Cheryl Broom (00:00.078)
Hi, I'm Cheryl Broom, CEO of Graduate Communications. And if you aren't doing digital marketing, then I guess you're pretty much in the stone ages, because almost every college that I know of is doing something online to recruit students. And that's why I am so excited to have such a wonderful guest.

With me today to talk about trends in digital marketing, to explain how things like Google rankings work, and to cue us up on what's next in the horizon. Chris Barton is the chief product officer at GNET USA, and he has run countless digital marketing campaigns and has more than 20 years of experience in the industry. Our conversation was exciting.

and educational and is a must listen to to any college who is currently or looking to get their feet wet with digital marketing. Enjoy. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm really happy to have you here. Great to be here. So you have a fascinating title of Chief Product Officer. what does that mean? What do you do?

Often ask myself the same question, Gerald. no, I what is a chief product officer? at a company like Gannette, which is the company I'm I'm at and work for, what that basically means is we have products and services that we sell to customers, to businesses. And so my team is responsible for building those. And so there's a few key disciplines of that. One is something called a product manager, which is basically a a kind of a

Business minded person who's thinking of what's the problem and and what are we trying to solve for. And then the other disciplines are design and what that's going to look like from a product experience. And then the third one is the engineers. These are people who actually write the code and make the product that you're going to use every day. So those teams are building the things that we sell ultimately. Great. And what you're here to talk to me about is one of your products or many of your products, the the digital side of the house. Yeah, absolutely. So

Cheryl Broom (02:19.488)
One of the sets of products and things that we build are digital marketing solutions. And those are services that help local businesses, education, entities, whatever it may be, who want to ultimately market themselves online. And so we sell products, help them do that. And those span typically across three main areas. One is helping you establish your digital presence online.

So that's everything from your website to social profiles and SEO, stuff like that. The second big category is helping people discover you through advertising. So we have a set of products around helping you advertise and do that well. And then the third area is is around kind of putting it all together and it's measuring what works and converting all the leads and everything that are coming in. So that's kind of the third bucket. So we try and think of it in those three areas and are constantly learning and evolving.

We work closely with Google, with Facebook, with Microsoft, with Snap, and pretty much any other partner you can think of. And then have our own properties as well that we sell advertising and content into. We have USA Today, about 400 local news entities as well that we sell into. And so bringing all that together. I love this three-pronged approach you just laid out because

The second thing that developing the strategies is what so many people jump to without first establishing their online presence. And before the podcast, we were just talking about a marketing retreat I just had. And I was sharing that at the end of the retreat of all of the things that we talked about, they all came back to the fact that their website needs a lot of work and that they just don't have a strong digital presence yet to go out and spend a lot of money in marketing.

As you work in these kind of three areas, how do you see clients and and what products are out there to help people establish a better online presence? Like where should you even start? Yeah. So I I think it it does ultimately start with your website. I think that is a great place to foundationally look of when someone comes to your website, first of all, just basic things of.

Cheryl Broom (04:30.572)
Does it look good on a desktop, on a mobile experience? And really, really thinking about those. That's old news a little bit, but it's still some basics that a lot of people just miss. And I think another thing to really focus on is how fast does it load? The number one cause of abandonment on a website is speed. It's just slow loads too slowly. And so really looking at that, and that's not only going to affect customer interaction with your website, but also affects your SEO.

score as well if you if you don't load quickly. So that's some real basics just to make sure. Does it look good? And do it yourself. Load it, make sure you're looking on both and do it regularly. Load it on your your phone. Whether you build it yourself or have someone else do it for you, you should always be looking and using your own site so you can see for yourself, does it look the way you want it to? Yeah. Speaking of SEO, that's something that's changed a lot. I feel like SEO has changed a lot in the last 10 years. For people who don't

really know what that even means. Could you explain it and then maybe talk to us about like how it's metamorphosized and what what's going on with it? I think the simplest way to think about SEO is when you go to a search engine and you do a search, if you look for a local community college and do that Google search or whatever it may be, you're gonna see two sets of results primarily. One set is paid advertising and that's typically referred to as PPC or SEM.

PPC is pay-per-click SEM is search engine marketing. That's typically the paid portion where someone is bidding on an auction and paying to get in that position. The rest of the results that you see are driven by this thing called SEO, which is search engine optimization. And often that's also called organic results. And basically what that is is how well do you follow the rules that Google or Bing or whatever search engine you're using has set forth in order to establish authority.

