Small Staff, Smart Choices Yield Social Media Success So Far for Baylor School

Immersing yourself in social media isn’t easy when you manage communications and marketing for an education institution, even a small one. There’s already a lot on your plate: events to produce and publicize, magazines to put out, a website to update. That’s certainly true at the Baylor School, a boarding and day school in Chattanooga, TN, where Barbara Kennedy, associate vice president for external affairs, manages communications.

Kennedy’s team is responsible for marketing, media relations, publicity, PR, publications, a magazine, BaylorSchool.org, and programming and promoting the school’s summer programs. It’s a small staff: just Kennedy with a director for summer programs, a webmaster, a designer, and a freelance editor who helps with the school’s magazine.

Despite the existing workload, Kennedy knew that it was important to learn about social media and to incorporate these tools into her work. “I knew that I had to be responsive. I’m a 25-year PR veteran and I knew I had to adjust to these changes myself. And I know our audiences expect us to communicate in this way.”

So in spring, 2009, she and Bernard Fertal, Baylor’s webmaster, began exploring social media. “We wanted to be in the lead, but we didn’t want to proceed without really thinking through the advantages and disadvantages,” Kennedy said. “I think some people thought social media was just a fad that would soon fade away—and still others chose to ignore it. But we looked at it as a revolution in how we do our jobs.”

After some experience, she added, “Bottom line: we look at social media as a powerful way to leverage traditional marketing and communication tools that we already have in place.”

Pilot project focused on a class trip

After doing some exploration and research, Kennedy developed a pilot project to launch over the summer, when she had time to focus on it: a travel blog about a student trip to Washington D.C. with photos posted on Flickr. “This was only read by the students who were on the trip and their parents and there wasn’t much interaction, but it gave me a reality check on the time commitment. Then we started tweeting. And I had already been immersed personally with Facebook, so the Baylor School fan page was the next logical step once classes began in August.”

These continue to be her focus. “I’m amazed at how quickly the Facebook page took off: it has grown virally, as has @BaylorSchool [1216 fans and 103 followers as of 28 October 2009]. We plan to do a radio promotion directing people to follow us on Facebook and Twitter, so we’ll see how those numbers grow.”

Kennedy’s main focus is The Baylor Blog, which feeds the fan page. She said, “Since I am generating all of the news items on our website and much of the information that we share with parents and students on a regular basis, I do the updates on Facebook and the blog.”

Tweets are drawn from the school’s daily announcements and other web content and lead back to news stories on BaylorSchool.org. Fertal manages @baylorschool and handles most of the tweets.

As a communicator, Kennedy appreciates the flexibility social media gives her in telling a story—and allows her to watch how her stories spread. “As someone in communications, the feedback and data I get on posts is invaluable.” As an example, she talked about some photos she posted of Korean students celebrating a Korean holiday. “I’m interested to see how many of those kids will interact, showing me if it’s viable to reach students in Asia this way. I may not get much interaction, but I’m watching what happens.”

Kennedy also appreciates how much she can learn about her audience. “Our total fan base is predominantly ages 13-24, almost evenly split male/female. As a boarding school, it is also of great value to see that 1,002 of our Facebook fans are from outside of the state, and 39 of those fans represent 19 different countries. Having the data also informs my choices on what to post, and will no doubt shape our communication strategies in the coming months. For example, 100% of the interaction has been from females (ages 35-44, 40 percent), (ages 45-54, 40 percent), (ages 13-17, 13 percent), and (ages 55+, 7 percent).”

She continued, “This week, we have pulled in 17 percent participation from males and our younger fans are becoming more active. So I’m thinking harder about posts that I feel will keep connecting with them. Our next step is to leverage this information with admission and fund-raising.”

And this data helps her to gain support from Baylor’s board. “I felt that some of my colleagues were just being polite when I talked about social media, but when I shared some of this data with the board, they really responded. They got that it was a whole new way of communicating.”

Challenges? What challenges?

When asked about challenges in putting social networking into practice, Kennedy said, “It has been ridiculously easy, but it was personally scary for me to let go of some of the control. I was blocked for awhile on creating the fan page because I wasn’t sure anyone would respond to it. Silly, huh?”

