Archive for 'Social Media'

HomeSocial Media

International recruiting goes social

Posted by:

International recruitment has become a top priority for many universities. There are a number of reasons for this trend.

Universities benefit by internationalizing their campus, enhancing their reputation and scoring higher in international rankings. International students also pay higher tuition fees, which is a welcome addition for cash-strapped institutions in today’s financial climate.

Traditional methods for recruiting international students include establishing strategic partnerships with other institutions, sending recruiters abroad to attend university fairs and hiring overseas agents.

The problem with these methods is that they are expensive and time-consuming. While the use of recruitment agents is a common practice in many countries, the issue is controversial in the United States and is currently being examined by a NACAC panel.

Dr. Rahul Choudaha, a renowned ...

Continue Reading
30
MAR
0

Categories: International Recruiting, Social Media, Social Networking, Student Recruiting

Facebook without the whining

Posted by:

“I would have written this article sooner,” says business journalist Lydia Dishman, “but I was busy on Pinterest.” Turns out, she wasn’t alone.

In her recent story in Fast Company magazine — entitled “Why Pinterest Is So Addictive” — Dishman explores the reasons this relatively new social networking site is attracting so many people, including, perhaps, students you’re trying to recruit.

Launched in 2010, Pinterest has suddenly exploded in popularity, with nearly 12 million unique U.S. visitors last month. The site is a virtual bulletin board that enables you to create online image collages, then easily share those collages — called pinboards — with other users.

Part of Pinterest’s appeal is that it is visually beautiful and overwhelmingly positive (“like Facebook without the ...

Continue Reading
24
FEB
1

Categories: College Recruiting, Marketing, Social Media, Social Networking

In pursuit of the best-fit student

Posted by:

Numbers no longer have the same appeal for admissions officers at the University of Tennessee. They’re moving away from the SAT, ACT and grade-point average in favor of a more complete view of their prospective students, according to reporter Joan Garrett.

It’s a familiar goal among the nation’s colleges — go beyond test scores and other statistics to get a fuller picture of a prospect to help determine if he or she will be a best-fit student. Increasingly, Facebook and other social networks are serving as allies in the search.

The number of admissions offices using Facebook to learn more about an applicant has quadrupled in the past year, reports Garrett of the Chattanooga Times Free Press. While schools are sensitive to ...

Continue Reading
7
OCT
0

Categories: College Recruiting, CRM, Facebook, Social Media, Social Networking

Social media marketing IQ

Posted by:

Getting more and more excited about marketing your school via social networking? That’s great, says interactive marketer Heidi Cohen, but first you need to check your social media marketing IQ.

“Here are 30 questions,” she writes in a recent ClickZ article, “that will help you assess where your organization is in terms of social media marketing maturity and where you may need to improve effectiveness.”

Cohen divides her questions into such categories as goals, strategies, content, metrics, budget — and the all-important “listening” factor. Included among the 30 are:

- Do you have brand monitoring and/or other analytics in place? These can range from professional social media monitoring to free options such as Google Alerts and Twitter Search.

- If you are listening as ...

Continue Reading
9
SEP
2

Categories: College Recruiting, Communication, Social Media, Social Networking

The Pillars of Technology

Posted by:

Two pillars stand tall in the shifting landscape of recruitment technology: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Social Media.  Providing real-time access to data, CRM solutions offer in-depth information on every touch-point with a student; Social Media allows admissions staff to meet students where they are, delivering (and receiving) multimedia messages across a variety of channels.

In many cases, however, both solutions face solely outward, addressing the relationship between recruiters and prospects, but ignoring the relationship of recruiters to each other.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, confronts this chasm in a recent Forbes magazine article (the magazine gives Benioff the top spot in an issue focused on innovators in business).  In the accompanying article by Victoria Barret, Benioff effuses about Chatter — “software ...

Continue Reading
19
AUG
0

Categories: Cloud, Cloud Computing, CRM, Social Media, Uncategorized

Measuring online sentiment

Posted by:

One of the newest marketing challenges is keeping up with your school’s “online chatter” — that is, how your students, prospective students, parents of students and other key groups are treating you on the social web.

“Monitoring and responding to online chatter is becoming more important as customers take to the Internet to voice praise and complaints,” says Sandra Fathi, president of public relations and social media firm Affect. “Today, for almost any company, online sentiment is absolutely critical. It affects their sales, it affects their employee morale, and it definitely affects their customer and prospect base.”

With the nearly religious devotion that young people have for their favorite social networking sites, you know they’re saying a lot about you online — ...

