Connecting with the Facebook Generation

In his presentation at the 2008 AARAO Conference earlier this month, Academica Group’s Ken Steele pointed out the benefits of utilizing social media in student recruitment. Web 2.0 is not about technology, but its use to fulfill people’s desire to connect and be heard. At the bare minimum, PSE institutions should monitor what’s being said in social networks, where students, applicants and alumni are driving the conversation. Ken recommends schools consider using Facebook, blogs, YouTube, podcasts and banner ads. Download Ken’s Slides

Melissa Cheater

eStrategy Consultant, Education Marketing

Academica Group Inc.
Full Cycle Marketing for Higher Education™
131 Wharncliffe Road South, Second Floor, London, Ontario
tel 519.433.8302 ext. 226 1.866.922.8636
fax 519.433.8062 melissa@academicagroup.com

email | web | blog | facebook | twitter | del.icio.us | skype: MelissaAcademica

Check out our new application for the Facebook platform, “SkoolPool,” that helps potential students track their consideration set and share it with their friends. www.skoolpool.com

Add comment June 20th, 2008

When competitors post on your blog …

What do you do when someone else walks their dog on your yard? Twice in just the last week, I’ve been presented with situations where a competitor school is promoting themselves on another school’s web/social media. They were both very different situations, and both took a bit of sitting back to figure out - and as always there’s no “right” thing to do.

Traditionally, community colleges have a history of serving their local areas and the relationships between colleges were collegial and in many systems the territory of each school was even strictly defined. However, these boundaries are fading in today’s post-secondary sector and we are seeing more and more schools cross the lines to market aggressively in communities that had been traditionally owned by their competitors.

Even though social media is global and wonderful and laughs in the face of geography and distance, competitors are still finding ways to sneak onto your lawn. The new social Internet opens all kinds of doors for students, staff and prospects to air their opinions loudly, and publicly. This is scary enough for some traditional marketers to grasp, so add in the fact that your competitors can just as easily use all the same doors to push their own programs and it becomes terrifying.

About 2 weeks ago we had a school come to us because one of their key competitors had posted a list of their own equivalent programs on their SkoolPool profile. (School A said that School B was promoting School B’s programs on School A’s page). Maybe this is sharp thinking by School B - I mean after all, it’s free right? School B’s strategies hopefully considered how cross-posting like this would make them look, because I would be a little concerned about that…

School A has so much more to worry about, all thanks to one quick little post that took School B all of 30 seconds to submit. First, SkoolPool runs on Facebook which puts all user content live without the option for moderation before hand (although there are many new features designed for PSE marketing in the Fall 2008 SkoolPool v2, hint hint). School A has to decide if it will ever delete any of the user-submitted comments on its page - and it is best if this decision is made before a controversial post presents itself. If you are going social any time soon, make sure you pencil in time to decide your comments/moderation policies. And make sure these policies are available to users before they submit posts.

Most conversations about content control and moderation tend to focus on content submitted by the audience. Some say that both positive and negative content should be allowed to stand, as long as they are respectively said and are constructive to the ongoing dialogue. Outrageous slander, as well as socially unacceptable content such as promotion of crime, racism, etc, should be deleted without hesitation. But where does competitor content fit into this equation?

The majority of the happy, ethical blogosphere isn’t worried about competitors. They are issue blogs, knowledge blogs, life blogs, news blogs. Blogs and other social media platforms owned by schools, companies and brands cannot just as easily throw caution to the wind. We have competitors and consequently our moderation approach just got a lot more complicated.

The gut instinct is to delete competitor comments. Get them out of there. Be gone. Before you hit delete, stop and ask yourself on what grounds are you deleting this comment? Refer to your comments policy. Did it include a statement on competitors? (If it doesn’t, you’ll probably want to go add one because this trend is not going to go away anytime soon). If it includes a statement on competitors, then you’re gravy. You obviously thought about this before hand and you already have your answer. Congratulations.

For those of us who didn’t see this coming, we’ve got to figure it out and fast. Your website, blogs and social media profiles are your marketing pieces. You can’t control the message the way you can in a broadcast campaign, but it’s still marketing. It would be unacceptable for your competitors to paint over your signage with their own logos. And it is frowned on to slam a competitor’s product outright in a television ad. Taking this approach, your competitor was out of line and you are welcome to go ahead with delete. Just make sure your new decision is added to the comments policy.

