David Baker: My name is David Baker. I'm the Web Communications Director at Oregon State University. We have a campaign that's been going on for almost two years now—well, a little over a year and a half—called Powered by Orange, a social media driven campaign. And I'll be talking about how that has evolved, what happened in the process, and then ten things that we've learned from participating in this campaign. And forgive my use of Prezi but I didn't get to travel last year because of travel budgets so I'm going to use the heck out of it this year which is the presentation software. So if you get motion sickness, close your eyes during the transitions. So, about us. We're Web Communications Office in University Advancement which actually doesn't do any development. It is a department which that's mostly focused on public relations and marketing. And that's where our public facing Web team is. I think the main thing to know about that is that we work across all of these different departments—News, Marketing, Events—without any walls. So, at Events, we often have our developers and programs out there passing out t-shirts, doing marketing works and things like that. We work with our News folks, with Marketing, very closely, so we're really a tight-knit division in terms of marketing and public relations. And here's our office and the roles that we have. We have a writer, social media specialist, content person and project manager, designer. All of our development is on the IT side and we work with that, with IT Division. And then, the red boxes are probably most important because those are our interns and they do all of the cool creative stuff that we take credit for. And this is little bit about Oregon State University. I think it just helps to understand a little bit about what our institution is to get an idea of what the problems we're trying to solve at Powered by Orange were. |
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02:04 |
So the first thing here's the—I think Mark had called it, the obligatory girls under a tree—photo that everybody's using. So this is actually the dry season in the Willamette Valley, which is known as the Fourth of July and then, this is what it normally looks like. So authenticity, a little bit, we're trying to embrace that on the marketing and public relations side by showing what it's really like -- a little less sunshine in our imagery. We are a land grant and we're a research institution, $275 million, and that's probably our best kept secret. We're more than twice the size of our next largest Oregon public institution and people don't know that. And this is one of our McArthur Genius winners. This is Benny, who's our mascot. And we invented the corn dog you saw which is probably our biggest claim to fame. There's the campus. Anybody recognize this guy right there? Audience 1: [03:10 Unintelligible] David Baker: Yes, women's basketball coach. Close enough. Got a name? Anybody have a name? Audience 2: [03:17 Unintelligible] David Baker: Ah, kind of close. OK. [Laughter] David Baker: So t-shirts. I don't know it's a… Audience 2: [03:23 Unintelligible] David Baker: These are probably… I don't know if they're the right size. So here you go. Audience 2: Yahoo! David Baker: If they’re too large, just wash them in hot. [Laughter] David Baker: So and then, this is kind of what it looks like. We're also known for forestry and natural resources, probably our top program. And here's the motion sickness part. And then, the first thing is why we had to do Powered by Orange. I think the problem is there's a lack of contemporary understanding of our institution as we're the land grant. People saw us as the cow college in the state so the less sophisticated. And we're sitting on top of this, for us, really huge research numbers. We're doing amazing things in marine science that folks just don't know about. |
04:12 |
And there also was a big problem. There's a lack of visibility in our key market which is Portland. So the geography of Oregon is that we have one urban area, and that's Portland, and two-thirds of the people live there. We have two other big institutions in the state and we all compete for the same students and University of Oregon has programs there and they have building there and have a lot of visibility. Portland State University obviously is there. So to make an impact in the market, we needed to something. And our big challenge—everybody is dealing with this—we have very limited resources. The last couple of years were the first years in the institution's history that they didn’t pay for television advertising in the biggest market of Portland. So, we have a couple of things that we're going on for us and that we did a lot of market research leading up to this campaign with an outside firm that gave us spreadsheets and research data. And one of the things that we knew is that even though audiences didn't know a lot of the great things that we're doing, they're prepared to believe it, but only if it rings authentic. Because the audience is more prepared to believe the glossy commercial and the slick advertising campaign and the agency-delivered message, yet, it would have to be an authentic message. We have this alumni hunger for us to make a splash all the time. Alumni are saying, "What can we do to help you raise visibility in Portland? When are you coming to Portland? When are you going to do something?" And, then we have talented, daring, dedicated staff and then the obnoxious color. So that was our huge asset. And then, what we came up with, in sort of our creative brainstorming internally. Mainly a couple of folks in our marketing department and our Marketing Director, came up with this statement. This is what we wanted people to say : "I make a positive impact on the economy, the environment and community. I turn OSU's enduring purpose into action, I am Powered by Orange." |