Continue Reading
10
JUN
0

Categories: Cloud Computing, College Recruiting, CRM, Social Media, Social Networking

Stages to success

Posted by:

Whether you’re utilizing every new tool possible or ashamed that you’re not in the social media game, Forrester Research has identified 5 stages of “social maturity” that you may relate your efforts to (or build a plan from).

Gavin O’Malley of MediaPost says “New research finds that most large organizations go through similar stages of growth and change as they wade into the world of social media.” What stage is your college or university in?

Research found one-in-five companies are in the “dormant stage,” not utilizing any type of social media. Is your college or university in this category? Forrester analyst Sean Corcoran suggests “focus on the best opportunities that can be used as case studies within the organization to get the ...

Continue Reading
3
JUN
0

Categories: Social Media

Yield from all angles

Posted by:

As you focus on yield this spring, hopefully you are keeping students engaged in every way possible: in print, in person, over the phone and online.

In his most recent blog post, Michael Fauscette explains the importance of engaging customers on Facebook. “Moving from a transactional relationship to one of trust and engagement is fundamentally about the customer experience. Positive or negative — experience trumps everything else.”

Fauscette developed a best practice list for companies that can be easily translated to help build relationships with your accepted (and excited) students.

Some of his tips include:

Make your page interactive. Ask questions, post frequently and make it a place students want to go.

Personal connections are powerful; personalize posts with “real” humans. Videos or posts from ...

Continue Reading
25
MAR
0

Categories: Best Practice Documents, Facebook, Social Media, Student Yield, Yield

Social media sins forgiven

Posted by:

If social media isn’t a priority in your marketing mix, what’s stopping you? Many admissions professionals say it’s the fear of the unknown, lack of control, or saying something “wrong.”

Some colleges shy away from actively posting and responding to prospective students’ questions, because they imagine a social media “mistake” equates to the worst-case scenario. But maybe the outcome might not be so bad after all. Kenneth Cole learned that lesson a few weeks ago.

Advertising Age featured a story by Rupaul Parekh, “The Seven Stages in the Life Cycle of a Social Media Sin,” where an ill-conceived tweet (by Kenneth Cole himself) was unleashed into Twitter and fans and followers responded.

“While some out there are dubbing blunders like the one Kenneth ...

Continue Reading
25
FEB
0

Categories: Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Social Media

Forget Facebook, if you want to yield students you should be on YouTube

Posted by:

Any dyed-in-the-wool Gen Xer can tell you that the first video MTV played when it launched on August 8, 1981 was Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles. Not as many can tell you the second video played on MTV. Do you know?

Video facts you need to know:
-43% of current prime time internet traffic is real time entertainment ( 12.2.2010)
-Netflix streaming accounts for 20% of internet traffic on any given evening (BusinessWeek 12.2.2010)
-Cisco predicts that by 2013 video will be 90% of consumer internet traffic (TechCrunch 7.9.2009)
-YouTube is a top “search engine” accounting for 28% of Google searches (Google 1.31.2011)
-There are 500 million monthly YouTube ...

Continue Reading
3
FEB
1

Categories: Authenticity, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, College Recruiting, Communication, Communication Plans, Did You Know?, Facebook, Free on Friday Webcasts, Social Media, Social Networking, Storytelling, Student Yield, Videos, Web Traffic, Webcast, Your Website

Preparing for the new year

Posted by:

Another year has come and gone but you are only about half way through the recruitment cycle for the class of fall 2011. As you wrap up 2010, think about where your recruitment marketing efforts currently are and where you might be going in 2011.

To help you do this, ThoughtLead hosted the Future of Marketing micro-conference. Sixty speakers each take 60 seconds to impart their wisdom on us with insights into what the “future of marketing” is in 2011 and beyond. Here are just a few that might appeal to admissions and recruitment marketing:

“Mobile is a game-changer” (Chuck Martin). We’ve heard about this a lot over the past few months, and your institution needs to begin thinking about how you ...

Continue Reading
17
DEC
0

Categories: Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Mobile, Social Media, Storytelling, Word of Mouth

The future of the internet – we seem to get it wrong

Posted by:

Working for TargetX, college administrators seem to think that we have a crystal ball into the future of the internet and everyone is always asking us what’s next. Be it Facebook, MySpace, twitter, or ning. it seems that our industry and society has a BSOS (Bright Shiny Object Syndrome) pandemic.

I recently heard a report on NPR’s Morning Edition about the Google/Verizon “Net Neutrality” proposal. Correspondent Alex Bloomberg’s closing line of the report rang so true, “What we know though, when it comes the internet most of our predictions about its future are wrong.”

Just six or seven years ago, while working at Mindpower, I’d go to college campuses to do discovery for branding or publications ...