Normally I recommend that you contact a user before deleting their comment. In this situation, I’ll leave it up to you whether you let them know that you nixed their post.

I’ll just throw this out there for spice - depending on what your competitor posted, you might actually be able to redirect the negative light on them for poor behavior - by leaving their little attempt at attacking you up for the world to see. Your community might also put this person in their place before you even get a chance to see the comment. This depends on how much traffic your page gets - and how active its visitors are - and whether your visitors are supporters, critics or undecided. If you’ve got fanatics, I’d say leave the comment live and let them start shredding it to bits.

The other situation we looked at this week was when a competitor advertised one of its grad programs on a community that was related to your school, but run by a private individual rather than yourself. This is where leaving it live gets a little more likely. First, you can’t delete it. If the comment is going to come down, you’ll have to ask the page’s owner to do it for you - and they might say no. Second, whether or not the owner goes along with the whole deleting thing, your request says that you feel threatened by the post and that possibly you are making requests like this on how many other websites as well? You may not be threatened, you may just be offended, but the page owner doesn’t know that. All they know is that you want that content out of there.

Do you even have the right to request a delete? In my first case (School A/B), one school was promoting its undergrad programs on the page of another undergrad institution. In this second situation, School B is promoting related graduate programs on a community of undergrad alumni. Obviously you want your grads to continue their education with you, if you have grad programming available, but students don’t always do what you want and a lot of alumni choose to experience another campus for their graduate degrees - whether for change, or just because the program happens to be more attractive than your equivalent. Your alumni may actually find your competitor’s post interesting. All they are concerned about is making yet another decision between schools, and knowing the available options is definitely part of that. Also, your school might not even have an equivalent grad program for them to consider - so is the competitor even actually “competing” with you?

After sitting on this for a few days, I can tell you what I would do - but I won’t say it’s the right answer, because the social media rulebook has yet to be printed. If your school has an equivalent program, consider adding your own post to the community - and even contacting the community administrator privately and seeing if they will consider adding their own voice to your school’s information (it looks so much better from a peer …). If you have no equivalent program, and your competitor’s post was respectfully written - and possibly actually helpful to the community members - then I’d say bite your tongue.

The spice approach is to go one step further and even submit a post that says very graciously that yes, School B has this program and that your grads tend to do well in it (if that is the case). Then add relevant information about your own graduate programs and encourage the community members to talk to you about the possibilities. Confident, polite, open, professional.

How is your school handling these types of situations? We’re all learning as we go here, and the rules are changing every day - it would be great to hear about your experiences.

Thanks for staying with me through the long read!

Melissa Cheater

eStrategy Consultant, Education Marketing

Academica Group Inc.
Full Cycle Marketing for Higher Education^TM

Check out our all-new website - www.academicagroup.com

131 Wharncliffe Road South, Second Floor, London, Ontario, Canada N6J 2K4
tel 519.433.8302 ext. 226 1.866.922.8636
fax 519.433.8062 melissa@academicagroup.com

email | web | blog | facebook | twitter | del.icio.us | skype: MelissaAcademica

Check out our new application for the Facebook platform, “SkoolPool,” that helps potential students track their consideration set and share it with their friends. www.skoolpool.com

Subscribe to Canada’s only FREE daily higher education newsbrief at
http://www.academicagroup.com/resources/Top10subscribe

Academica provides market intelligence and marketing expertise to institutions of higher education, particularly in the areas of student recruitment and alumni relationship management. Our annual University and College Applicant Surveys, the UAS and CAS, are the largest and most comprehensive in North America.

Add comment June 20th, 2008

Moderating with a Gentle Hand

EDIT: With all my talking about how to moderate appropriately, I seem to have forgotten to point out that I am almost always against moderation.  That said, we don’t always get our way - and that’s where moderating “appropriately” comes into play. M.