06:20 |
So the idea of us not being able to say that, this is what we wanted people to say on our behalf, in our perfect world, as marketers. This is the snake oil, if you will. So we needed to find a way to do that but in such a way that it was our people that were saying that – our grads, our students, our alumni, people connected with OSU. Because from our market research, we knew that OSU people are more mindful, more thoughtful, more connected to the community. And the market place are ready, they believe that in a community, somebody from Oregon State would be more likely to volunteer from anything from coaching Little League to opening a business that gives back to the community and does charitable work and that type of thing. So how we started was, after we came up with what we wanted people to say—and we didn't have a lot of money for more research or anything like—so we went ahead and built a website. Because everybody on the marketing side, of course, knows that web stuff is free, cheap and easy, right? So they turned to Web Communications and said, "We don't have any money so what you do is just magic, so whiff something up together." My boss used to present on this and she said the easy part – building a website – and I would just cringe next to here. But in our website, we plugged a few key elements that helped us to deliver that message. We used a Google map. Nothing sophisticated, just a regular, editable My Maps. We had a blog which contain a lot of the story telling that we were doing about our people, delivering those stories about real people who were great things, who are powering their communities by orange. We had our official messages in a not so prominent place but that was to say, "Hey, we're doing messaging too on our website." So those had some of the more, you know, "We are America's land grant or America's natural resources university." |
08:28 |
So we just put everything together there and collected it. And then we created some social networks, leveraging some existing social networks from OSU but also creating new ones just for the campaign, in Facebook, on Twitter, created YouTube play lists. Then we did stickers and t-shirts. Anybody from an orange school? Or Any orange? Orange school? OK. This is sort of an Orange t-shirt but I have to give away some things. And then the download section, this is Kegan Sims, our social media specialist, and if you find him at the conference, he'll give you stickers or buttons or free stuff. So the other thing that we put on the website that was cheap and free are downloadable things. We wanted our people to become our brand ambassadors and all of that good stuff, so we put ways to brand their computer screens. They can download door hangers. They can add themselves as a dot to the map. They could print out posters and we wanted them to become, our marketing director called them, "the cubicle warriors". So people who would show their colors in their workplace and show where they were making a difference. So that you could say, "Hey, so and so in this position not only does a great job but they also came from OSU." The website—which we launched with no fun fare, just a couple of weeks after getting the whole idea to do the campaign—was a proof of concept for this idea of Powered by Orange. We had no idea that it would resonate. We didn't know if it was good or bad but we use sort of the social networks to be our test marketing and our survey tool. And it was a proof of concept and that allowed us to follow with some stronger elements. |
10:22 |
You know, the initial limited investment other than every waking and sleeping hour of the Web Communications team was later supplemented with a television commercial that we didn't air on television because we didn't have any money to do. But it played during a free spot on the PAC10 games. More bumper sticker, buttons, shirts, some billboards eventually and then we painted some metro trains orange in the major market of Portland. So this is our again sort of glossy polished version of Powered by Orange. Voice-over: The world around us is full of possibilities. At Oregon State University, we're making them a reality -- ensuring the water you drink is clean, driving innovations to produce healthy foods and feed a hungry world, harnessing clean renewable energy to power your life. Our solutions are making a difference you can see everyday. That's what it means to be Powered by Orange. [End of video clip] David Baker: