Community

With all the current buzz around the professional use of Twitter, Facebook or YouTube in admissions, alum offices or institutions at large, it’s hard to believe that social media has been around in higher ed for 5 years or so.

While MySpace isn’t the talk of the (campus) town anymore, it played an important role – a few years ago – in this social media tsunami. At that time, danah boyd was already studying and researching these websites — and her work made me think about the possibilities for admissions marketing practices back in February 2006. More recently, I shared on this blog my comments about a paper she co-authored about retweeting practices.

Fast forward to 2010. Social media isn’t optional anymore to engage our constituents and Dr. boyd is one of the most sought-after experts on the social media practices of young adults – presenting around the world about the topic.

That’s why I’ve been on Cloud 9 (haven’t you noticed? ;-) since she accepted last December my invitation to present this summer a Master Class about her latest research. While danah boyd is scheduled to speak at several conferences in the next few months (including CASE Summit for Advancement in New York), this online lecture followed by a Q&A is a unique opportunity to get ALL your team members and colleagues on campus to learn how young adults truly use social media and how higher ed institutions should engage them.

Scheduled on July 15, 2010 at 1PM ET (with the recording available for a full-year as part of the registration fee), this 1-hour online event is the perfect occasion to help your team (and all the other offices on campus) understand how younger constituents (prospective and current students as well as young alumni) use social media and make sure no time is wasted with social marketing tactics missing the mark.

Master Class: Social Media Practices | Higher Ed Experts

Gather a large group in front of a screen with an LCD projector in a big conference room and make this Master Class a professional development event on campus!

Register at www.higheredexperts.com/socialmedia by July 5, 2010, but hurry up as only 80 virtual seats are available for this event and they are expected to fill up very quickly.

Once again, I’ve rallied Mark Greenfield, the driving force and new owner of the Uwebd Ning website and Stewart Foss, the owner of eduStyle to create a single survey to poll our respective community members (that would be you ;-).

As we did last year, instead of polling our respective members in our own little corners of the Web, we agreed to launch a grouped survey to find out what makes the higher ed web and communication community ticks and how our respective websites can better serve this group.

Higher Ed Experts/eduStyle/CUwebd Survey – 2009 ::

This survey has about 25 questions (but depending on your situation, it might even be shorter). If you fill it out and provide us with your email address, you’ll get a chance to win one of the 14 cool prizes that will be drawn on December 8, 2008:

• a free pass to one of the 5 upcoming webinar series from Higher Ed Experts ($240, $300, $300, $300 and $240 values),
• 5 electronic copies of the eduStyle Guide of Usable Higher-Ed Homepage Design (a $39.99 value each)
• an eduStyle Standard Single Web Page Review 5-page Report + 1 copy of the team edition of the electronic book (a $318.99 value)
• an eduStyle Standard Website Review 10-page Report + 1 Copy of the team edition of the electronic book (a $618.99 value)
• 2 Amazon $50 gift certificates courtesy of Collegewebeditor.com.

This survey will be open until December 7, but you never know what can happen, so go take it now!

And, that’s just the program for the months of January, February and March 2009.

I’ve just wrapped up the upcoming webinar series for the first quarter of 2009, and I hope you’ll like the result.

With the tougher budget times we’re all facing in higher education, I’ve decided to focus the next webinar series I design for Higher Ed Experts on topics that will help you do more with less: social media, saving big, going paperless with your publications and implementing effective analytics programs for your Web and email initiatives.

As usual, places are limited, so it’s always wise to register ahead of time if you want to secure a spot for your team. You can register by visiting each of the dedicated web addresses of the series.

Social Networks MBA: How to develop and nurture a thriving community
January 13, 14 & 15, 2009
“Social Networks MBA” is a 3-webinar series that will help you decide if your institution should launch its own private niche social networking website. After this series, you will know why and how to nurture and develop a thriving online community around your own social networking website.

• Besides and Beyond Facebook: Do’s and Don’t's for your niche social network by Mark Greenfield (University at Buffalo)
• ROI-Oriented Social Network in a Box: Why and how to buy an integrated social network by Adam Stahr (UNL)
• Add-Member Social Network Mix : Why and how to host your free online community on Ning by Mike Caulfiled (MIT OpenCourseWare)

Register by December 19 January 9, 2009 at www.higheredexperts.com/socialnetworksmba

Saving Big: Winning strategies to get better results even with a crunched budget
February 4 & 5, 2009
“Saving Big” is a 2-webinar series that will show you how embracing the right digital approach can help you dramatically cut costs while still meeting the needs of your target audiences. It will show you why and how social media can become a very budget-friendly asset in the battle to attract, engage and win over the brightest, but also why and how to save on any publication budgets without alienating readers and compromising editorial quality.