Continue Reading
18
AUG
3

Categories: Best Practice Documents, Facebook, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Videos

Increase your digital influence

Posted by:

In admissions, you often cannot attend every conference you would like to, especially when there are so many throughout the year. So, why not attend the shortest conference ever? 60 speakers in 60 minutes.

ThoughtLead held their first 60 in 60 event on July 6. The Influencer Project: The shortest marketing conference ever, discussed how to increase a business’s digital influence in the competitive world of online media. Sixty speakers provided their personal advice on how you can do this today. After listening to the conference, there were several points that were extremely relevant to recruitment and admissions efforts on the web. Here are just a few:

“Make connections online and then go and meet them in person in the ...

Continue Reading
23
JUL
3

Categories: Authenticity, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Communication, Social Media, Websites, Your Website

Monitor your social media presence

Posted by:

Talk to anyone in college admissions and they would say social media is important to any recruitment strategy. Ask them how much time they are spending monitoring their social media tools and they may not be as confident with their answer. You know social media is important and you should dedicate more time to it, but it’s difficult to find the time and staff to assess and monitor your social media strategy. Find the time to review your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other tools now.

Hubspot.com offers up five ways to monitor your social media presence in 10 minutes a day. Most people find social media monitoring a burden, and cannot find an easy way to tackle the job, especially leaving ...

Continue Reading
9
JUL
2

Categories: Facebook, Free on Friday Webcasts, Social Media, Twitter

No. 1 in social media

Posted by:

Higher ed has a reputation for being a couple laps behind the rest of the field when it comes to marketing innovation. One historical rule of thumb is that hospital marketers are about five years behind their corporate brethren, and colleges are about five years behind hospitals.

But that seems to be changing as higher education reacts to tougher times with more aggressive and effective marketing communications, and nowhere is that more evident than in the explosive growth of social media.

A staggering 95 percent of colleges are using at least one form of social media to recruit prospective students, far outpacing the rate of adoption in the corporate world, according to research from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Among the findings:

- ...

Continue Reading
2
JUL
2

Categories: Blogs, College Recruiting, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter

Be more social, be more…corporate?

Posted by:

Corporate websites need to make an effort to be more social — does yours?

A recent blog entry from Hubspot.com says corporate websites are guilty of producing boring content. “These sites end up being a time and financial drain without delivering the appropriate value to current and potential customers.” Sound familiar?

If you have heard comments like this around your campus or by prospective students, then you should sit down with others and reevaluate your site’s priorities. Hubspot’s suggestion: “Four Ways to Make Your Corporate Website More Social.”

Focused on engaging customers and empowering them to share with others, Hubspot suggests a level of interaction between the customers and the organization that does not exist when the website spews one-way messages.

While the article ...

Continue Reading
21
MAY
5

Categories: College Recruiting, Communication, Communication Plans, Online Experiences, Social Media, Social Networking, Summer Projects, Web Traffic, Websites, Your Website

Time to kill social media?

Posted by:

This is pretty deep, admits consultant Rob Key, but think of social media in the context of a 9th century Zen warning about mistaking the messenger for the message. “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him,” goes the saying, because when you become fixated on the intermediary you lose the deeper meaning of the message.

Marketers are currently obsessing over the intermediary — Twitter, Facebook and other technologies that help circulate their message.

Key studied online conversations about social media and discovered they’re dominated by talk of the tools, with little attention paid to the larger meaning of how the social phenomenon is impacting marketing.

“In our view,” he writes, “social media is about the evolution of human communication. Cultural ...

Continue Reading
23
APR
4

Categories: College Recruiting, Communication, Social Media

Taming the social media beast

Posted by:

Marketers in all industries — including higher education — feel overwhelmed by the looming presence of social media. They know they have to use the tools of the social web, but struggle with how to do so effectively.

Some still aren’t sure where to begin, concerned that they’ll make mistakes and alienate the very people they’re trying to cultivate. “Almost every marketer I meet asks me how does social media marketing work,” says Mary Henderson, CEO of an online technology firm.

A recent gathering of executives from businesses and colleges in the Raleigh-Durham area looked at the promise and pitfalls of social media and offered the following observations:

  • Social media is a beast that cannot be avoided.
  • Listen, observe, crawl before you jump into ...
Continue Reading
12
MAR
0

Categories: Communication, Free on Friday Webcasts, Social Media

WOM for Higher Ed

Posted by:

Fueled by the social web, Word of Mouth has become a billion dollar marketing engine. It even has its own professional organization — the Word of Mouth Marketing Association — with conferences, webinars, tutorials and a strong emphasis on ethics.

If you haven’t visited the WOMMA website yet, it’s worth the time. It offers a number of resources for any level of WOM practitioner. And perhaps in recognition of the overwhelming influence of social media on young people, it has dedicated a branch to higher education.