And there are a set of rules and Google publishes them. Some of them are very transparent, other ones are a little gray as to what they mean exactly, but how well are you doing it following those rules and those guidelines that they lay out? And if you follow them the best and you have the most authority, meaning you're seen as a source of information that is accurate and represents the content and the answer the best, you will show up higher in the rankings. And at the end of the day, if you're not on that first page, you're pretty irrelevant.

Cheryl Broom (06:58.892)
That's the bottom line. so someone's talking about getting on page 10 or 11, kind of doesn't matter. You really want to be on page one. That's the main, the main point. Yeah. And I think most of the colleges I work with, I mean, you search a college name, you're gonna get them number one. But then you start searching for certain certain things. Like for example, I have a client where we're working.

To market their paralegal studies program. And they're in Los Angeles. They're actually by you. You're in Los Angeles and they're they're a college close to you. And they've had a lot of enrollment declines, particularly in this one program. And so I went on Google and searched for paralegal studies program and then the name of the college. And they weren't even on the first page. I got lots of ads for paralegal programs here in San Diego. And then all this other stuff that wasn't even relevant.

So that was obviously one of the first recommendations is we've got to get your site found. Like we have to get it on that first page. Absolutely. And and part of that comes down to a keyword strategy. Your business, your college, your school is not going to be number one in every word that people search for. And so you've got to do some research around where there is an opportunity for you, what your specialties are. Maybe there's a specific program or set of courses.

Or geography that is really you cater to well, and that's where you win is really focusing in on that. So I may not win on nursing programs because that's a lot of competition, but I may be able to win on MiraCosta nursing programs that get more specific with keywords, location, those types of pieces. So so what advice do you have to to colleges who are looking at certain pages? They want to improve the way they show up and search? Like what should they be doing? Yeah. So

Two or three really basic things that you should do. one is first of all, part of the way search engines and all that work is through making sure that your content is readable and consistent by search engines. And so there's some very basic rules around how your site is set up. And Google publishes these. You can search for these and and they'll they'll actually lay them out, but in terms of just

Cheryl Broom (09:07.038)
how your headings are set up and just basic stuff so that a a search engine can actually read what information is there. So that's one part of cloud one A. One B is making sure that your name, address, and phone number, it's often called NAP, is consistent everywhere. And what I mean by that is in Google Maps and then maybe on Facebook, and maybe there you have a like a listing and a directory or somewhere else, if you're using different phone numbers, your address is different.

Google looks at that and says something fishy's going on and it will rank you lower. So make sure all that stuff is consistent and it's correct. so that would be kind of one is is kind of getting your making sure the search engines can see you with some of that basic piece. The second of three things I would say is there's this acronym EAT. Okay. And it stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. And so make sure that the content that you're creating.

follows those elements that it is indeed has some sort of expert unique angle it's authoritative and it's trustworthy and you can do that in a few different ways one is the the quality of the content of course and also the way you're linking to or get linked to by other websites that might be talking about these topics. And then the third element I would say is the freshness side of things. Google is always what have you done for me lately?

you might have been great three years ago, but if you're not keeping up with that, you're gonna fall in the rankings. So you got to constantly be thinking of what's the next bit of content that you're gonna put on your site to become relevant and make sure. and so with all those themes, there's sort of this, you know, one making sure you can be found, but having good content on your site, something that's interesting and that the search engines will find and rank you for. that's such great advice. And I love the acronym EAT, which I have not eaten lunch.

I've been in meetings all day. It's like, he's telling me to eat. but freshness, wow, that I didn't know that. And that's so important, particularly when you have a college site with like 5,000 pages. Yeah. It's really hard to keep things up to date. And a lot of colleges decentralize control of their sites. So this is a great like nugget. I think people can go back and tell their

Cheryl Broom (11:27.798)
Departments, hey, you want to be found by Google, you need to keep your site fresh. You need to get on there and do the work. Like Google's not just going to put you up there because you want to be there. And one thing I didn't mention, and that that's a really key element of that freshness and the EAT acronym there is not having duplicate content. and so if you are part of a larger network, for example, and maybe your one of the other schools wrote an article and you're just copying it and reposting on your site, you'll actually get penalized for that.

So you want to make sure that whatever you're doing is unique. And if it's not unique, you can link into an overarching sort of governing body or something that you've got that you're all kind of feeding into. That's fine. But don't just re-copy paste content on multiple sites. It'll hurt you if you do that. Don't plagiarize. Yeah. You fail classes for that. You'll fail the internet for it too. Right. That's right.