• Recruiting on a budget 101: Master plan to win the social media jackpot with prospective students by Rachel Reuben (SUNY at New Paltz)
• Taming the print beast: How to stretch the publication dollars of your institution by Joe Hice (UF)

Register at by January 26, 2009 www.higheredexperts.com/savingbig

Stop the Presses: Why and how to go digital with your magazine or newsletter
March 3, 4 & 5, 2009 July 7, 8 & 9, 2009
“Stop the Presses” is a 3-webinar series that will show you why more and more higher ed institutions have gone digital with their news-oriented publications. It will also help you get ready for an eventual switch from print to electronic or to better integrate both media at your institution by sharing winning strategies, lessons learned and practical advice from editors of higher ed digital magazines.

• Going Paperless: How to prepare and survive the transition from print to digital by John Lofy (Michigan University)
• Paper and Pixels 101 by Bonny Griffith (Ithaca College)
• The Editor’s Guide to the Digital Galaxy: How to edit a paperless and multimedia magazine by Karl Bates (Duke University)

Register by Feburary 23, 2009 at www.higheredexperts.com/stopthepresses

Analytics 360: How to track and measure (and show to your boss) the ROI of your online initiatives
March 24, 25 & 26, 2009
“Analytics 360″ is a 3-webinar series that will help you jump start, fine tune and optimize an effective web and email analytics program for your institution or your department. It will show you the best way to track and measure important data with the help of the tool of the trade, Google Analytics, calculate return on investment and use your analytics program to improve your web and email initiatives.

• Web Analytics 101: How to plan, start and implement a comprehensive analytics program by Joshua Ellis and Shelby Thayer (Penn State University)
• Advanced Web Analytics: How to track data, measure ROI and improve your web initiatives by Joshua Ellis and Shelby Thayer (Penn State University)
• Advanced Email Analytics: How to track data, measure ROI and improve your email initiatives by Karlyn Morissette (Dartmouth College)

Register by March 16, 2009 at www.higheredexperts.com/analytics360

Questions? Email me at karine@collegewebeditor.com

Do you Ning?

If you’re not familiar with Ning, here’s what I wrote about it in University Business a couple of months ago:

Launched in October 2004, Ning is a social networking platform aimed at giving anyone the opportunity to create social networks for anything. Offered as a free web service-with some premium options for minimal monthly costs-Ning now powers thousands of niche social networking websites. With extended privacy settings and flexible state-of-the-art social networking features, this platform has gained some traction in higher education as a viable alternative to solutions offered by traditional vendors.

Among the institutions using the Ning platform are Keene State College (N.H.) for its private social networking website targeted to alums; the University of Richmond for a university-specific network open to students, faculty, staff, and alumni; the University of Wales, Newport (U.K.), for an online community targeted to new and prospective students; and the University of Maryland School of Social Work for My Social netWork, a website dedicated to the school’s new and current students.

Ning is definitely something you want to check out if you’re planning to launch an online community or social networking website for prospective/current students, alums or your campus community at large – especially in those tough budget times since this platform is very powerful, but doesn’t cost a dime (or a very minimal fee if you want your site to be ad-free).

Mark Greenfield from the University at Buffalo has become a sort of Ning evangelist in higher ed. Beyond his work on the uwebd social networking website – powered by Ning – Mark has also created several Ning websites for his institution and several associations.
Mike Caulfield launched the alum community of Keene State College powered by Ning last April. Mike has also been a very active political online community organizer.

Both Mark and Mike will be joined by Adam Stahr from UNL on January 13-15, 2009 to present the 3 webinars of “Social Networks MBA,” a series that you shouldn’t miss if you are in charge of an online community/social networking website for your institution.

Already sold on the idea?
You can get more information and register for Social Networks MBA at www.higheredexperts.com/socialnetworksmba.

If you want to learn more about the different sessions, just keep reading:

“Social Networks MBA” is a 3-webinar series that will help you decide if your institution should launch its own private niche social networking website. After this series, you will know why and how to nurture and develop a thriving online community around your own social networking website.

January 13, 2009 1PM-2PM ET – Rain date: January 20, 2009 1PM-2PM ET 1PM-2PM ET
Besides and Beyond Facebook: Do’s and Don’t's for your niche social network
Mark Greenfield, director of Web Services at UB, will help you figure out if a niche social network is what your institution needs to communicate with all or some of its constituents. Mark will share best practices and lessons learned in launching and maintaining a few niche social networks including a private site targeted to current students and a public site for higher ed web professionals.

January 14, 2009 1PM-2PM ET – Rain date: January 21, 2009 1PM-2PM ET
ROI-Oriented Social Network in a Box: Why and how to buy an integrated social network
Adam Stahr, Assistant Director for Special Communication at UNL Admissions Office, will explain why and how his institution launched Club Red, a private social networking website targeted to admitted students. Adam will also help you understand what it takes to run a social network that delivers results and great return on investment.

January 15, 2009 1PM-2PM ET – Rain date: January 22, 2009 1PM-2PM ET
Add-Member Social Network Mix : Why and how to host your free online community on Ning
Mike Caulfield, director of Web communications at Keene State College, will explain why and how his institution launched “About Keene and After,“ a private social networking website targeted to alums, in almost no time and no cost by leveraging the Ning platform. Mike will also share good tips and practical advice to jump start and nurture a community.

