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Let’s get visual

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I consider myself a “visual” learner. Draw out my thoughts on a whiteboard, watch a video tutorial, type out my weekly tasks in Evernote. So I wasn’t surprised to see Fast Company’s article “Fast Talk: The Visual Shift” — where industry experts were asked to weigh in on how businesses can adapt to our image-obsessed culture.

Experts from retail, news, government and more shared tips on how to infuse more imagery in your user and online experience, and they had some valid points that translated well to higher ed.

The Creative Visionary: Joe Stewart, partner and global creative director at Huge
“Consumers expect the same level of quality and service from digital that they would get in a store,” says ...

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Categories: Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Communication, Experience, Marketing, Online Experiences, Social Media, Storytelling, Student Recruiting

Pinpoint what’s hot on campus

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Pinterest is growing up. The showy image-sharing social media site is not just about pinning pretty pictures anymore, says higher ed marketing specialist McKenzie Coco. Now colleges can measure user engagement thanks to a new built-in analytics tool. pinterest

“Pinterest has taken social media by storm, already catching up to Twitter in its short existence,” says Coco, founder and president of FSC Interactive, an online marketing agency that specializes in social media strategies for higher education. “The addition of metrics solidifies its place in the online marketing sphere. This is not a shiny new toy, but rather a formidable and results-driven online marketing tool.”

The addition of data-mining means colleges can now answer such ...

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

Put the emphasis on social

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Building an arsenal of social media to reach prospective students? Got your Facebook page, Twitter handle, YouTube channel? Maybe Pinterest and Instagram accounts and Tumblr too?

It certainly makes sense, since research indicates that two-thirds of high school students use social media to research colleges and more than a third of those students use the sites to help decide where to enroll.

But a recent article in Inside Higher Ed offers this advice: “The number of social media accounts might not be nearly as important as what colleges and universities do with the technology.”

Reporter Alexandra Tilsley talks to some of the people behind the research, and they recommend that you delve into the findings and perhaps reconsider your social media strategy. While ...

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Categories: Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Facebook, Online Experiences, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter

A picture is worth a thousand words

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Popular photo-sharing site Instagram has been added to the social media mix by many colleges and universities. Proving itself to be a useful tool not only for prospective students — but current students and alumni too.

While you might cringe at the thought of adding something else to your “to do” list, there are a few articles making the case for the new(er) channel with examples of how it’s working for campus communities.

Highlighted in a BestCollegesOnline.com article, here are just a few from their “top ten” list:

Going behind the scenes.
University of Florida is using Instagram to go behind the scenes of the university. Sharing photos from a variety of locations like class lectures, the university TV station and ...

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Categories: College Recruiting, Communication, Marketing, Online Experiences, Social Media, Storytelling, Student Recruiting

Is McDonald’s keeping it real? (Well at least in Canada.) And can your school?

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Earlier this month TargetX hosted our Xpert Summit at the most inauthentic or least-real place on Earth; Las Vegas.  Every form of civilization (represented by some themed hotel) has gone to the desert to die out there. (But that’s a whole-other rant.)

I’m going to talk about a McDonald’s marketing effort that I like. I need to first qualify and say that growing up as a teen in Florida, McDonald’s was the hangout for my high school and church youth group. So I’ve consumed my fair share. But like Las Vegas, I’m now not a fan.

Let’s connect Las Vegas and McDonald’s. Both might be the symbol or poster child of everything wrong with America. Both are fabricated, processed versions of originals, ...

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Categories: Authenticity, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Customer Service, Social Media, Social Networking, Your Website

Social helps relieve summer melt

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School’s out for summer — but the work is far from done. Colleges are often concerned with summer melt — fearful that their enrolled class (and hard work over the year) will slip away. So what’s an admissions staff to do?

That’s where social engagement comes in.

Social sites aren’t your magic bullet, but they can certainly help you to stay connected. And if you do it right — you might just keep those incoming students engaged right on through til move-in day.

Business writer Courtney Rubin blogs about “The Secret to a Perfect Facebook Post,” and shares some insights from a recent Buddy Media report for businesses using Facebook to interact with consumers. And guess what? They just so happen ...

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Categories: Best Practice Documents, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Communication, Facebook, Social Media, Summer Projects

International recruiting goes social

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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 ...

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

Facebook without the whining

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“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 ...

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

In pursuit of the best-fit student

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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 ...

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

Social media marketing IQ

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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 ...

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

The Pillars of Technology

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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 ...

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

Measuring online sentiment

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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 — ...

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

Stages to success

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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 ...

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Categories: Social Media

Yield from all angles

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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 ...

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

Social media sins forgiven

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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 ...

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Categories: Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Social Media

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

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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 ...

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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

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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 ...

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

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

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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 ...

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

Increase your digital influence

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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 ...

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

Monitor your social media presence

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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 ...

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

No. 1 in social media

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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:

- ...

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

Be more social, be more…corporate?

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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 ...

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

Time to kill social media?

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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 ...

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Categories: College Recruiting, Communication, Social Media

Taming the social media beast

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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 ...
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Categories: Communication, Free on Friday Webcasts, Social Media

WOM for Higher Ed

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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 ...

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

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