When it comes to social media & content control, I’m a bit of a hippie. I can afford to be because I entered the field as an academic rather than a marketer. After almost two years of working side by side schools as they approach the social media question, it has become overwhelmingly clear that content control is a big concern - and often a very valid one. And sometimes isn’t as clear cut as ideals try to make it seem.
Last year at eduweb 2007, presenter after presenter reported that the dreaded flood of negative comments had yet to happen. The fact that the vast majority of schools who have gone 2.0 avoided comment disasters is not proof, but it does still help to quiet a few fears. Regardless, some institutions will be deadset on moderating. And when it comes down to it, at least they are still thinking somewhat social - even if they aren’t ready to go without content control. It’s a baby-sized first step, but it’s in the right direction.

(And actually, even at my own blog I preview all comments before they are posted, to ensure that nothing violating our terms of use is posted - such as highly offensive content, and the inevitable flood of spam-bots.)

The tips I give when it comes to content control are as follows:

• If you are going to delete material, make sure your users know that ahead of time by publishing your policies (or they will feel betrayed, and will get even more vocal).
• Contact each person directly if you delete their content, to explain and offer a chance for them to explain their in return¹. This gives the user a way to negotiate, making them less likely to go galloping angrily to their own blog or list-serves.
• If your institution is highly concerned, it is better to moderate comments before they go live rather than deleting them after the fact. AND make sure this is communicated near the comment submission form - rather than buried in a hyperlinked TOU policy.

I can see why any school or company would be nervous about opening the flood gates to student and consumer comments, but even if the dreaded attack does come it may actually serve to engage your supporters and bring out community spirit.

My favourite analogy for this is Virginia Tech ‘07. Obviously a negative comment from a disgruntled student or employee is not the same as a campus crisis but there are a few parallels we can draw. After the shootings at Virginia Tech last spring, there was buzz in the media that enrolment numbers would most likely go down. VT’s numbers actually went up - thanks to the wave of “hokie spirit” that carried the community through and showed applicants a community that they wanted to be apart of.

The key in this situation was that people love Virginia Tech. Its supporters are well known for their feverish loyalty. If you are thinking of going social, it is definitely important to take a step back and ask yourself if you are liked.

For example, Target’s social media efforts went over well but Wal-Mart’s met with backlash (Groundswell). If your school or program has more critics than supporters than you will definitely want to approach social media more cautiously and most likely with a much different strategy than a brand with dedicated followers.

Almost every social media presentation references Wal-Mart and the backlash to its Wal-Marting Across America campaign. Wal-Mart has its enemies and it may have benefitted from a more gradual approach to social media, to test the waters so to speak. Their biggest mistake was thinking like traditional marketers. They saw the splash, they saw the content, they saw the message - they didn’t see the new rules, and they didn’t see the consumers as an active voice (or in this case, reactive). Wal-Marting Across America wasn’t legit. If the company had been upfront that they were financially supporting the trip, the backlash would have been lessened, if not squashed altogether. But because the campaign portrayed itself as something it wasn’t, the community fought back.

On the other hand, Dell was able to turn around its “flaming laptop” disaster by taking a very honest approach on their corporate blog. They started with the appropriate corporate messaging and then when the blogosphere revolted, they threw caution to the wind and honestly admitted that yes a dell laptop had caught fire and no they didn’t know why - other than it was linked to the battery (a battery type that was used by many brands other than just Dell). Was the PR department happy about this admission? Most likely not. But the honesty won over a blogosphere that had previously been very much opposed to the brand even before the laptop ball of flames.

Case Study: The Money Lounge

The Money Lounge is a Facebook community of more than 11,000 users. The community is run by TD Canada Trust, one of Canada’s largest national banks. As one of the first brands to really take to Facebook, TD had to beat its own path in regards to how they should handle an environment where users have so much to say.

Wrong information was quickly corrected by users (the Wikipedia phenom), although TD kept an active watch to make. TD was also an active “host’ and jumped in to post official corrections when required. In regards to negative content, they found that any random attack was disregarded by other users for simply being unfounded and unprovoked. It simply wasn’t given any credit.

I will point out that TD had part of the decision made for them. Facebook does not offer the ability to pre-approve user content before it goes live. Also, with a Facebook Page, I haven’t yet found a setting that will notify you of new user content such as is done for the individual profiles - which can require a staff with time to keep an eye on the page. If you have a strong IT team, you can definitely work around both of these. And as always, there are always third parties with solutions - such as my own pet, SkoolPool.

