Posts filed under 'Online Communications'
Thank you! I have really enjoyed my month as an eduWEB blogger, and hope that those readers coming to the conference in 3 weeks will knock me on the shoulder and say hello in Atlantic City! (Also, I’ll be presenting 9:45am sharp on the 3rd day of the conference - I hope you’ll stop by!) Today is June 27 and our Canadian offices (where I work) will be closed from now until July 2nd - so this is most likely my final post, and then on to Carmella, the July guest blogger.
So I am letting go. I am letting go of your “ears” with my final post. And if you do not hear from me again, it will mean I successfully let go of the web over the long weekend (horrifying!) I hope that any readers out there that are still debating social media will let go and dip their toes in sometime soon - just to see if the water is warm. I am here if you have any questions, so please ask.
Social media is NOT the answer for everyone. Earlier this month I blogged about Target vs Wal-Mart and the disaster that was the “Wal-Marting across America” campaign. If you have more critics than supporters, you will definitely want to approach the social web with a cautious strategy - and there are definitely some schools out there that feel this is the case, my heart goes out to you. We have looked at some solutions such as a Facebook Page with the wall and discussion boards removed - and with “Ask the University” forms and other custom widgets that replace the wall/discussion forums as the primary activities on the page. We are also launching solutions for comment moderation and content control on social platforms such as Facebook and MySpace, coming soon to a network near you.
Social media can be VERY cost effective. The costs are usually time, rather than money (although money certainly helps - one national company offered a $40 incentive for students to join their online community). If you are an over-worked department (ha), you will definitely have to decide ahead of time how much time you can invest in social strategies - and whether you can maintain that commitment over time. The nice thing is that students and young grads are well versed in these technologies and can bring you new ideas, and can be paid via bursary or something nice like that.
Here is why I want you to let go: Higher ed is flagged as a field that trails behind corporate and commercial marketing, due to silo’d department structures, level after level of decision committees, and goodness knows what else. I don’t think that is very fair. There are more than a handful of schools doing fantastic things with social media (wayy too many to name, so watch bloghighed.org for updates from some very active folks). Whether or not your school has gone “social” depends on the enthusiasm of your decision makers, and sometimes on the level of necessity. In regions that are facing bleak demographic outlooks, online video, interactive recruitment portals, and social network liaison officers are definitely more the norm than abnorm. If you’re out there, wave you flag and show off your brave new world of marketing because not all of higher ed is trailing.
If you are not one of these brave schools, but are looking at them and thinking “hmm, nothing bad has happened yet” - go with it. If you spend 2 months researching the technologies, another month drafting an internal proposal and another month convincing your committee to buy in - and then 2 months trying to get marketing and IT to work together (let’s not even touch on departmental and faculty marketing units) - guess what, your plan is 6 months out of date by the time it goes live. And in terms of web, that is a big problem.
Get buy in to go social, and then move fast. Keep your initial research broad and focus on the fact that COMMUNICATION IS NOT THE SAME. People, namely your alumni, donors and applicants, are talking to each other differently and expect you to talk to them the same way. Once you have permission to heaven forbid install a blog, go with the most enthusiastic potential blogger and get them onto blogger, wordpress, typepad - whatever. These are all fantastic free services. You can build your beautiful branded blogging microsite later, but get the activity started. This way you get to do 2 news releases, one for the blogger launch and one a month later for the microsite launch - yay! Do the same with everything else, test it fast, test it live and then expand. You can hypothesize all you want, but you really won’t know what your audience is going to do until you let them go at it.
The last way I’d like you to let go is to let conversational marketing into your tightly woven brand identity. I’d throw stats at you but we all know that social technologies are doing well because they simply fit human behaviors and needs, and we all know that a large chunk of your applicant pool is in that young, mediated generation of web addicted millennials. It’s not all because of technology - many teens are actually not tech savvy at all. But they know how to talk, and talking is important to them. Last year our national applicant survey (100,000 applicants) found that 87% consulted their friends for information during their school decision process. That’s more than viewbooks, family and teachers.