Kennedy and Baylor have not encountered any discipline problems or issues with their own ventures in social networking, but that doesn’t mean that Kennedy hasn’t had “an aha moment” around potential abuses of social networking. “A couple of years ago, a reporter ‘friended’ some students on Facebook to get a quote regarding a controversial issue on campus. He ran the story with a student’s quote and I was just blown away. Because I also handle media relations, it was a teachable moment for me, the student, and others in our school community. That was my first experience with Facebook—and, when you think about it, it’s a miracle that I grew to love it!”

Although being an active blogger and Facebooker take more time in her day, it hasn’t been a big burden for Kennedy. “Honestly, it takes me just a few more minutes a day. I would be developing news content for the website anyway, so copying and pasting into the fan page and tweeting about it—is really just a few extra minutes.”

Even the interaction is manageable, Kennedy has found. “I don’t follow up much, though I do spend time reading comments and think about how they might inform what I post. For Twitter, I’m looking at what people are reading, RTing, and I’m thinking about they say. This takes 10-20 minutes a day. I could spend more time on it, but I don’t. I have to set some boundaries.”

The effort she’s put into social media—and its payback—have resulted in some plans for the near future:

• Silverpoint, Baylor School’s web partner, is designing a mashup page that pulls together the school’s various feeds; it should go live this fall.


• Kennedy is also exploring how she can incorporate a Flip video camera and iMovie into her communications retinue, and her immersion in social media is causing her to rethink how she will present Baylor’s magazine when it moves online. The current print magazine is mailed twice a year to 10,000 people. Kennedy isn’t sure what an online version of the magazine will look like, but she is sure that her effort won’t involve slapping a PDF on BaylorSchool.org. “I’m thinking about how we can tell stories through video and audio,” she said.


• Finally, there’s a need for other voices to join the conversation online. She’d like to include more student voices, but that hasn’t happened much yet. One of her concerns is the amount of time they could spend: “I don’t have a lot of confidence in their level of commitment to it—they have a whole lot of things going on,” she said. And she’d like to see other departments involved in contributing to and sustaining Baylor’s social media activities. “We need other voices to join the conversation and in doing so contribute to the effort,” she said.

Note: This post is the result of research and interviews for an article on innovations in social media by independent schools. It will appear in the January 2010 issue of CASE Currents. There are four related posts:

• An interview with Chuck Will, from Proctor Academy, Innovator: Chuck Will, The Longest-Running Blogger in Education?;


• A case study on how Northfield Mount Hermon School’s new website will incorporate social media;
• 
  
• A post about online life at Worcester Academy.


• A case study of social media in action at Beaver Country Day School
.

Update: The mashup page went live the week of 2 December:

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Social Media in Action at Beaver Country Day School

At Beaver Country Day School, an independent school in Brookline, MA, social media plays an increasingly important role in marketing and communications and in the classroom. Jan Devereux, BCDS director of communications, said that the school’s laptop initiative and significant investment in information technology and professional development has accelerated the momentum for these (and other) online communications.

In contrast to the social media activity at Worcester Academy, most of what an outsider sees of BCDS’s social media is targeted toward prospective families, alumni, and other external constituencies and is produced and managed by school staff. Behind the scenes, though, there’s much more going on. Devereux said, “In our classrooms, teachers are using all sorts of Web 2.0 applications as learning and teaching tools—blogs, Ning groups, wikis, YouTube. etc. This effort was piloted in 2008-09 and is now active in every class.”

Devereux said that she began exploring how BCDS could use social media more effectively in its marketing and communications activities when planning began for a relaunch of BCDSchool.org in 2008. “A goal of that redesign was to make the site more interactive,” she said.

She’s encountered no obstacles to rolling out an array of social media initiatives. The school’s administration was very supportive: “We are lucky that our administration has been very supportive and trusting of our experimenting in the social media arena without a drawn out trial and approval process.”

She added, “At Beaver, it’s in our DNA to ‘try new things.’ Peter Hutton, our head of school, says, “We’re going to make mistakes but we’re going to make excellent mistakes.”