Case Study: CEO Blog - Time Leadership

To look at the other side of the coin, let’s take a look at an executive blog that keeps an eye on content but still manages to be honest and accessible. Type CEO blog into google and Jim Estill’s blog “CEO Blog - Time Management” is your first hit - and has been for years. Rather than letting everything go live and then moderating if necessary (like TD), Jim has all comments queued for approval before they go live and posts them only if there is value in it. Value meaning for other readers, such as dialogue/questions and thoughtful commentary. Personal notes to Jim and irrelevant content, among other things are read by Jim but not published on the blog. The social media purist sees this as an interruption of the conversation, a violation of the user’s right to speak! The marketer takes a step back and sees that Jim’s blog is one of the most successful executive blogs out there and definitely is setting a strong standard.

While it is not the perfect Web 2.0 ideal, pre-screening blog comments and other user-generated content is definitely the standard in corporate settings. And that’s OK. The fact is that you may not get sign-off on your proposal for a presidential blog unless you include screening. If moderation is a requirement by your higher levels, it does not have to be the end of the world. As shown by Jim Estill, it can be a part of a very successful and active blog. Be transparent, let people know up front how your comments work (right beside the submit form, not hidden in a linked TOU policy), and you should be fine.

If you choose to leave negative comments on your site (which I do recommend almost 75% of the time), it is definitely a good idea to have a rep from the school that acts as a voice and offers a gentle counter-opinion and invites more questions etc. Be friendly, be open, be factual.

I’d love to hear back on how your school handles UGC and comments - and I’m sure others reading would be interested too. It’s one of the first questions I get from every school, so it’s definitely pushing some buttons in higher ed!

Cheers,

M.

Melissa Cheater

eStrategy Consultant, Education Marketing

Academica Group Inc.
Full Cycle Marketing for Higher Education™

Check out our all-new website - www.academicagroup.com

131 Wharncliffe Road South, Second Floor, London, Ontario, Canada N6J 2K4
tel 519.433.8302 ext. 226 1.866.922.8636
fax 519.433.8062 melissa@academicagroup.com

email | web | blog | facebook | twitter | del.icio.us | skype: MelissaAcademica

Check out our new application for the Facebook platform, “SkoolPool,” that helps potential students track their consideration set and share it with their friends. www.skoolpool.com

Subscribe to Canada’s only FREE daily higher education newsbrief at
http://www.academicagroup.com/resources/Top10subscribe

Academica provides market intelligence and marketing expertise to institutions of higher education, particularly in the areas of student recruitment and alumni relationship management. Our annual University and College Applicant Surveys, the UAS and CAS, are the largest and most comprehensive in North America.

¹ This best practice comes from a presentation by TD Canada, and I swear by it in my own work.

4 comments June 10th, 2008

It’s finally here! Summer, the iPhone, or my intro blog.

Greetings eduWEBians and other blog readers! It is my great pleasure to be your guest blogger this month, after a great experience at last year’s conference and as a fervent reader of the buzz blog.

I am Melissa Cheater, and I am a Senior Consultant in Social Media & Web Strategy at Academica Group Inc. With this post I am going to get the introductions out of the way, run through my company, and let you in on my background so you can see where I’m coming from with this month’s posts.

Academica Group 101

Academica Group started as a market research firm, Acumen Research, back in 1996. Acumen Research founded the University Applicant Survey(TM), which lead to the College Applicant Survey(TM), which is now the University/College Applicant Study(TM), which we fondly call the UCAS(TM) (pronounced “U-Kass”). The UCAS has grown into the largest applicant survey in North America and surveys 100,000 incoming university and college applicants each year. Since then, Acumen acquired a marketing firm as well as a creative + technology house and was reborn as Academica Group Inc - a Full Cycle Marketing(TM) firm specializing in higher education.

We offer market research, strategy, creative and technology solutions and have provided one or the other or all four to almost every major school in Canada. We run a free daily newsbrief that filters and digests the ten most relevant news stories related to PSE, particularly in Canada - which I invite you to join if it is relevant to you.