So great. So so SCN is something that people can do on their own by following those three guidelines. But then one of the products that that you sell that Gannette sells is Pay-Perclick. And we always tell our clients, like this is your foundational, you know, your website's good. Now you should spend money on getting found in Google. So we always recommend that as a as a first option. So explain how it works and why it's so important.

First of all, there are many different types of advertising online. And exactly as you just said, one of the most effective forms of advertising specifically for the goal of generating a lead or a someone who might want to sign up for a course or education is paid search advertising, PPC, pay-per-click advertising or SEM search engine marketing. These are all terms that are sort of intermingled and used. And depending on how snobby different people are, they might, you know, kind of pick apart those. But

They're they're kind of speaking to the same thing. There's a few things to note. One is Google is not the only place people search. and so that would be sort of mistake number one is don't do just Google, do more than that. Think of it as a holistic approach of where are people searching? And that's important because for your particular market, geography, product specialty, whatever, there might be niche audiences that are in other places. And so you want to be be mindful of them.

Cheryl Broom (13:42.914)
But also sometimes where everybody is can also be where it's the most expensive. So there might be cheaper, at least limited, cheaper inventory you can buy in other places. So you want to have this holistic approach. That'd be number one is think holistically. The second one is you got to set this thing up to work correctly. And so there's a few key elements that are really just core and basic to understand. And I'll mention a couple of them. So one is there's this idea of a campaign. And a campaign is basically

It's a set of activity you're going to run that is going to help you achieve something. So you should start off saying, I have a goal. And that goal might be I want to get fall registration signups. Great. That's awesome. That could be your campaign that you're going to set up and run. and then there's there's some other elements in it, and we'll go too deep into these, but but just to kind of give you a little flavor. So something called ad groups. And so this is really around how do you set up the different

literal ads that are going to run in your campaign and how do you verify which ones are going to work better than others because you want to be trying and testing different things. You have keyword selection and this is really important. I was talking about this before of you're not going to win at every single word and it might be really expensive, but you might find niche words which are actually very targeted to a customer who has very high intent of converting. And those are the nuggets of gold you want to go after because they're going to be cheaper and they're going to convert better because they're very specific to someone looking

In your area for what you offer. So that keyword selection is important. And there's tools that we have and services we provide to help you in selecting those keywords. Then you get into ad copy, writing the actual text of the ad, and you want to iterate and try different things out. Certain words might resonate better with different people, and it changes all the time. So you just got to try it and see, see what works. There's best practices, but you you still got to try and test and iterate.

And then the last thing is there's these things called ad extensions. They might be things like being able to show an address in the ad or being able to click directly into a link and land you exactly in that space. They're basically incremental bits of functionality that help with conversion. And so thinking holistically across those different areas is what if you choose a partner or vendor or somebody you're going to work with, that's what they're going to help you with, is trying to figure those things out and get a strategy that aligns to your specialties and your budget as well.

Cheryl Broom (16:04.898)
I've seen when making purchases for clients, we often do like lists of negative keywords too. What what are those? Explain those to Yeah. So a negative keyword is basically things that you you don't want to be bidding on. A lot of what people don't understand on Google, some people do, some people don't, is you can actually type a lot of things into Google and it will really narrow or broaden your search.

And Google has extended that into the tool set that they let you use when people are are searching. So a negative keyword is basically just saying, I don't want to include this. I'm intentionally gonna not have that. And and that might be useful in a few different scenarios. One, there might be competitive sets, or you've got programs that you're you're trying to recruit for, and one of them's full. And so you want to exclude people who are searching for a specific one that you've already filled in. But it could also be to avoid things that are.

Are ambiguous. I remember one example, this was years ago, but living in kind of the LA Metroplex, you know, there's always celebrities and won't say who, but there was a celebrity who got we had we had a dealer which was a Ferrari dealer, okay, who was a customer. And at the same time, there was a celebrity, very well-known celebrity, who crashed his Ferrari. And so without having things like negatives, you could start including people who were actually searching for something that was very unrelated to.

Buying a Ferrari, they were actually searching for a celebrity who crashed a Ferrari. And so by using negatives, we were able to sort of separate some of that traffic out and make sure that wasn't included. Yeah, that's really interesting. I think I think that's everybody's got a Ferrari problem, right? Yeah, I know. I was like, maybe they want to be found, but I don't know. I've there's probably a very small percentage of the audience searching that could afford a Ferrari, right? So, like you don't want to waste money on them. Right. Right. Now I'm gonna Google.