Devereux is clear about what BCDS is trying to accomplish with social media, at least for now. “Its purpose is two-fold: to promote connections with and among members of the community (hopefully resulting increased financial support and school spirit) and to enhance our brand image (hopefully boosting admissions),” she said.

Social media in action at BCDS

BCDS social media initiatives include the following:

Facebook: Devereux said, “We have a fan page where we post photos, videos, and brief news items designed to keep in touch with our 413 (and growing) fans and to promote school events. We also have a private alumni group (currently with 146 members), which we use primarily as a platform for alumni to (re-)connect with each other. Here, we post alumni events, but not news.” She added, “There are also a couple of class-specific group pages started independently by alumni.”

BCDS is a WhippleHill customer and uses the company’s Facebook Connect feature, which allows visitors to BCDSchool.org to share news to their Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts.

Twitter: BCDS has a main Twitter account @BCDSchool and a second, @BCDSweb, which used by the communications staff. Devereux explained, “We post to the main account a couple of times a week—sports scores, news of guest speakers, a photo now and then. We try to keep it lighthearted and upbeat, and are somewhat wary of bombarding our followers with every little thing.” @BCDSweb is used primarily to network and share info with other school communicators and education marketing/media folks.

@BCDSchool feeds directly into the school’s portal, making the tweets accessible to non-followers.

LinkedIn: As far as LinkedIn is concerned, Devereux noted, “We created a Beaver group on Linkedin where current and former faculty and staff can connect with each other and alumni. We have not used it to post job openings at the school.”

Classroom activity: Various social networking tools and applications are used in all BCDS classrooms as a part of school’s 1:1 laptop program which began this year. Some of these sites are linked to BCDS’s mashup.

Devereux and her communications colleague Matt Clobridge manage the Twitter Facebook accounts. BCDS’s alumni relations director, Shira Lewin, also works with them to update Facebook. Lewin has reserved @BCDSalumni but hasn’t started tweeting from that account yet. Deveruex said, “We’re not sure there’s a separate audience for alumni-specific tweets.”

Finally, A new page pulls various social media and social network feeds into BCDS’s website giving current and prospective families a window on how social media are being used as teaching tools.

The biggest challenge? Finding the time!

So far, the biggest challenge in putting social networking into practice, Devereux said, is time. “Managing social media could be a full-time job,” she remarked. “In general, the online side of our jobs is taking a huge amount of time—and it’s getting bigger. In five years, the balance has shifted to doing just about everything online.”

She observed that social media has become an organic process. “We do it as it happens—we don’t ‘plan,’ but respond to opportunities because there’s always something going on on campus.” But it’s not as if it’s random. “We keep in mind what we want people to know about us: today, we had four kids who were recognized by National Merit Scholarship. We want people to know about this so, we posted it. The next tweet might something about sports or a guest speaker.”

The immediacy of social media appeals to Clobridge. “Yesterday, a singer-songwriter came to an English class, so we took a Flip video camera and covered it as a web news story.”

Clobridge came to BCDS from a public elementary school and appreciates the fact that his current environment provides many more opportunities for him to take action without overthinking them or seeking approval.

Although Devereux joked about the risk of making mistakes on their social media activities, she said, “There haven’t been any major gaffes.” And there haven’t even been snide wall posts or negative blog comments. Clobridge said, “People have been respectful and haven’t done it.”

At BCDS, Devereux noted, “There’s a culture of respect and tolerance that carries through everything Beaver does. Teachers talk to students about how their online identities are a reflection of who they are and the importance of being respectful in a public forum.”

Note: This post is the result of research and interviews for an article on innovations in social media by independent schools. It will appear in the January 2010 issue of CASE Currents. There are four related posts:

• An interview with Chuck Will, from Proctor Academy, Innovator: Chuck Will, The Longest-Running Blogger in Education?;


• A case study on how Northfield Mount Hermon School’s new website will incorporate social media;
• 
  
• A post about online life at Worcester Academy.


• A post about how the small staff at Baylor School handles social networking.