As far as technology goes, we love open source. We work primarily in Drupal but have also implemented with proprietary CMS as well as provided hard-code sites. We are the developers of SkoolPool, an applicant community on Facebook(R) with more than 9,000 student signups and a free package available to all schools so that your profile (which is already there, created by students) looks like A, instead of B.

A (Below)

B (below)

Me

I’m young, I’m a millennial, but I’m old enough to remember how to load California Games(TM) in DOS. I started a non-profit youth programming group when I was 17 and ended up being influential in municipal policy and writing for a Trillium grant on Youth Services. Other than Youth, my background is tightly linked to music and community. The Constantines played the first show I ever booked, and they are still one of my favourite live bands.

I started building sites in 1997 and haven’t stopped since. Geocities, to HTML, to Dreamweaver, to CMS & Wordpress. Other than my personal sites, I have worked with non-profits, government, and a several businesses and events. I’m an HTML kid who can throw down in almost any other language if you give me Google, notepad and an Internet connection. I’ve handled large-scale web updates and I’ve worked in an environment where web is a team under a team under a board under elected officials who need 1,000 pages updated in both national languages in the next 24 hours.

My education is media, and communication. If you want some applicant insight, I applied to the University of Western Ontario’s Media, Information & Technoculture program because I had paid for 5 application slots and thought technoculture was a funny word. Once the offers were in and I was faced with four years of accounting or business, I ended up going with the funny word.

I had the privilege of working with the Anonequity project as a rare undergrad assistant, and through this spent two years researching privacy, technology, the internet and public expectations with a national team of leading technology, sociology and law minds. When given my own lead, my contributions to this project rang to social networks (MySpace was emerging at the time), as well as data collection and privacy on children’s websites.
Other than that, I’ve worked with the University of Western Ontario - in the registrar’s office and in HR. I was hired on at Academica Group shortly after these two contracts and have been here ever since. I have spent the last year working closely with SkoolPool(TM). And I am the founding member of our Social Media Services department, where I continue to be.

In exchange for this incredibly long & boastful introduction, here are the slides from a presentation Chris Skinkle & I gave last week at the CAUCE 2008 conference here in London: “Engaging Mature Students in the age of Facebook, YouTube & Wikipedia”

Reach me:

email | web | blog | facebook | twitter | del.icio.us | skype: MelissaAcademica

1 comment June 3rd, 2008

Your Institution’s Most Valuable Asset

In my final post as May guest blogger, I wanted to say “thanks” to all of you who work so hard on your websites, especially the web content managers. In an earlier post I said that your website is your institution’s most valuable asset. Well, I’d like to correct that and say that I believe it’s actually you who should be considered your institution’s most valuable asset. Why? Well, consider this…

According to the most recent statistic I can find on Google and Netcraft, there are approximately 43 billion web pages on the World Wide Web today. Those pages are served by about 158 million unique websites. That’s an average of about 272 web pages per website. Now, according to Google, there are about 758 million web pages representing approximately 5,000 higher educational websites (.edu sites). That’s an astonishing 152,000 web pages, on average, per college site, or approximately 56,000% more pages than the average site on the World Wide Web.

Using these facts and figures, and excluding only the largest e-commerce and media related websites, it’s clear that there are no harder working individuals on the planet than you!

Given the extraordinary effort you and your team make on a daily basis, I have yet to find a single one of you that wants to complicate their job further with burdensome technology. My work revolves around your web content management software (CMS) needs, and over the years I’ve seen a lot of web CMS technologies make a lot of promises. The biggest failing of most of these technologies is that they often make managing content more challenging than before — not something you need!

So, our goal at OmniUpdate has been to keep our web CMS extremely easy to use; yet powerful as a technical engine.  We designed it in 2001 exclusively for higher education; consequently, we understand how different your problems are from business and e-commerce sites. Our design ensures WYSIWYG ease of use for everyone involved, plus complete separation of content from design, version control and roll-back, content repurposing, and all the specs even the most hardened techie would love.