OK. And that was great but the problem is it has no authenticity yet. We did our best to make that authentic. We did write everything in-house. Everybody in it was an OSU person. The production company that filmed it did it on the cheap because it was run by an alum who has strong ties to OSU. They actually do great work. They build these cranes that are used in movies like Titanic and things like that. The woman who did the voice over was an alum. And the music was written by an OSU student, and written and composed and performed. So we try to make it as the authentic as possible but that's still the polished marketing message. Now, for the lessons that I mentioned after the background. What social media taught us right away in a marketing campaign was the necessity to give up control. And this is the thing everybody's been talking about for a long time. But you have to embrace that aspect. And how do you use that in a distant environment where you're trying to market and you're trying to push a certain concept or a certain message? How do you give up control and also do messaging. |
12:35 |
Because we all know that if you repeat something long enough people start to believe it. So it's really a tough thing to do in the social media space. But what we had to do is we had to understand who our students were, who our alumni were, and we had to know who they were and what they would say when we ask them a question. Question we ask most frequently was, what does it mean to be Powered by Orange? So this past spring, we had an event. We gave away t-shirts again and we asked a hundred students. Actually, I'm rounding up a little bit because I'm on the marketing side of things, but it was actually 87 students that… We videotaped them, giving their definition of what it means to be Powered by Orange. And I'll show you just a little clip from that. [Start of video clip] [Music] Student 1: Powered by Orange means to me, it's a type of energy that people use and focus towards their passions, as well as life goals. Student 2: To me, Powered by Orange means having the education and the experience to make a difference. Student 3: Powered by Orange means that from all the experiences and learning I get on campus is going to help me achieve great goals in my life. |
14:05 |
Student 4: Powered by Orange means that as OSU students, we just impact the community some way or another whether it's through volunteering or through donating or just informing others. Student 5: To me, I think it means like what you can do as an individual to make this community better like a nicer place to live. Student 6: Powered by Orange means to me as being powered by Oregon State and just having that knowledge that something's always backing me up and that's something I can take with me for the rest of my life. Student 3: My name is Tara. I am a championship bowler and I am Powered by Orange. Student 2: My name is Kelly Thompson. Student 1: My name is Tara Soretson. Student 6: I love playing guitar and writing music. Student 1: I love cats. Student 4: And I love beat boxing. Student 1: I got a cat named Frank. Student 2: I'm a competition sailor and competition archer and I am Powered by Orange. Student 4: And I'm Powered by Orange. Student 1: And I'm Powered by Orange. Student 6: And I'm Powered by Orange. Student 5: OK, so I am Nadia. I love hiking in Mary's Peak here in Corvallis and I'm Powered by Orange. [Music] [End of video clip] David Baker: So that gets to the side and I like to juxtapose that with a commercial, is because that is our audience and our ambassadors and the people we're also trying to reach, giving their definition. And it's sort of a scary thing when you say, "Well, what does it mean to be Powered by Orange?" This is our marketing campaign. We're trying to get a very specific message out there and we have to know and trust our students and understand that community and they're going to say the right things. Sure, you know, "I have a cat named Frank" doesn't have a whole lot to do with what it means to be Powered by Orange but by and large, they're delivering the message that we want to get out there in the community. And it's a sort of community developed definition and that's a lot different than laser-pointed marketing and that I think comes from the social media aspects of the campaign. |
16:00 |
So after being willing to give up control in a marketing campaign like this, the second thing to do is to just start already. So we are sitting in a conference room downstairs and Melody Oldfield, our director of Marketing, was saying, "We're thinking of a campaign and goes something like Portland is Powered by Orange." And at this time, we're still thinking just of Portland. We have no idea where it would go because behind every meaningful endeavor or some marketing and stuff is OSU thinking in action. And at some point, we said, "OK, we have to start and we have to call this campaign something." And we took away everything except for the Powered by Orange. And a couple of weeks later, about three weeks later in March, we had sort of our campaign elements out there. We had the website built, we had the social networks created, we had already