Celebrity who crashed Ferrari. This was a a couple years ago, but it was Yeah. Well, you know, you brought up a lot of really interesting points around pay-per-click. And something that resonated with me. And and I this came up with a client just a couple of weeks ago was we think of Google, Google, Google, and their ads really performed well on Bing and Yahoo. I have no idea why, but that's where most of their spend ended up going. And it

Cheryl Broom (18:21.464)
Performed well. So it was a good reminder that it's Google's not the only player out there that you should be present in, you know, all the different platforms. Absolutely. And at the end of the day, there's best practices always that you can follow, but you always need to be open to trying things and seeing what works and what doesn't, and adjusting based off of that because things change. It's at the end of the day, these this buying ecosystem that we're talking about, it is what's called an auction, meaning you've got other people who are bidding on trying to get that.

spot. That's how that works. The advertising works. And so because it's an auction, it means no two are the same. Every single one, it's a little different. And so you got to be trying and constantly learning. Fascinating. So you sell so many different things. What is your favorite product? Like what do you really get passionate about? So I like some of the the pieces that that help see the value in all this stuff coming together. And so one of the things that's you know we talk about search and all that.

It's great to get a bunch of people contacting you. You know, they they see your ad, they contact you. Great. That means the first part worked. And then they're gonna go to your website. And hopefully your website's designed well, looks good on mobile, and loads fast and all that good stuff. So that works, hopefully. But it still doesn't mean they're your customer, right? And at the end of the day, you want them to sign up for that class to register, to to get in, you know, want to drive enrollment. You're not just there to get a bunch of people to visit your website. And so that last gap, that last, you know.

few miles of of what do you do to close that that loop. I I like that part of it a lot. And that is getting into this idea of how do you collect your leads that have come in and start to nurture them with things like drip email marketing communications and others, which are really just all about how do you how do you get them from expressing intent and interest to closed being a customer? How do you close that last bit of loop?

And so we have some services and and products that we built around that too, where you can design something called a drip marketing campaign. And what that is, is basically it's a set of rules that allow you to have sort of a templated approach to converting customers. Let me give you example. So you might say, if someone contacts me and signs up for interest on an enrollment in the fall, I'm gonna have a few rules. The first rule might be say,

Cheryl Broom (20:42.038)
As soon as they contact me, send an auto response and say, thank you for contacting me. That would be step one, grip one. The second would be three days later, I want to send a follow-up message and say, Hey, we noticed you haven't actually converted yet. here's some additional information about our school, our location, whatever that you might find useful. That could be a a second. A third would be maybe five days later, you want to send a promotion, 10% off or an extra class or extra set of credits or something.

but you can kind of offer that and so on and so on. And the idea is you can configure that how you want on the timing you want, but it allows you to automate that process. So it's not someone's job to be going, shoot, it's been three days since Sally contacted us. Should I do something? It just becomes an automated system that that can can constantly work. So I'm really interested in the product that you have because it sounds pretty simple. And I know colleges want the lot of colleges will come to me and say, we're looking at a CRM.

And that's, I mean, you're basically describing what a CRM can do. And then they go out and they spend a half a million dollars on something that has so much that they can't use and it's overwhelming and no one can run it and then nobody uses it. So I was is yours, it was what you do different? Is it simpler? What how does it work? It's intended to be much simpler, exactly. And at a price point that is very affordable. We're talking

hundred dollars, not thousands of dollars. I'm gonna we're gonna have to talk offline about this. this people this is what colleges need. They they need this. Absolutely. And so so that that's exactly the intent is you know you got sort of this Pareto principle you hear the whole time of 80% of the value, you know, for 20% of the the cost type thing. And so that's that's kind of where we try and play with a lot of these pieces is not necessarily having every feature that ever has happened.

Because most customers don't need it and they won't ever use it and they're just throwing money away to actually spend it on it. So that's exactly where we try and play. And exactly with these types of solutions, you can get most of what you need for a lot less than you probably pay. Yeah. Well, there's some really great salespeople out there too, right? Like you and me are a good salespeople, but there's some really good ones. And I've had clients that are like, gosh, we we invested in the CRM and

Cheryl Broom (23:04.054)
Now we don't have anyone to write the messages and nobody can figure out how to use it. And you're like, why did you do that? good intentions gone gone wrong. That's totally, you're, you're totally right. and there's this new trend going on around data privacy. And what's basically happening there is there have been two major industry shifts that are affecting everyone in some way or another. The first was Apple came out.