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Teens to Advertisers: We Don’t Want Your Texts (and Other Insights from YPulse Mashup)

I’m attending the YPulse Youth Marketing mashup in San Francisco, hoping to learn how top brands among teens and tweens manage to be successful in marketing to this incredibly discriminating audience. [You can follow #ypulse09 on Twitter if you’re interested.]

One of the best panels I’ve heard so far was a presentation by Bill Carter, a partner in Fuse Marketing, who talked about a study that Fuse did in conjunction with the University of Massachusetts on brand advertising aimed at teens. The survey—done with teens in “Sarah Palin’s America” (e.g. not just teens from the coasts and big cities)—aimed at whether advertising was memorable and presented in a channel that appealed to teens.

Carter emphasized the disconnects between what marketers believe is true about the power of various channels and what teens and tweens think, using these examples:

• TV is not dead to teens: 75% prefer and/or believe it’s appropriate for brands to reach them via TV ads.


• Teens are not interested in interacting with brands on social networks—at least the way brands represent themselves currently. Teens use social networking sites to connect with friends and do things that are fun—they don’t relate to brands online. Only 30% of teens have “friended a brand” on a social network.


• Official company websites aren’t dead: 80% of teens have gone to a official company’s product site and used them to make purchase decisions.


• Only 10% of teens approve of advertising in video games—teens just don’t believe that having advertisers in a game makes it more realistic. Carter said that ads for Burton snow boards in a videogame about snowboarding could make sense, but only because they’re in context.


• Teens aren’t interested in or receptive to ads in text messages: only 10% of teens approve of texting by advertisers; this ranked dead last in approval ratings by teens in what was acceptable in communications. Carter said that he believes this is mostly due to the way that current advertisers are using the medium, but it’s currently the case.


• Teens still read magazines: magazine ads receive high approvals and are the second-most-effective medium in reaching them.


• Teens say that the most effective advertising includes “people who look like me.” Only 20% prefer ads with celebrities or athletes as endorsers. The most memorable ad among teens was Verizon’s “can you hear me now” guy, Carter said.

In the Fuse study, 83% of those surveyed were average or heavy users of the Internet; 80% were average or heavy users of TV; 63% were average or heavy users of email; and 47% were average or heavy users of social networks.

Of the 80% of those surveyed who visited an official product website, 80% somewhat or strongly agreed that the site was valuable.

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Trends and Judges’ Report, CASE Awards of Excellence for Websites

This year, I chaired the judging panel for the CASE Awards of Excellence Judging for websites. The judging was hosted by Roosevelt University, Chicago—a shoutout to Lisa Encarnacion, director of university outreach, who made all the arrangements for us, and to Lesley Slavitt, vice president, government relations and university outreach.

This year, 15 judges convened for two days in March for the judging. The judges represented American and Canadian colleges, schools, and universities, public and private. The panel included people with experience in design, web strategy, web content development, admissions, student recruitment, web technology, and marketing. We also had a number of consultants on the panel, one of whom spent years working as a high school counselor. More than half of the judges have won national CASE Awards of Excellence for their websites. (Typical panels that judge other categories in the Awards of Excellence competition number about six to eight.)

There were 56 complete institutional sites entered in Category 10A [Complete Institutional Websites] this year and 94 sites entered in Category 10B [Individual Sub-Websites]. This year we awarded a Grand Gold and two Golds. In Category 10A, George School won a Gold for its redesigned site. And in Category 10B, Xavier University won the Grand Gold for Road to Xavier and Nazareth College took a Gold for FlightoftheFlyers.com.

Short list of Award winners for 2009; more details about each in the Judges’ Report for 2009.

What makes an award-winning institutional website? Here were some of the important elements we identified this year:

• a sound strategy


• sound information architecture, navigability, usability and search


• good content, effectively deployed across the site


• effective management of the site


• appropriate look and feel, distinctive to the purpose of the site and consistent within the site


• appropriate use of technology and adherence to standards


• evaluation plan; appropriate results

We also ask whether the site does something particularly interesting or unusual. We’re not very interested in sites that merely look good. It’s easy to make a site look good, but is the site great at what it’s designed to do? If a site looks good but isn’t well-organized or lacks coherent messaging, it won’t get an award. Competition in this category is very rigorous, and winning is difficult.