a live event at a baseball game in Portland where we’re capturing these testimonials and getting those sort of authentic definitions of what it means to be Powered by Orange, how you impact the community as an OSU grad. We had all the stickers and t-shirts and with the URLs put on there. So we just went ahead and launched. We didn't have a committee. We had support from our leadership in our division but not in other divisions and in some cases, folks were very skeptical or hostile about it. But we just went ahead and we just started already. So the other thing is after you start, something that we learned from this campaign—and this is something looking at it in retrospect—is we kind of started quietly. We didn't invest a lot of money again other than the blood and sweat and hard labor of our department but we all know that's cheap. So we started really quietly and this gave us a lot of room for trial and error to test out ideas, to train your staff on the concepts of the campaign and where it's going to go to get your numbers up on social networks. |
18:06 |
We created some social networks from scratch. And it would be kind of embarrassing to launch a social media campaign with five people on your LinkedIn group. The interesting thing about that is we have a very small LinkedIn group. We are late in the game in creating one for the University and there was an organically grown LinkedIn group out there that an alum. had created. So our social media specialist reached out to them and said, "Hey, can we partner in this group and can we change the name to Powered by Orange 'cause it's a new marketing campaign?" And they're like, "Sure!" So we went from having just a few people on our LinkedIn group to well over a thousand a couple of years ago just by making that partnership. So we got the numbers up before we really broadly launched the campaign. And that sort of quite phase, just by saying, "Oh, it's a quite phase. Nobody's watching." Of course, there are plenty of people of watching but by just framing it that way, it creates a low risk environment in order to experiment. It takes some of the pressure off and you can get to do some creative things. And so what we learned during this phase and again, we hadn't done any test marketing or anything like that. We learned and realized that people wanted more substance to go with just sort of a rah-rah-rah messaging. We found out that our original website that we created for Powered by Orange, it was very striking and it got a lot of notice, but it was confusing to people. It was so different from our homepage and our new brand guidelines that people are getting confused. They were saying, "Is this Oregon State, is it not?" So we realized that we had to redesign that before we went any further with the campaign. We also learned that the campaign was much bigger than Portland because we put this little map on there where folks could add themselves. And dots started showing up around the country – alums on the East Coast and in Texas. And actually, we've learned a lot from the campaign, that we have a lot of people going to Texas that we didn't really realized how strong that connection was. When dots started showing up in Texas, it really made the whole institution focus more on Texas and we had a game, a big game in Texas, and an alumni reunion where 1400 people showed up in Texas just this past year, or couple of weeks ago actually. So a lot of that was something that we learned from this campaign. And then, people really, really like free t-shirts was something else that we learned. |
20:28 |
Step 4 in the whole process is to get buy-in. And of course, in Higher Ed, that's the whole committee thing. You need to get support, you need to create some kind of alignment around the campaign. When you're trying to have an amplified voice and have somewhat people working together, it’s a really challenging thing to do. Several ways that we get buy-ins and brought the entire university community along was first we created an IMC network on Ning. IMC stands for Integrated Marketing and Communication but everybody who does web stuff, who does any type of outreach, who does brochures, in the department. Anybody who talks to the public in anyway in campus, we invited to join this network and then we bribed them to join by paying for Power by Orange-ified marketing stuff that they could use. On the Ning network, we put a bunch of really solid high quality photos that they could download to just… And that was the main reason that they joined, is to get these free photos and then they happened to get an invite to a meeting that we held on campus and they showed up. And we tried to make those meetings have some informational training type component to give them another reason to go. So the bribery is very important. We gave a lot of presentations all over campus and to our alumni association and our foundation. |
21:55 |