And said there was this thing, it was called IDFA, which stands for identity for advertisers. And it was basically a way for an advertiser to know who you are through a key that was on your phone. And Apple said, we're not gonna offer that anymore. So that suddenly created this huge blind spot of who are these mobile people visiting our sites? We don't know because Apple wiped it out. So that was one. and that actually happened a while ago, about nine months ago. They removed that.

The second big one, which is even bigger, Apple already did it, which is this concept of third-party cookies. and so the idea there is if you don't know what a cookie is, when you visit a website, what it does is it writes a little file, it's a little text file. It's called a cookie, and it basically puts some information in there about you. And what that allows it to do is when you go to different sites, it can recognize who you are from that reading that little file.

It's not putting stuff like your credit card or anything, but it might be, you know, saying, hey, you're a male, you know, in your 40s and you have looked at car websites or something like that. And so it gives some ID and some information. And then there was a lot of math behind that where you had all these companies who were looking at all this cookie data, running math on it, and getting really specific about what kind of people, who people were and how to target them. So Google has announced that in Chrome, which is the most commonly used browser, they are going to be getting rid of the third party cookie.

They originally said it was going to be in 2020, then it was 2021, now it's 2023. They keep pushing it out. But that is creating this huge gap of what's going to happen when all that happens, of being able to understand how to market to and advertise people. And this is now that was my little tangent. I'll come back to what this means for the average listener here is there is going to be, if you're not already starting on it, an increased importance in understanding who your audience is.

Cheryl Broom (25:24.162)
This taps back a little bit to the CRM piece you were just talking about, but also being able to know who that audience is for yourself so that you can use that data to target and find more users like the customers you have. And so one of the things that we've been building and that we have that that helps with that is the ability to capture this customer set and then find them in other places. An example of that is we talked about search a minute ago.

If we're getting leads in from search, we can capture that and then go find an audience like that in another place like Facebook. And so we'll take your customer list, go and find other people like that on a different platform. And this becomes really powerful because now, as the business owner, you're empowered with your data to find customers that you want. And that's a really important thing and a huge trend that I think is going to be taking more and more.

becoming more and more ubiquitous in the future. So I know that was a little techy, a little geeky maybe, but it's it's important and it's coming over the next couple of years. And so good to start thinking about okay, how am I collecting my customer list? Do I have a CRM? Do I have a database of some sort that I can use? And if you do, great. If you don't, you need to get one. Now I the I have been asked more and more about

privacy and this is on everybody's mind. Like, is it going to make a huge impact to the way people market? And it sounds like you're saying, like, yeah, it is, it is going to make an impact. And you have to be ready for it. Absolutely. Absolutely. and there's some terms that are used that are are thrown out a little bit. Third party data is sort of this idea of you're buying audiences and people from others and it's not really your your data. First party data is the data you own. And then some people are starting to use a term called zero party data, but

But really, it's the same as first party data. It's just data you own. And so it's really thinking about what data do you own? How well do you know your customer? Do you have that data and insights? And if you don't, how do you start building it out? That's how you should be thinking about it. So once this once this happens, what if somebody comes to your website? Can you still retarget them or remarket to them? Absolutely. Cause that would be first party data. If it's yours and you own it, you can do anything you want with it. and especially if you're working with the partner or a an agency that

Cheryl Broom (27:44.968)
has that capability, then it's very simple. But you just have to be collecting that data and making sure you're keeping it healthy and and clean. and so you don't get it outdated or get it in a bad state where it's not that useful for you. Yeah. We tell clients all the time and they're surprised like, hey, give us a list of all of your your students with their personal emails and we can, you know, link them up to social accounts and then do lookalike audiences. No, what we didn't know. And this is

The reason why you want to work with an agency or you know work in a platform that has expertise because so much is changing and there's so much potential. if you're a one-man show, you're gonna you can miss out on it. Absolutely. And and I think too, thinking about your business process about how are you collecting and keeping good customer records. And it may be something as simple as you want to make sure when people you see people in person that you ask them for their latest email address, things like that, to just get in the habit of doing those things to

practice good clean data hygiene. It sounds like if you're capable, this is in every organization, not just in a college, but if you're a capable person, your job kind of balloons to other things that you really never should have gotten. So

One of the things that I got to be put in charge was was the college switchboard operator. So then I had to run on the phone system and the switchboard. Wow. did you have the cool hands back? Did you put that? We did. I had to go out and give the switchboard breaks because she needed a break three times a day. So then I became the switchboard operator. It's like a marketing director and the person who answered the phones until finally I found some students that could do it. But we it actually ended up being a good fit because I I love data and so I started.

pulling the data from our phone calls and from the phone tree. And and my God, like the lady working the front wasn't just complaining about how many phone calls she was getting. She was literally getting like thousands of phone calls every week. She couldn't handle it on her own. And then it became clear that like she wasn't asking anybody's name. Like she was getting inquiries on the college, but never being like, hey, what's your name? What's your email? just transfers trying to transfer.

