by Pete Wright
Axia College of University of Phoenix MySpace PageI haven’t posted much about my experience at University of Phoenix. It’s a big place with many challenges and, even with nearly a decade under my belt there, I’m ill equipped to comment on most of them. But I find this one downright funny.About six months ago the director of marketing called me in to a meeting with the MySpace folks. They were evaluating alternative media for marketing purposes and had been approached by MySpace with an advertising package. For over $100,000 they’d set up Axia College of UOP on MySpace and give them ad space on the MySpace internal site network, driving clicks back to the Axia MySpace page. This, for something like three months. (note: I could have that backwards — it’s been a while — but it could be $300,000 for a month. Either way, it’s ridiculous).They’d brought me in to help decide if it would be worth it, if we could be cool enough on the site to not look silly. I couldn’t come up with anything that wouldn’t make the brand demons cringe. All the good ideas were about user generated content, connecting students and alum with the university … all the great tools that MySpace was designed to enable.But this was an *advertising* tool, I was told, not an operations tool. So I walked out of the meeting knowing that something would happen, probably too late to be of interest, and likely a lame attempt to shoehorn the brand someplace it has no right being.Just got the email last week. They launched the page and visitors are greeted with this massive flash video tour of the online learning environment. There are screensavers, desktop wallpapers, MySpace badges, and of course links to and RFI to become a student. The profile has 2720 friends as of today and 103 of the most glowing, pro Axia comments I’ve ever heard. Now, I know that it might be cynical of me to say so, but these comments just have to be plants. First, I know the marketing team, and while they’re good people on the whole, they’re just not above seeding copy. There’s precedent for the discussion anyway, going back as far as 2005, in which they were considering hiring bloggers to pose as students and blog pro-UOP for six weeks at a time. That plan was cancelled, but there were a lot of disappointed lead generators in that meeting.You simply cannot get that many happy people in a room to have an honest discussion about the organization and have not one single negative comment.The saddest part, knowing that this is a marketing initiative, it will be unsupported in 90 days, and dissolved within the year in disrepair. Say there are some legitimate users on the site, they’ll lose what could be such a valuable network because the organization as a whole has forgotten that it is actually a school.