If you aren’t ready to drop your guard and chat with your applicants and students on your official .edu, or if you are just looking for a way to reach applicants effectively online, I invite you (implore you!) to take a look at our free student network. Students join for free and get read outs of where their friends are going, why their friends are going where they are going, whether they got a scholarship and where they turned down an offer. Our SkoolPool community started on Facebook and is now much, much broader - and is free for both students and schools. We have paid level packages with custom higher ed applications designed to meet your unique marketing and recruitment needs, but we also have a basic level option that gets you into the conversation in a safe, comfortable environment. If nothing else, registering for the free level replaces your “?” icon with your logo and gets your admissions contact info out there for students who want to get in touch.
So please, let go. Don’t over plan, and don’t try to control too much information. Whether or not you are “social”, your students are and there is no embargo to stop them from voicing their opinions.
That’s it from me - please drop by our booth in Atlantic City and check out our presentation on Wednesday (abstract below). I will be publishing the results of our annual applicant web trends survey on my normal blog early in July - so please consider stopping by once or twice to stay in touch!
“SkoolPool: Energizing your applicants with Facebook & OpenSocial”
Wednesday, July 23 @ 9:45 - Cayman A - eduWEB 2008
87% of college and university applicants are influenced by their friends when making their school choices. SkoolPool.com is a social hub that allows applicants to share choices, ideas, comments and decisions about school choices with their peers as well as institutions – across all major social networks! The SkoolPool network is powered by the peer feedback that applicants crave, and also creates a safe place for schools to tap into social media. Applicant demographics, interests and decision factors are collected and provide a 24/7 window into the decision process. This presentation will take you inside the making of a Facebook/OpenSocial application and review the insights won from joining students on popular social network websites. We will include statistics on applicant technology use, the ups and downs of building third-party social network applications and best practices for promoting your institution via social advertising.
Melissa Cheater
eStrategy Consultant, Education Marketing
Academica Group Inc.
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
June 27th, 2008
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
June 20th, 2008
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 EducationTM
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.
June 20th, 2008
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!)
- 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
May 30th, 2008
In my last post, I left with the idea that stimulating regular visits to your blog can be about “wanting more.” The cliffhanger approach to blog posting is certainly one method that works. The fact that you are reading is proof itself. But there’s more. And, last time I promised you three more tips to keep your audience coming back. So, here they are…
Tip #1
Give them what they want!
If your institution is blogging as a means of communicating with prospective students, current students, and others of the “millennial generation,” don’t force institutional messaging into blogs. Create an environment where students themselves can participate (in a controlled manner) in the blog posting. Believe me, your student bloggers will know what topics are most interesting to their peers. Now this might seem very obvious, but it’s not as simple as it sounds. The software and contractual controls you put in place should ensure that you can monitor and veto blog posts before they are live on the web (as marcom professionals it’s your responsibility to the institution). But, don’t get trigger happy with the veto button. Work with your student bloggers to ensure they know where you must draw the line, yet let them be creative with the subject matter to ensure it’s
relevant and interesting to the audience you’re trying to reach.
Tip #2
Embed Videos
The popularity of plopping YouTube videos right into blog posts should come as no surprise. Blogging is very much a Web 2.0 phenomenon and mixed media is a big part of the equation. Offer your bloggers a way to add videos — and if YouTube is just not acceptable (I’ll talk more about that later), then offer ways to convert and upload video files directly to your server. Don’t be afraid of video, embrace it.
Tip #3
Use the 1 in 5 Rule
For every five bloggers you recruit, you’ll only get one that keeps it going. Believe it or not, for all the concerns your administration might have about “appropriate” content issues, the biggest problem you’ll have is a lack of content. Most of your bloggers will disappear on you. And, worst of all, you won’t know which ones until it’s too late. The most enthusiastic, the best writers, or the ones you’re certain will be great are the ones you’ll probably lose first. The solution is to get lots of bloggers. If you figure you’ll have one in five who make it, you won’t be disappointed later.
Ok, let me get off my blogging horse, and get to one of the biggest issues of online communications!
Ah, but for that, you’ll need to wait until next time…
Lance Merker
Guest Blogger, May 2008
CEO
OmniUpdate, Inc.
lance@omniupdate.com
May 7th, 2008