One thing that was really important in getting buy-in is the whole map concept there. And again, it was something that we added and we thought it would kind of nice and we didn't invest a whole time in it but it was really symbolic for people to show the scope of the campaign. We just wanted to show that there was a cluster of dots in Portland and everybody who saw it internally was like, "Wow, this is really interesting. That's compelling. Look at this amazing map that you created." And literally, it takes a few minutes on Google to do that. And then, gathering sort of the video evidence. People started approaching us to say, "Can we do a Powered by Orange video?" And this is one of them, real short. [Start of video] Jimmy Sullivan: Hi. I'm Captain Jimmy Sullivan, commanding officer Naval ROTC Unit, Oregon State University, and I'm Powered by Orange. OSU Naval ROTC: We're Powered by Orange! [End of video] David Baker: Did you hear the echo at the end? It's like you just get the chills. Of course, they had to do this. They're military folks so they have to do it like 6:30 in the morning. [Laughter] David Baker: But you have dead silence in the quad. You have the old buildings forming this canyon and then you have the power of their voices. We showed that video to folks on campus and they said, “Yeah, everybody’s embracing this campaign.” Nobody… That was people that had come to us and said “Hey, we want to be a part of this. We want to tap into this.” That was part of the organic nature of the campaign and by showing that buy-in across campus from different units really helped us moved this campaign forward and advocate for more funding. And so then, Step 5 is to… Once you have all this going, you have your site and you’re ready to move forward, it’s time to make a big splash. I’m learning so much from the Marketing Office in our university that it’s really made me re-think social media and made me re-think Web communications because we can do great stuff on the Web. And we can think that that’s where all the action is all the time, sort of on the back channel or it’s in the commentary or in the blog post and that’s where everything is and the site hits and all of that .But really, live events are so critical to anything that we do and we have to connect what we do on the Web with physical engagement activities. |
24:28 |
You can probably see on there when we made the splash which was, we had an event in Portland simultaneous with an event in Corvallis, which was about 70 miles away, and we gave away cupcakes. Our president was speaking in another event and the media office rallied around and sent out press releases. TV news crews ended up picking up on it and we gave away a whole lot of t-shirts. That’s when the big spike happened and that was the first bump we had in our Website traffic, was after those physical live engagement activities. And then the thing to do after you make another big splash is you have to keep doing it and incorporates everybody from the university. We see, let’s see, that’s a marketing person, but this is a news writer, programmer right here. Web geek, he’s handing out t-shirts. And that’s something that our entire department got involved with, on the Web Communications side, is we were really physically engaged with this campaign. We learned about it and we learned some marketing techniques and tactics. Some other things that happened, this is just a great aside, we had a speaker come to campus who had actually heard about Powered by Orange, visited the website, gave a presentation in front of 300 of our faculty and he said, “This is a great statement,” and we didn’t even know about it. Some of us were sitting in the audience. We had no idea that he was going to do a bunch of our work for us and selling this to our faculty and getting them to embrace it. And I think, seven or eight faculty members did actually end up embracing it. |
26:06 |
And then we have Powered by Orange trains that were going… This was a big investment but we couldn’t have made it without the proof of concept on the social media side. Then, another big splash, this was when we gathered those roughly, approximately 100 student videos. We have the Web guy here, another Web person here. There’s a writer. There’s a marketing writer. There's a video guy over there. There is a programmer, social media specialist. So everybody is involved with the campaign and they’re sort of understanding what that relationship is, and also understanding that site traffic and outreach kind of go hand in hand. And then the next thing we learned, little things mean a lot. We have a… Let’s see, anybody, we have one t-shirt left. When you start a social media campaign at your institution, what are the three letters that you most hate to hear from leadership? Audience 3: [27:13 Unintelligible] David Baker: Who is that? Audience 3: [27:15 Unintelligible] David Baker: Are you sure? You count. Audience 3: [27:19 Unintelligible] David Baker: Anybody? Free t-shirt? OK. You can hand it out to somebody. Audience 3: I think so. Moderator: Great. David Baker: So, ROI is… Yeah. What’s the ROI of this? We’re trying to build the community. We’re trying to foster that community and give something back from that community, not really take away from that and a lot of what happened in social media is different from ROI. Sure, we want them to be our ambassadors but they’re real people and we need to kind of foster them and it’s just a dissonance. ROI is important. So our approach has been not to look at the numbers so much—although we do share those—but to look at the little things and those are the anecdotes in the stories. This a campaign about personal stories and we all have these all over our social networks and we keep a folder of the best ones. |