Cheryl Broom (29:53.974)
And I think back like how many thousands of names did we miss out on? Like all this information flowing in through people wanting to find out more. And we just couldn't take an extra five seconds to collect it. So good lesson learned. 100%. Yeah, that's yeah, absolutely. And I don't ever want to do the switchboard again. It's like now, can I? No, it's not like that. You don't get to plug things into the wall anymore. It's all

buttons, how fast that your your index finger can can point. wow. Going point and push. Well, gosh, you've had so much great information. And before we wrap up the conversation, we haven't even touched on social, but I'm going to save that. I think that's a whole nother podcast because that's a whole nother world. But in terms of you know SEM and SEO and privacy, is there anything else that you see on the horizon? Anything people should prepare for?

One thing that is really far out, so you know, I I don't think this is something the next little bit, but but I think it's gonna hit us fast when it does hit is this whole idea of the metaverse. and specifically when you think about colleges and secondary education or even primary education any any sort, I think that plays a can play a pretty interesting role in the metaverse. So what what is the metaverse? You might might have heard that term or not, but it's basically

Being able to go into a virtual world where you can interact and transact with others. And and Facebook, you know, recently rebranded its corporate name to be Meta to really go after this hard. and I can see a lot of the social and and everything is is really going in this this space. And so what does it mean for you? I think it's starting to think of how can you make what you do virtual? Are there opportunities there? And does that open up a whole new channel commerce for you?

to be able to to offer courses and education in a world where you can have virtual learning environments. People can go to a class, engage there, have identities there, come as they want to. They could come as a, you know, what whatever, avatars, whatever, and and come as in their whatever comfortable identity. But it's gonna open up a whole new world of ways to learn, audiences and hopefully revenue streams for you know, colleges, universities, secondary education that I think is not there today. So it'll be exciting. Do you think that

Cheryl Broom (32:17.706)
At some point we're all gonna be wearing headsets, no more Zoom. We just like put on our headset and we're actually in a conference room. We're in an education building. So I have been a little hesitant to that myself. I I will admit, you know, I'm I'm supposed to be a little more forward thinking with based on my job and and all that, but I I'm like, I don't know if I really want to do that, you know. But I did it recently. So I got I got and did a virtual meeting with the headset on and all that. And I gotta admit it was still a little wonky.

I'll be honest. It was still a little wonky, but I can see it. Like you you can see it that it's gonna get there and it's gonna be actually a you you think about situations where we're talking like this, it's fine, but if we want to whiteboard together or collaborate on something a little more in-depth, you can do that in that virtual world. It feels more real where you can't do it in this sort of two dimensional aspect that we're in. So it's coming. I I think it's not a matter of if it's just when.

Wow. And I think a lot of these technologies, you it's not like it's gonna happen on a certain day and you set that day. It's more like you wake up one day and you realize you're doing it. So I think that's gonna happen with this as well. It's like my grandma, she's passed away, but she was born in like nineteen fourteen and she had a a horse drawn carriage. And I was like, Grandma, wow, I can't even imagine you were on a horse and you know, our grandkids are gonna be like, I can't even imagine. How did you use Zoom? Like

you used to like you. Yes. fascinating stuff. You're right. And and education, you know, education is supposed to be innovative, but it's so bureaucratic. And so I think this is an opportunity for colleges to gosh get in the space early and play around with it. So kind of exciting stuff. It's more than just the you know, I I said too that.

The actual learning environment is one part of, but it's also the campus tours. you know, you think of all the elements of how would you want to experience where you are meeting that some of the staff, you know, going around and doing different things. Like what are some of those that you could use as a mechanism for ultimately setting yourself apart from others? Fascinating. wow. I hadn't even thought of that before. That is just amazing what you can do.

Cheryl Broom (34:42.38)
Well, Chris, it has been it has been so great to talk to you. I've I've learned a lot. It's Friday afternoon and my head is now spinning. I'm like, I'm ready. I'm ready to dive in and have it be Monday again. This is a ton of fun. And really appreciate you inviting me on to be on here today. Well, thank you. And I'm gonna for sure have you back and we'll have to dive into the world of social media. Sounds awesome. Thanks, Cheryl.

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