Managing Conflicts of Interest
Judging panels for other CASE Awards of Excellence categories top out at about six people. There are a number of reasons why we invite such a large number of people to participate in judging this category. First, building websites is a complicated undertaking and we want people with different kinds of expertise in the room to comment on issues such as audience appropriateness, usability, design, and other issues as they came up. Second, we have a lot of sites to review and having a large group of people makes this process go faster. Third, having a large group of experienced people with strong opinions ensures that a broad range of opinions is heard. Finally, the large group ensures that conflicts of interest do not emerge in this judging.

We take conflicts of interest extremely seriously. Several of the judges represented institutions that had websites entered in Category 10, and several mStoner clients entered sites in this category. Judges with a relationship to a site being judged do not participate in viewing the site during the first “elimination” round; if the site survives this round, judges are expected to recuse themselves from judging the site, are not allowed to comment on it, and are asked to leave the room when the site is being discussed during the final round when awards are given.

Trends
I’m sorry to report that the judges were underwhelmed at what we saw this year. One remarked, “I felt as if I was looking at websites from 1997. I was disappointed and surprised at how bad they were.”

Some sites we explored are clearly reaching for “wow,” but wow in and of itself isn’t enough. Without functionality, wow quickly becomes annoying. We noticed a lot of gratuitous elements that had no purpose and/or were not useful; examples of bad design; and many generic websites. One judge remarked, “I don’t see many best practices emerging this year.”

It was particularly galling to see sites that completely lacked any sense of branding or even a sense of place: the institutions could have been anywhere. For example, we looked at one site from an institution on the California coast and couldn’t find a single image that showed us where it was located.

And as important as authenticity is today, many of the sites we looked at seemed to lack authenticity. Authenticity was one of the elements that people liked about George School’s site, as well as Northland’s and Nazareth College’s Flight of the Flyers.

Another shortcoming overall was a decided lack of great content—we saw very little excellent writing or video on any of the sites we viewed. Too much of the writing was characterized by the usual university-language clichs. Sites need to be edited—and not just for misspellings (we observed far too many). And, often, excellent content was buried deep inside the site: this is good content used poorly, where one had to stumble upon it in many cases. This is not only a waste of time (and/or money), but also attention: visitors want good content!

One judge observed, “When I’m looking at your site, all I have is what is on the page. Don’t assume I know who you are; or where you are.” [Note: one of the strengths of the award-winning site for the George School is that the site provides a sense of what George School is, in words, images, and video.]

There were a number of sites that did a nice job in tying real-world experiences into the web—particularly Nazareth University’s Flight of the Flyers site. This site, McGill’s Six Word Stories site, IUPUI’s Events Calendar, and The Road to Xavier were particularly good at engaging visitors with the sites and encouraging them to share information in a variety of different ways and on different platforms, including social networking sites.

Some final comments:

• One judge noted, “What’s with the small fonts?” It wasn’t just older judges who complained about the lack of readability of small type on websites.


• We noted that a lot of sites used Flash and provided no alternatives, so they were inaccessible.


• We noted that many of the people who entered sites this year hadn’t spent much time thinking about how to evaluate the results of the all the work that went into their site. There were some clear exceptions, two of them being George School and Xavier University. At Xavier, a robust analytics toolset allows people on campus to monitor how the site is being used and respond to groups or individuals appropriately. Bravo to these award winners—and to others who thought through this key step to making a site “effective.”


• Many of the entries were a bit cagey about the use of consultants in the redesign process. Some of the winning sites were designed by on-campus teams; others were designed by consultants. We’re not particularly focused on how much a site costs, but on how good it is and what kind of results it gets. Please credit consultants for their work and be transparent about the share of the costs allocated to consultant fees when you prepare your entries. We’ll recommend that, next year, entries that reference consultants but don’t break out their costs be eliminated.

Additional Resources

Short list of Award Winners for 2009

Judges’ Report for 2009

Judges’ Report for 2008

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Award Winners, CASE Awards of Excellence 2009: Category 10, Websites

There were 56 complete institutional sites entered in Category 10A [Complete Institutional Websites] this year and 94 sites entered in Category 10B [Individual Sub-Websites]. This category includes special-purpose websites ranging from campaign sites to alumni sites, virtual tours, admissions sites, annual reports, search sites, and others.

