legacy systems need to stay active for months or years after the transition.

That’s a whirlwind of information and no doubt reflects my personal excitement over our progress over the last few years in a few areas that I think are really important; it’s probably a little bit of a different angle that you might get from other people at CUnet. I welcome questions and would be happy to delve into any of the three points above in more depth to clarify some of the points in future blog points or cover other topics from an R&D perspective.

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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CUnet’s booth is built, the giveaways are ready, the ballot box is in place and we’re primed for the show to start. Pull the trigger on this day already, LeadsCon! The anticipation is killing us! With just hours until the exhibit hall opens, the team at CUnet is ready to take their stations at booth 113 for the first day of LeadsCon!

This year, we’re  proud to announce that we recently surpassed a major milestone, processing over one million inquiries each month through our Sparkroom technology platform.  To help get everyone else in the celebratory mood, we are giving away $1,000 in CUnet services to one lucky school. Whether you are looking for help with your SEO, Social Media, or you’re looking to expand into Mobile, this could be the perfect way to get started. Don’t forget to stop by booth 113 to enter your school to win.

If you missed our very own Steve Smith reviewing “KPI’s You Can’t Live Without” yesterday at the Buyers-only sessions, you can access his full presentation here.  Steve will also be at the booth if you’re interested in learning more about how your school can benefit from looking at your data in a whole new way.

We’ve got a lot more to share throughout the the show – from our 2012 Compliance Report to free offers for compliance and marketing audits. If you’re at the show (and even if you’re not), don’t forget to follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/Cunetco for the latest updates.

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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In July 2011, the Department of Education passed a series of new regulations targeting for-profit schools which have a significant impact on recruitment. These regulations created the need for agencies like CUnet to place a greater focus on compliance, and help schools become more transparent for prospective students. At that time, CUnet committed itself to becoming a leader in the quickly-evolving area of compliance through significant investments in:

People: Dedicated internal team of compliance specialists

CUnet responded to this challenge by forming the Marketing Operations Quality Control (MOQC, pronounced: MOXIE| MOK-see|) team in Lincoln, NE and hiring 13 associates to focus exclusively on creating and implementing our compliance practice. We also dedicated a team of developers from our Toronto, ON office to focus on extending Sparkroom, our industry-leading platform, to track our client’s affiliate networks and ensure compliance guidelines are being met.

The MOQC team is made up of Analysts and Professionals who are responsible for manually reviewing websites, looking for issues, and creating compliance violations; marking them as major or minor based upon client standards. The MOQC team also proactively identifies and monitors the internet for fraudulent or “blackhat” activity in order to attack compliance violations on all fronts for our client base.

Processes: Clearly defined set of operational processes to monitor, enforce, and address misrepresentation

CUnet’s MOQC team manages the following  processes :

   -    Creating & managing compliance guidelines

   -    Conducting automated monitoring

   -    Performing analyst reviews

   -    Tracking & communicating violation alerts

   -    Providing in-depth reporting

   -    Performing periodic audits

Technology: Significant investments in technology solutions, backed by our industry-leading Sparkroom platform

The Sparkroom Monitor software supports the compliance team by storing URL information for monitoring, crawling the URLs daily, and comparing URLs against previous records. When Sparkroom Monitor detects changes within the URLs, it takes an image snapshot for analysis. The system also records when manual audits are performed by the MOQC team and scores all media objects (URLS) to help the MOQC team quickly prioritize their tasks; flagging client designated banned terms, and automatically tracks the differences in pages that occur over time.

With February 14th being the “official day” to share your feelings with the ones you care about – with cards and roses and chocolates and more – well, with all that going on, a few of us here at the CUnet office started to “feel the love” ourselves.

What better way to share with the world – and each other – how much we love working at CUnet, than with a virtual valentine. Anyway you say it – French, Spanish, Cantonese, Hindi, German, Jamaican, Russian or English – there’s clearly a lot of reasons to be happy that you work here at CUnet. 

A huge thanks goes out to Jeff Berg and Pooja Shah for making this happen.

Happy Valentine’s Day from all of us at CUnet!

Faster, Smaller, and Integrated – Now What?

As we continue our series of predictions posts, we take a look at the quickly changing world of mobile devices, and share some thoughts on some ways that higher education marketers can respond to these changes.

1. 2012 – The Year When Mobile Smart Phones Reach 50% Of The Market

Back in March, 2010, Nielsen projected that the U.S. cell phone smart phone market would finally reach 50% of the total handset market by Q3 of 2011.As it turns out, they were a little premature in their estimates – the majority of Americans still have feature phones (according to comScore’s latest survey, which puts smart phones at 38%). However, with smart phone prices down, tier 2 carrier smart phone inclusion, and increased competition, we can expect to pass that milestone in 2012. With almost half the population accessing the internet on their mobile devices – from social media to shopping sites and more –we can expect the marketing pendulum to begin the swing in favor of “mobile first, desktop second.”