28:12 |
These are comments from our blog and from the YouTube channel, some of the Powered by Orange videos and we keep those. This one is in Spanish. I don’t know Spanish but Google translate, says that it’s something pretty good. And I think the important one here, this is from a video that had a hundred and something views. We took an afternoon, went interview this guy, put this video on the YouTube channel and we got three or four comments on it. Only a hundred and something views but this comment happens to come from a Silicon Valley executive and the guy we interviewed was another Silicon Valley executive. And the comment says, “If Paul is representative of the high quality and competent alums OSU turns out, I’m sorry I didn’t go there. Keep up the academic work and give us more Pauls." If you can go to an administrator and say, “Here’s when an executive thinks based on what we’re doing. This executive has an elevated opinion of our grads in one of the top employing areas in the country, in the Silicon Valley.” So that’s a very strong argument and these are the things that you need to be collecting all throughout your campaign to show that return on investment. Here’s another story. This is an anecdote. This is alum. that we profiled, put together a YouTube video. Third generation Beaver owns a premium winery in Napa Valley in California and our marketing director shot a real quick video of him while he was on vacation in Napa and we put the profile up and posted it. And a couple weeks later, he’s on the cover of winebusiness.com which is huge for him. We’re reaching out to this community, our alums, and elevating their position, helping them out with their business and not asking anything in return. Although I’m sure at some point, our development folks will get in touch with them. But in a short term, we’ve helped him out and we have this anecdote to share with folks and alumni association and around the university to show what the return on investment is for our campaign. And in this case, it’s helping out alumni businesses. |
30:34 |
So another lesson: if you build it they might not come. I think the Holy Grail for a lot of folks, in terms of a social campaign, is you want user-generated content. UGC is something we’ve been struggling in trying to get those videos that come rolling in. And when we had originally envision this campaign, we thought everybody’s going to rally around us and we’re going to have this page that has a whole wall of videos, of people saying why they’re Powered by Orange. And we’re not going to have to do anything, we can take a vacation and they’re just going to send in our marketing materials for us. We have not been able to figure out that magic button to push to get people to send things in. So we built the infrastructure. We had a number of efforts to ask people to send in their videos and none of them really have worked. But there is sort of a bright side. We put probably well over 500 people in front of different cameras, from foot cameras to DSLRs to more sophisticated video cameras, and we’ve asked them what it means to be Powered by Orange. And even if you’re the one holding the camera, you’re still creating ambassadors… David Baker: What's that? I'll get through this. You’re still creating ambassadors out of these folks. So if you get them to say and think about, "What does Oregon State mean to you? What did you pick up at Oregon State? Does it make a difference in who you are? What does it mean to be Powered by Orange? If you get those folks to think about that, then they’re going to internalized that. |
32:14 |
And we hear echoes coming back from some of these people. We’re developing that community and everybody we pointed the camera at, even though they’re not pointing cameras at themselves, we’re still turning them into ambassadors and we’ve seen evidence of that. That is working well. [Start of video clip] Student: Hello. My name is Tao. I'm from Vietnam, Hanoi and I’m doing my MBA here. Actually, I will have my degree next week. I’m excited about it and I am Powered by Orange. In Vietnamese it would be [32:43 Vietnamese] Good bye. See you here. [End of video clip] David Baker: So that was…That wasn't it. That really felt like UGC. That was what we wanted and that didn’t happen. That wasn’t actually user-generated content but it was another form of sort of pseudo—ten minutes—pseudo user-generated content that happens. People around campus, other communicators; in this case, somebody from International Programs had been seeing what we’ve been modeling and came in to our office one day and said, “Do you have any EC video cameras?” And we gave her a flip camera. She came back an hour later with 15 little vignettes just like that and all from international students saying Powered by Orange in their own languages. And that's sort of a treasure throve of content that we didn’t produce or we didn’t create in our centralized office, but that was one of the benefits and it sort of falls into that pseudo user-generated content area. The great thing about that is we are doing a lot of international recruiting. International recruiters are taking these videos that are in Mandarin or Cantonese and taking them back to their areas to recruit. |