Full report on the judging, complete with comments about each of the award winners, is here [it’s a PDF].

The entry form for the category states:

Grand Gold, Gold, Silver, and Bronze medal awards may be given for innovative Web sites or pages developed for any institutional use. Do not enter only your homepage for evaluation. Judges will only be looking at multi-page/layered sites or pages.

Category 10A: Complete Institutional Websites
This category included sites designed to represent an entire institution, from the home page down. In the past, we’ve noted that it’s difficult to have all the parts of a great site come together at once at an institutional level, and this year was no exception. You’d think that a small institution—a school or a college—would have an advantage here because the scope of work is narrower than that of a large university.

Gold
George School

Silver
Northland College
SUNY-Potsdam

Bronze
University of Virginia
Georgia Tech Research Institute

Category 10B: Individual Sub-Websites
These sites—developed for special purposes for particular audiences such as prospective students, alumni, or others—allow institutions to develop a coherent, deep web experience for visitors. It’s often easier to build a special-purpose site: there are usually fewer political issues, a clearer purpose, and more of an opportunity to measure results—assuming, of course, that there is a plan in place to do so.

Grand Gold
The Road to Xavier, Username: hopsonk1, Password: Twitter1

Gold
Nazareth University Flight of the Flyers

Silver
Boston University Annual Report
[url=http://www.bu.edu/admissions]Boston University Undergraduate Admissions Website{/url]

Bronze
Boston University, College of Fine Arts Website
Cornell University Photography Image Library, login: case; password: case1
Hobart and William Smith Colleges Daily Update
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Events Calendar
McGill University
Virginia Military Institute Don’t Do Ordinary Website

Additional Resources

Judges’ Report for 2009

Judges’ Report for 2008

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Admissions and the Web: Recession Is An Important Time to Spend Money on Your Website

“Meanwhile, colleges should not cut their admissions or marketing budget, but they must use that money more wisely, said Christopher M. Small, executive vice president at GDA. For instance, this is not a good time to revamp the college’s Web site, which is expensive, though admissions offices might still spruce up their home page with Flash programming and create small, discrete pages on specific topics.”

I’d love to hear your reaction to this remark: please add your comments below. Meanwhile, I have several thoughts about it, most of which boil down to: “it depends.”

If Your Website Is Well-Designed and Managed Effectively

For institutions that already have fairly decent websites, I agree: this is not the time to embark on a massive redesign. If you’ve been thoughtful and prudent in how you’ve approached previous site redesigns, here are some of the things you should have done:

• created a visitor-friendly information architecture for your site


• invested in a content management system, enabling you to update your site easily


• designed your pages in such a way that enables you to add new & relevant content to them


• created a user-friendly search that rewards searchers by delivering “best bets” for their searches


• developed special-interest features (we call them “spiffs” at mStoner) to draw attention to programs or other characteristics that distinguish your institution.

If you’ve done this, you’re in a great position to make sure that you are clearly articulating value messages to the people who visit your site. They’ll be seeking information on what makes your institution distinctive or how you help students afford the cost of attendance. If you’re the kind of institution that attends NAICU, you’ll need to convince them that the education a student receives on your campus is worth the extra cost of attendance over your nearby state university. [Don’t get me wrong—you’ve got a lot to say, but you need to make sure that visitors to your site understand the value of what you offer.]

This is complicated stuff. You need to make the point in web-friendly ways, to visitors who are spending little time on your site. And I feel compelled to point out that this is the sort of information that is usually notdelivered via Flash animations.

Also, remember that it’s not just the home page that needs your attention, but other key pages across your site. In the age of Google, they count just as much as “www.institution.edu.”

And If It Isn’t?

Well, what if your site needs serious help? What if you were just starting to redo your site when the economy tanked? You know the kind of site I mean—a visitor can’t tell what distinguishes your institution from its competitors, and no one can find a list of majors on the site, and even you get lost trying to find admissions info.

