Social Marketing Conversations

An online presence needs to be tailored to your audience and, if your audience rapidly migrates from one demographic characteristic to another, you may need to create a presence that has many faces to it.  Scott Chappell at Sessions College of Design has mastered the tactic.

Sessions has a year-round (3 semesters) enrollment model, graduation certificates that are presented monthly and classes that can be enrolled in anytime for enrolled students.  So his use is everyday for the various tools Session employs (blog, micro-blog and social networks) to connection to the audience.

What’s the biggest obstacles for the growth of social media presence for Sessions?  Scott says ‘patience’, he sees the the education product characteristics is not the commodity of a fast moving consumer good with a low price point.  His effort is to get subscribers to engage in all areas in a way that they appreciate and have a value associated with the Sessions brand.

Scott has determined that for Sessions, there is a way to use social media to establish a lifetime value with the audience – education is pretty much a one-shot sale in most cases.  The maturation of the relationship allows a prospect for Session.edu to become a student, attend classes and graduate into the business community.  At some point he can trust alumni to evangelize the Sessions.edu product and he does not find that they need to scrub or moderate content.

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In this episode we talk with Scott Chappell, who is the Chief Marketing Officer for Sessions College of Design (Sessions.edu), and a presenter at the MeasureUp conference in Chicago on March 10, 11, & 12th, 2010.   Sessions.edu offers online classes for the design community from real experts (author, educators and others) in an asynchronous format, pairing student with instructors in a meaningful dialog about how to develop your design sense and knowledge of the industry.  His presentation at MeasureUp is titled ‘Blog, Tweet, Repeat: How Social Media improved lead acquisition, sales and the lifetime value of your customers’ and in this episode, we get to meet Scott an find out about the Sessions.edu social media efforts.

Scott talks about how social media is used by Sessions.edu and how it has supported an almost 10 fold expansion of the number of monthly ‘touches’ with the Sessions Design College audience of prospective student, current students and graduated alumni.  Scott explains how he has embraced the premise of Marshall McLuhan in that “the medium is the message”, but he cautions that too many contacts to an audience can cause them to disengage.  In Sessions case, while social media has allowed them to dramatically increase the number of messages, the reality is that there needs to be quality and sincerity otherwise you run the risk of turning off the audience.

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