2. The Rise of the Tablets To Main-Stream

The increased competition in the tablet market will drive prices down and increase sales as new models come out allowing the devices to be more main stream. More Americans who use their PC for simple activities like e-commerce, news, web, email, will buy tablets when they want to replace their PC.

So what does all this mean for higher ed marketers? Schools can no longer afford to build and test their websites purely with a desktop user in mind. Sites that are optimized for mobile (including touch screens) will offer a better user experience and in turn, drive better results.

3.  Social Sites and Apps will Continue to Dominate Mobile Traffic

All analytics and indicators show the strong dominance of social sites and social games. This theme will continue throughout 2012, and we’ll see more and more marketers exploring ways to leverage that trend to increase brand awareness. In particular, we expect more attention on Android and iPhone GEO Social apps with creative uses of targeting them.. This recent Nielsen Study reinforces this prediction.

4. RIM Losing Market Share

Research in Motion, the manufacturer of Blackberry, is in serious trouble. With sales already on the decline and a series of network issues in the recent past, they will continue to lose marketshare going into 2012, with the other 3 major players (Google, Apple, and Microsoft) benefiting.

While it’s still possible that RIM could find it’s way back by introducing an advanced touch OS with features and benefits equal to – or better than – Android and iOS operating systems, this doesn’t appear likely at this point. Having said that, marketers should keep focusing on optimizing their mobile presence for all handset types in the market with mobile web design best practices in mind.

5. The Beginning of the Start for Contactless Payments adoption via NFC & Virtual Wallets to Replace Credit Cards

This trend is unlikely to directly impact higher ed recruitment any time soon; however, our list of mobile predictions would be incomplete without it.

Many new smart phones that are coming out now and the rumored new iPhone5 to come will probably have NFC. Allowing users with these handsets to store credit card information in a virtual wallet on the phone and start using the phones at terminals that accepts them like the MasterCard PayPass for quick and easy checkouts.  One example is the Google Virtual Wallet.

6. The Rise of Smart Phone-Connected Gadgets

Finally, if you are up to date with the latest trends and hip gadgets craze, you may have noticed new gadgets in your electronics store that take advantage of the smart phone’s connectivity features to enhance everyday life activities. Today, smart phones enable everything from listening to music through Bluetooth connected stereo phones to tracking fitness and health through app-supported devices like the UP  bracelet or the Fitbit activity and sleep trackers. Expect more of those life-enhancing gadgets to show up and to satisfy our technology-driven lives.

While this is another trend that doesn’t have immediate/obvious ramifications for higher ed marketers, it is worth watching how this evolves. As more companies come up with ways to take advantage of smart phone connectivity, marketers are bound to follow.

As we continue our series of 2012 predictions for higher education marketers, one overarching trend stood out that we thought deserved a deeper dive. Across all industries, the availability of data has been growing exponentially over the past few years. For marketers, this unprecedented access to real-time data has the potential to have startling a startling impact by allowing educational institutions to make quick, well-informed business decisions. At CUnet, we have a team of people dedicated solely to analyzing and reporting on that data for our clients; they pulled together the key “data-driven opportunities” that we see making the biggest impact for our clients in the coming year.

Refining of inquiry scoring strategies

Inquiry scoring is a useful tool, but has fallen off the radar for some schools over the past year for various reasons. I believe that 2012 will see a renewed push toward using scoring especially in evaluating marketing spends. In the past, scoring has been mainly used to differentiate how a school connects with potential students. Moving forward, more emphasis will be placed on using scores for tiered pricing structures as opposed to other strategies.

Increased focus on demographic and segmentation information

What is a great way to target your potential students? How about data points that typically aren’t asked for on the average inquiry form. Where do these potential students live and work and what do they do in their spare time? Do they like HBO or Showtime? This type of information has become the norm for a number of industries and the higher education space is certainly no exception. Schools want to know how to reach their target markets, and this type of information is a gigantic step in attracting new students. Combining this with tiered pricing through inquiry scoring will also be of greater interest in 2012.

Conversion metrics evolve

Applications and starts are certainly still important, but ultimately student retention (graduating and finding a rewarding career) will be the primary goal. This trend gained significant momentum in 2011 and will escalate in the coming year. Student retention helps to ensure a given school’s dedication to education, building strong brands, and adding qualified and successful individuals to the work force. Schools will spend more time and effort analyzing the factors that impact retention, and use that data to help refine recruitment efforts.

Predicting program trends

With more and more data available, schools will look for ways to identify program trends as before they take shape, so they can quickly respond by adjusting program offerings. For example, the IT field has grown in popularity in the for-profit space significantly in the past few years, and we expect this trend to continue. Even as budgets become more refined as 2011 progressed, interest in IT programs has not only held steady but grown as an overall percentage of total inquiries. 2012 will see even more emphasis placed on IT specific program offerings and will continue to generate even more interest in the coming year.

Source: CUnet seasonality and data findings for 2010 and 2011