The educational press in Denmark is very limited. There is no equivalent of the TES in the UK and there are no newspapers with educational bents like the Guardian and to a lesser extent the Independent. So what do you do when you have a course to offer Danish teachers? The trade unions are very important in almost all aspects of Danish life and the teachers' unions publish relevant magazines so these were the first port of call when we were planning our marketing for the ICT integration and mentoring course inspired by the VITAE project. But it occurred to us that a course promoting (amongst others) the use of Web 2.0 tools should use Web 2.0 in its marketing too. And since a colleague had used Google Adwords successfully to rent out her flat in Berlin, we decided to give it a go. This is a whole new world for us, first of all in identifying the relevant key words. Should we use 'Web 2.0' for a target group wanting to learn more about it? In fact that is the key word which has given us the best results so far. Soon we will have to reduce the 34 words we initially thought of to the 20 or so as recommended by Google. But key words on Google searches are less significant than appearing on affiliated websites. These are clearly the most effective but you are not told who these affiliates are.
There is definitely a greater feeling of control using Google Adwords. I can change the ad wording and the keywords at any time whereas the printed ads, for which we paid a great deal of money, have probably already been glanced at and forgotten. I am also beginning to appreciate that those people who are sniffy about sponsored ads and adamant that they never click on them are probably doing the advertisers a great favour. People with a real grudge against the advertisers would be better advised to click as much as possible since we pay for every click regardless of the motivation behind the click.