34:06 |
Social media doesn’t really permeate China because YouTube is banned. So we can’t put this up and say, “Hey, here come. Check this out.” So our recruiters that have gone over the China had burned DVDs of these things and taken them with them and said they were powerful at exposing new, potential students. So that was a benefit of that user-generated content. So another lesson that we learned is, how many marketing offices would you be in or PR shops where they started taking your brand and doing this and you cracked down like a cops. Say, "Furloughed – take that down.” This started showing up when we had some budget reductions and people took furloughs in order to try and save jobs on campus. So the faculty voted to take six months of furloughs, and some people didn’t appreciate that. So they came up with this mini-campaign Furloughed by Orange. And because we had been looking at this from a different perspective from the social media side, we’ve been thinking… Sorry about that. I'm going to put this phone somewhere else. We looked at that as a positive aspect. So we embraced it. There was another one. Actually people who had a larger grievance were our grad students and they did Squeezed by Orange on campus. Because you know that your campaign is really picking up steam when people start to mock it. In other cases, for every time that somebody mocks it, this is from the Gazette Times "OSU Zombies Powered by Brains". That is some alignment of the media around a marketing concept and we see it all the time, Powered by Orange referenced in newscasts and in newspaper headlines. We know that it’s really resonating with some folks in the media. |
36:00 |
So, the Number 10: Think in Phases. That’s something else we’ve learned. You always hear that for a social media campaign, you need to have a plan or strategy before you started. Honestly, we really didn’t. We had sort of a notion and my advice based on this experience is you don’t need to have that plan and you can’t wait for a plan because a really good plan could take awhile to develop. Our phases included with a Quiet Phase, our Experimental Phase. We had a Spirit Phase, sort of rah-rah-rah and we learned from that Spirit Phase that people wanted more so we did our public launch in Fall of ’09. And we did a Substance Phase, and that was a very specific message, OSU makes a difference in food energy and water and people wanted to know why. So we did five or six-minute interviews with researchers to kind of back that up. And then our current phase is Beaver’s to Business where we really want to help our businesses grow. We want to drive traffic to businesses, elevate the businesses that our alums run and own and also highlight the good work that they do in their communities. And finally, I think why Powered by Orange works is primarily because of the social media side of things and, I think, Clay Shirky said, "Social media is proof that people are more creative and generous than we had ever imagined." |
38:11 |
So here we are brainstorming, thinking about, wouldn’t it be great if we had people saying, standing up and saying “I coach Little League and I make a difference in my community and my experiences at Oregon State really helped shape that part of myself." And we had all these wonderful things that we thought of, that we wanted people to say. Actually, in real life, the people were more generous and creative than we have imagined even in our wildest sort of marketing fantasy. And I think that’s why this particular campaign has resonated because of that aspect of it. That we’re not driving the message that is getting out there, it’s the individuals who are the subject and the target of our campaign that are driving the message. So that’s Powered by Orange, let’s see. Here we go. How's that? Moderator: Hands go up and I’m going to make them to earn the football. They go to talk on a microphone. David Baker: Okay. Let’s see. Moderator: Going to make it real hard. David Baker: There we go. How's that? Moderator: All right. I guess we’re starting over here. Audience 4: Hi. David Baker: Hello. Audience 4: Just curious if you saw any increase in d donations or if you don't have any data with that. David Baker: ROI. I'll still give you a football. We did not, but through the course of the campaign, we delivered to our foundation the names of the number of successful alumni-run businesses that we have found out. We shared information and, of course, when they signed up for this Orange spotlight program that we had as part of the campaign. So we did deliver a lot of data to our foundation but I don’t know if any of that has turned into dollars but we’re kind of letting them take care of that. |
40:10 |