Why is this CMS approach important? Consider the fact that:

1. IT staff benefit from a standards based approach to web CMS. XML and XSL are the backbone of Web 2.0 and at the very core of OmniUpdate’s templating system.
2. Administrators benefit from the ability to control permissions and manage actions at a department and/or individual level — it’s a powerful capability (and very important) to decide and implement “who can do what” on your website.
3. Recruiting, admissions, public relations and marketing staff benefit from all the communication and messaging features previously described earlier in this series: blogs, RSS, video, online chat, etc. (Yes, one CMS can do all that!)
4. Decision-making committees appreciate a user-based pricing model that is scalable with flexible terms, and would like to purchase one product that delivers all the previously described benefits and functionalities.

OmniUpdate is used today by website heroes just like you to update the content on over 450 college and university websites.  And there’s no doubt in my mind that YOU are your institution’s most valuable asset.

I look forward to meeting you at the eduWeb Conference in July.

Lance Merker
May Guest Blogger

CEO
OmniUpdate, Inc.
lance@omniupdate.com

1 comment May 30th, 2008

Transcoding Video for Web Pages

As I mentioned in an earlier post, it’s never been easier to shoot, and edit video.  So, why is it so difficult to put video on our websites? Playback quality, browser compatibility, and other complexities make it so challenging that we end up doing something we really shouldn’t — putting videos on YouTube and using the embed code to display them.  Go ahead and admit it, we’ve all done it!  It might not even seem that bad of an idea, right? Not so!

Posting video to your campus website using YouTube can pose a problem. Your video production will be YouTube branded. Furthermore, if you click on the video while it’s playing, you’re redirected to the YouTube website.  Allowing your visitor to be redirected to an external website is clearly not good marketing strategy.  You may never get them back.

To keep in control of things, OmniUpdate is now offering a free service called Transcode-It.  The idea is to make things really easy for you to take any video and play it right in your web page. Like this…

View the video playing in a fictional university web page.

Transcode-It is a free service that allows college web professionals to quickly convert any video, then upload and display it as a high quality Flash video embedded right in any web page. It’s as simple as inserting an image into a document. Feel free to try it right now at http://www.transcodeit.com/.

Transcode-It requires no software installation and creates a video file that plays on all modern browsers (Windows and Macintosh). Your resulting video will not be branded by Transcode-It, and will not redirect viewers away from your site.

In the spirit of community, we at OmniUpdate hope that colleges and universities will find Transcode-It a helpful service.  We offer it as one more tool in your arsenal for reaching that often unreachable audience.

Lance Merker
Guest Blogger, May 2008

CEO
OmniUpdate, Inc.
lance@omniupdate.com

Add comment May 27th, 2008

RSS—Quick Access to the Unreachable

Offering site visitors the opportunity to subscribe to RSS feeds is one feature of a winning website strategy. Assuming your RSS feed is integrated into your web content management software (CMS), every time your staff updates important information on your website, an applicable RSS feed item can be created and sent to your audience. RSS is fantastic because the message is sent in virtually real-time, and isn’t filtered or blocked because it’s delivered to willing recipients… you can’t beat that messaging strategy!

As I mentioned in my last post, RSS feeds can be directed by the student to his or her preferred medium and accessed on a variety of devices, such as Facebook, RSS readers, email and portals. This alone can be huge. Think about it, how many other opportunities do you have to get right on your student’s Facebook?

In addition, RSS can be automatically converted to SMS and rapidly delivered to all subscribing cell phone users. 

Now, how effective could RSS be when used for crisis communication? Well, based on a recent Newsweek report, approximately 97% of your target audience keep their cell phones “on stand-by” at all times. These people will get your message, whether they are sitting in a lecture, or on their way to class. While in class, their phones are in silent mode, but many students are still getting text messages discretely during lectures. Other audiences could include prospective students, parents, media, faculty, administrators and alumni. 

Combine RSS with your web CMS and you’ve got an extremely powerful and cost-effective way to make updates from one central hub — your website!  If subscribing to an emergency RSS crisis feed is integrated into the student enrollment process as part of a crisis notification plan, nearly all students and their affected family members could be registered automatically.

With a little planning, RSS can play an important and crucial role in both marketing and crisis communications.

Lance Merker
Guest Blogger, May 2008

CEO
OmniUpdate, Inc.
lance@omniupdate.com

Add comment May 23rd, 2008