I hate to say this, but you’d better look hard for some funding. No microsite or Flash animation is going to help you in a situation like this one [I have more to say about microsites, below.]

You just can’t get away from the fact that your website is your single most important communication and every group—most especially prospective students and parents—is going to look there first for informaiton about your institution. If you’re a state university, there are compelling economic reasons for them to look beyond your incomprehensible website. If you’re a private institution, though, you’re missing one of your most significant opportunities to influence their behavior. It’s often the gateway to the crucial campus visit, where the sell is made.

Microsites

It’s great to think about developing microsites for special purposes. For targeted campaigns, they’re a perfect solution. But remember that microsites have to be marketed specially to the audiences they’re intended for; people won’t just stumble upon them unless they’re linked from multiple pages on your site and/or promoted in email or direct mail. And remember that microsites can accentuate how bad your overall website is. And, unlike your main site, microsites won’t show up on top on Google searches.

In short, a microsite is seldom a substitute for an effective website.

Social Media

There are, of course, other things you can do that are less costly than an overall website redesign. For example, consider now how you can take advantage of social media—especially Facebook. In an economic turndown, it’s high time for institutional leaders (yes, this means deans of admissions, vps for public affairs, and others) to get over concern about “losing control of our message.” [Hint: it’s 2009 and you’ve already lost control; you just haven’t realized it yet.] This is not without its drawbacks, though, since it takes time and effort to manage Facebook—just as it takes considerable time and effort to manage an effective web presence.

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What Prospective Undergrads Want on a College/University Website

The monograph draws on our own observations and research as well as research conducted by others, including Noel-Levitz and Royall & Company. Here’s the intro:

Identifying the most important visitors to a Web site and understanding what they are looking for is an essential first step in designing and building a great Web site — one that gives visitors what they need and gets the results that you need.

This is especially true when the target audience is prospective students. Understanding how they use a college Web site — and making sure that your site is designed for browsing and for in-depth exploration — will make your site much more appealing to them. And testing the site to make sure you are meeting their needs — not gratifying the egos of a Web designer, president, dean, vice president for marketing or a member of the board of trustees — is an essential step toward making the site effective at communicating with this demanding demographic.

Our own experience and research, and that of others, indicates that although your Web site is your most important resource for communicating with prospective students of any age, it shouldn’t be the only means of communicating with them. Traditional-age students still value other types of communication, including (especially) print. The majority of members of the class of 2007 said they would rather look at a Web site than read brochures sent in the mail (57 percent), but a significant percentage (43 percent) said they would rather read brochures than look at a Web site. So though your site should serve as the centerpiece of your marketing, it’s intended to be supported by other types of communications.

I was thinking about this this morning in part because of this report on how online merchants are redesigning their sites. Here’s what they are doing to their sites:

Improved site optimization is the top priority for 72.9% of merchants, followed by clearly organized home, category and product pages at 62.4%, better navigation at 49.4%, improved site search at 47.1% and faster checkout at 40%.

They’re also adding features that site visitors have come to expect, such as product reviews and video:

In the early days of web retailing a flashy design that showcased a merchant’s brand may have been enough to pique an online shopper’s interest. But today web merchants are designing pages that deliver a more sophisticated shopping experience. The Internet Retailer survey finds that 43.3% of merchants will update their e-commerce sites with video this year, followed by 40% with personalized product recommendations, 36.7% with customer reviews and ratings, and 35% with product configuration tools.

But they aren’t deploying these tools willy-nilly; instead, Internet Retailer says, different kinds of usability testing is essential to know how consumers will react to choices they are offered. Placement can make a big difference in the impact media can make. And we find in our testing with prospective students that they have strong reactions to design. One concept may turn off the high-achieving students a college is trying hardest to recruit, while another may engage them and encourage them to explore a site. Knowing who reacts how to what can help you make informed choices about design, not just please decisionmakers who are 30 to 40 years (or more) older than the target audience.

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The Latest Salvo Against College Marketing

“Why Colleges Are Just Not That into You” is the work of Zac Bissonnette, a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, who is also an editor with AOL’s personal finance site. Bissonnette is nothing if not contrarian. If you haven’t been following The Daily Beast, you might have missed his column entitled “Why Giving Money to Your Alma Mater is Immoral”. The article has already been picked up by Alternet.