Another? Audience 5: I know that the intent was not to reach legislature or stakeholders in the government, but as a land grant institution, that’s always the concern of ours, do you know if this made its way to that group of stakeholders? David Baker: That’s a good question. Audience 5: Or that's influenced them in any way just getting… I mean, it’s always hard to get your research noticed by... David Baker: Yeah. Audience 5: ... in our case, Albany, but… David Baker: Well, we do know that a lot of influential community leaders have seen it—people, board members and things like that. So, we get some anecdotal feedback from that. Specifically with legislators, I don’t know that. And our Government Relations Office, they don’t like us to talk to legislators. So we have a sort a partnering relationship but they're really trying to almost… They don’t even think in marketing terms. I’d like to think that it has but I have no evidence at all. I’ll throw this to her. You need to catch. Audience 6: With the social media aspect of it and people in the community interacting on Twitter and Facebook and stuff, what kind of… Or did you run into people like, I guess, slamming the university? Did you filter any of that out for any of the stuff you pulled on to your website? David Baker: We didn’t have to do any filtering and the interesting thing, we actually have done filtering in other context. We actually had a diversity video that’s been gaining a lot of momentum the past couple of days and we ended up stopping comments on it which is really pertinent to a discussion Mark had earlier. But we have to stop comments because we’re at the conference and nobody’s there to monitor. And that was sort of impersonal attacks on individuals in the video and that was some ugly stuff that we had to shut down. |
42:01 |
But from this campaign we didn’t have anything that we had to filter. We had some back and forth and some people saying this is stupid and that sort of thing but we left that out there. And I think by and large… And we also have a map. We’re a little worried about the map about graffiti. It’s wide open. Anybody can edit it and add these dots and a lot of times people accidentally add directions to places where they’re going on the map. But there's nothing negative and nobody’s like erased all the dots but we back it up once a month in case we need to restore it. But yeah, we’re all worried about what having this Wikimap out there for part of a visible campaign and nothing bad has ever happened. Audience 7: How did you put the call-out for your spotlight sign-up? David Baker: Through the Spotlight, we did our foundation put together a list of businesses that they’re aware of. We went to our extension offices and asked them to submit businesses. A lot of it are on our social networks. Our Powered by Orange Facebook group was one what we really cultivated business connections and alumni connections, our LinkedIn group. So all of our social networks we put to call-out. We even linked to it from our homepage—university homepage. And we had about 300 nominations and we gathered data both on the nominees and the people nominating. In some cases they’re one and the same because we encourage people to nominate themselves. So we had data on the number people in the business community connected Oregon State as a result. So, I need to get a football. So. I’ll throw it. It’s Nerf, so if it hit somebody unaware, it's not going to hurt. Moderator: So you were saying that you didn’t really have a plan going in, you kind of phased things out? How did you define, when you had reached success, when you had reach, really achieve the momentum that you wanted? And were there parts of the campaign that you found weren't really working and you were trimming those and how did you decide that you needed the trim those? |
44:09 |
David Baker: Yeah, that’s a really good question. We tried to advance the campaign around sort of strategic efforts that were happening with the university. So when our Marketing office was partnering with Alumni to do business outreach, as prompted by our president's strategic plan, then we switch into that gear. We kind of said, “Oh yeah, that’s what our campaign is all about.” So, and then as far as measuring the impact again along the way, it’s really the anecdotal things. For each phase, we’ve had an event associated with it and we were able to show that on the social media space using Facebook, invites and events. We were able to show that we had an impact on attendance at that event. So that’s one way that we documented success. So, we’ll try and... Okay, so far everybody’s caught it. That’s great. I don’t have anymore football, I don’t think. But I have… Audience 8: That’s all right. David Baker: But I have time for response. Audience 8: One more question. I’m just wondering if there was any reaction by Portland State during this campaign? David Baker: Yeah, actually we heard from our Portland State and actually we get along great with their Marketing Office. Former intern is Marketing Director over there and they were very angry with us because the Powered by Orange train went right through Portland State campus. [Laughter] David Baker: And they had even a less of marketing budget than us, so they are just envious and jealous. |