Spearheaded by DePaul University’s Deborah Maue, WOMMA created the Higher Education Council to help college marketers “use social media to their best advantage.” Mostly, that means helping them recruit Millennials, who have elevated word of mouth ...

Continue Reading
5
MAR
1

Categories: College Recruiting, Millennials, Social Media, Social Networking, Word of Mouth

Social storytelling

Posted by:

Marketers tend to obsess over the tools behind social networking’s meteoric rise. Are blogs more effective than Facebook? How easy is Ning to use? Does Twitter appeal to young people?

What they’re forgetting, says social strategist Gaurav Mishra, is that the tools are not as important as the content. And the content that continues to engage people most consistently is a good story.

“I have come to the conclusion that social media is most powerful when it’s used for creating, collecting and sharing stories,” Mishra wrote recently. “In fact, I now believe that storytelling is the key to social media marketing success.”

Stories are central to the human condition, he says. We love to listen to stories. We’re able to learn from stories. ...

Continue Reading
4
DEC
3

Categories: Social Media, Social Networking, Storytelling

XpertTip No. 133: How are you structured?

Posted by:

Greetings from Boston!

I’m here in bean-town for this year’s American Marketing Association Higher Ed Symposium (or simply “AMA” to avoid the mouthful).

I’m excited to have an opportunity to speak again this year and rub elbows with some of the brightest marketing minds in the business.

Already I’ve had some great conversations — like my nice chat this morning with Shelley Wetzel (of eduWEB Conference fame).

Shelley wanted to know if I could point out some folks who are changing their structure to bridge the admissions/marketing gap at their institution.

It’s something I’m seeing more and more of as communication plans become increasingly complex and clients attempt to wrap their brains around social media strategy.  I guess you could say the need for a ...

Continue Reading
16
NOV
3

Categories: Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Communication, Social Media, Uncategorized

The ethics of social media

Posted by:

Admissions counselor Daniel Creasy loves Facebook, Twitter and the other social media that make it possible for admitted students to feel like they’re part of Johns Hopkins University before they ever attend their first class.

“I hear from people all over campus that with every progressive year, the newest incoming class is the most together and connected group that has ever showed up,” he told the Baltimore Sun newspaper recently. “They’ve already known each other for months.”

But the great rush to use social media also raises questions about privacy and appropriate relations between administrators and students.

“Desperate applicants might attempt to improve their admissions chances by ‘friending’ counselors,” writes Sun reporter Childs Walker. “Conversely, counselors might use social media profiles to search ...

Continue Reading
30
OCT
1

Categories: Social Media

TWIT, Don Tapscott and a 17 year old's Perspective

Posted by:

Sunday night, my friend Leo Laporte had a wonderful panel of experts discuss the media, social media and colleges on his popular This Week in Tech podcast. I highly recommend you listen to it. The panel included Don Tapscott, author of Growing Up Digital and Grown Up Digital, the father-son duo or Jeff and Jake Jarvis and social media expert, Gina Trapani. During the show they share a lot of opinions on social media, the future of colleges and the generation rising into the the college scene.

I highly recommend college administrators and faculty listen to this show. In the middle they discuss Google Wave – for those interested, ...

Continue Reading
1
JUN
1

Categories: Generations, Millennial Generation, Social Media

A social web primer

Posted by:

The web has gone social, says marketer Adrienne Bartlett, which presents a challenge to schools competing for the online Millennial Generation and their equally tech-savvy Generation X-er parents.

“To remain successful, it’s crucial for admissions marketers to develop relationships with prospects and facilitate the process of helping them make connections,” Bartlett writes in the current issue of Higher Education Marketing Report. “Luckily, the social web provides opportunities for both.”

But too often the conversation about using social media starts and ends with the tools themselves — blogs, social networks, RSS, podcasts and streaming video. And that’s a mistake, says Bartlett.

“At its core, social media is not about technology. It’s about people’s desire to connect with each other. Sure, technology is ...

Continue Reading
22
MAY
1

Categories: Social Media

The rise of social media

Posted by:

Here’s confirmation of what you already suspected: The admissions world is being turned upside down by social networking.

Two new studies have examined the impact of social media on student recruitment and concluded that their use is becoming increasingly common in admissions offices. And essential for the future.

A report from the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) is based on survey responses from nearly 500 four-year institutions. Among its findings: 88 percent of admissions offices believe blogs, social networks and other means of online interaction are either “somewhat” or “very” important for their future recruitment efforts.

“Social media tools like Facebook, Twitter and blogs are key to communicating with this generation of students,” said NACAC CEO Joyce Smith. “While still no ...

Continue Reading
1
MAY
5

Categories: Social Media, Social Networking

Page 1 of 2 12