The thesis of Bissonnette’s admissions article is this:

The charade in which schools solicit more applications than they need—just to improve their selectivity ratings—isn’t just underhanded, it’s cruel.

Bissonnette quotes several stories that reporter Jay Matthews wrote about deceptive college marketing and mentions that Matthews …

told me he checked letters from 100 colleges the year his daughter applied, and only one, Harvard, had any language indicating that the letter should not be taken as a hint of impending acceptance. (Something you’d figure Harvard applicants would be smart enough to figure out on their own.) These letters “create false expectations of admission, particularly in the many low-income households where the search letter is a new and unexpected feature of the process,” Matthews says.

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More on Facebookgate

I posted a link to the unfolding (unraveling?) story of Facebookgate this morning [Andrew Careaga called it Facebookgate]. There’s been a lot happening today; more to follow on SquaredPeg.

Briefly: Brad Ward had just looked at some interesting action on a Facebook group ostensibly set up by Butler University’s Class 0f 2013. Problem was that when he looked at group’s creator, Patrick Kelly, he realized that no one by that name had even applied to Butler. He recalled that his friend and colleague Michelle at WInthrop University had also encountered Patrick Kelly on Winthrop’s Facebook group. More digging revealed that Kelly and a small group of linked friends had created a slew of Class of 2013 Facebook groups at other colleges and universities. Lots of digging by Brad and a slew of collaborators at colleges and universities across the country linked this activity to CollegeProwler.com.

Today, CollegeProwler came clean. According to their CEO, posting on SquaredPeg:

Until about an hour ago, I was unaware that College Prowler was working with another company that may have been using fake aliases to create to these groups. The groups that College Prowler was responsible for creating were set up with real accounts. Here are the names that are associated with College Prowler, and they will all be removed immediately from the Class of 2013 groups…

I know that a lot of people in admissions, advancement, marketing, and other departments are uncomfortable, even paranoid, about social media like Facebook. And this is just the sort of incident that has the potential to exacerbate concern about the new social media landscape.

But I can see ony good news in this story. The incident illustrates just how smart institutions should act, monitoring—and responding—to disruptions in their online presence.

First, Brad Ward was paying attention to what was going on with Butler University’s Facebook presence. Not because he wanted to intervene inappropriately in the Class of 2013 group, but because he wanted to know who was involved and what the conversation was about. That’s what helped him identify the weird activity in the first place.

Lesson: It’s essential to have your staff be part of what’s happening on the social web. They need to know what’s happening and to be monitoring what’s going on.

Second, Brad himself was connected. While Brad identified the problem and started investigating it, he wasn’t alone. He relied on a network of colleagues at other institutions. Lots of people got involved—they’re part of the strong community connected by email, the blogosphere, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. There is a lot of wisdom—and people-power—available to someone who identifies an issue like this.

Lesson: Stay plugged in yourself, not only to the external community on the social networks but to the growing community within higher ed.

Ultimately, this incident illustrates why institutions should have involvement in social networks like Facebook. Incidents like this are going to happen, and with more frequency. You’ll only know about them—and be able to respond—if you’re involved in the conversation and know how what kinds of responses are appropriate.

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Something (Weird) is Happening on Facebook

Over at Squared Peg, Brad Ward notes that something weird is going on on Facebook and exhorts colleges and universities to pay attention to possible ersatz Class of 2013 Facebook groups.

An interlinked group of friends has apparently colonized Class of 2013 Facebook groups for a range of colleges and universities. Research by Brad and a growing number of college and university web admins links the initiative to College Prowler, which, if you don’t know it, is a college guide + website written by college students promoted as offering “unbiased” commentary about colleges and universities. The Facebook effort could be an attempt to recruit potential College Prowler contributors or it could be something more than that. Brad worries about spam and data collection, a legitimate concern if you ask me. Read the post and then check out the Class of 2013 Facebook group for your institution to see if you need to take action on your own or in concert with Brad and the others working with him on this effort.

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