Find out more about this 3-webinar series at www.higheredexperts.com/socialnetworksmba. And, if you have any questions, feel free to email karine@collegewebeditor.com

Don’t know if you got a chance to read “Getting Consumers to Spend $150,000 With a Viral Effort,” this article published Monday in Advertising Age, but I’m pretty sure we would all love to have our institution featured in such a positive way in any media outlet (minus the price tag in the headline, maybe, in these difficult economic times):

I’m not in the market yet. But the other day, my 12-year-old, Morry, showed me this funny video clip he’d seen on one of the free online games he plays. (Yes, we’re cheap and we’re raising cheap kids.) It showed a really rotten rapper singing the praises of his college, Roanoke, and getting rejected at mascot tryouts. Morry clicked on another clip, this one of a redneck also trying out. Rejected. A streaker? Rejected. A goth girl? Rejected. Every possible stereotype had a 30-second audition in front of a weary, bemused panel of judges à la “American Idol,” and they all failed delightfully.

“Roanoke College,” mused Morry. “I’m thinking of going there. Or M.I.T.”

As this was our first college conversation, I had to find out more about this campy campaign.

A quick look at Roanoke College’s channel on Youtube shows that these videos did have some real traction with their target audiences — including the rapper video the Advertising Age journalist’s son loved so much with close to 70,000 views at the time of this writing (although this success might be explained by the ads the college bought on an online gaming website as reported in the article).

Roanoke College used a very interesting tactics that you might want to steal for your next viral video campaign. They posted some of these videos as replies to other popular high traffic YouTube videos, piggybacking on their success.

If you’d like to view all the videos, I’ve compiled a nice playlist of the 11 videos for your convenience.

The whole campaign is supported by a dedicated website to engage even further high school seniors: Classic College.

What do you think? Have your institution launched something similar?

This session is presented by Richard Hesel from the Art & Science Group.

Why this research?

studentPOLL is quarterly survey done since 1994 about different issues with a national sample.
Now, sample is done through The College Board and their SAT takers database.

90% of every college-bound students visits social networking websites (97% of African American)
84% have a profile page (93% of African American)
Why don’t they have it?
Parents 28%
Don’t have time 46%

Facebook and MySpace dominate
79% on Facebook (55% for Hispanics), 69% on MySpace (Hispanics 88%)
60% Facebook the most often visited with MySpace far behind 38%

70% visit site at least once a day, 32% 3 or more time

Why do they use social networking websites?

86% to stay in touch with friends they rarely see
80% with friends they see regularly
61% to talk about homework with classmates
41% have friends they met for the first time on a site (Hispanics and African American are more likely)
18% claim that they met their closest friends on the site

Only 7% report attending an event sponsored by a college they are interested in, 9% an event related to college admissions.
56% for parties.

What about privacy?
69% extremely or somewhat concerned that private information on their profile might affect their chances of admission to college.
59% that employers might use this information
50% keep private everything on their personal profiles
64% have changed the default privacy settings
83% are careful because their parents or other adults might see it.

22% looked for college pages on social networking sites
18% used sites to gather information or impressions about colleges (looking for friends, comments, students groups, pictures)
16% would be more interested in a college where a friend attend, 48% somehow interested

Campus visits have still the biggest influence (72% much more interested)
College websites 47%

Some conclusions from Richard Hesel

• No digital divide on uses of SNS with college-bound students
• SNS not a primary or effective marketing/communications tool for prospective students
• Direct marketing through SNS may be seen as an invasion of private space and become counter productive
• Greater commercialization of SNS may further dilute potential value as college communications tool
• Focus on nuanced personal social connections
• Use of SNS as a communication tool may be more effective with minority students

Get all the details of this survey results on the presentation PDF file (attention, this is a big PPT file)

This session is presented by Deborah Maue, Assistant VP for Marketing Strategy at DePaul University.

DePaul hired a Word of Mouth Marketing Agency to try to tell the story more effectively, using its internal audience more effectively as ambassadors. The WOMM plan was built on DePaul’s core values.

They decided to build a social community for people who had a strong affinity for DePaul.
Parents were chosen for the pilot project.

The Quad was launched in August 2007 and targeted to parents of undergraduates (first new freshmen, then deposited freshmen, juniors and seniors and in Jan 2009 DePaul will invite parents of admitted students)

Why Parents?
Strong affiliation with the institution emotionally and financially
Scary time in their lives
Parents are a credible source of higher ed information for other parents

Brad Ward did an interview a few weeks ago about the topic and shared some of the screenshots via Flickr he took from the Quad:

(To see full-size photos, click here)

Results?

1,863 registered members (30% of invited)
2,794 visits per month
1,100 unique visits per month
Forum Participation 2.25%
Email open 45%
Poll participation 1%

Popular Topics
Campus safety/security
Health services
Empty nest syndrome
How/how much to communicate
How to support students without meddling
What’s going on that they don’t know about (career services, advising, student services)

10 things DePaul learned

1. You have to remind members of the value of coming back
   2 to 3 email per week: new content, new parents issues being discussed
   General parenting tips, site updates and did-you-know type of content
   With regular emails, traffic increased
2. It’s about them, not about you
   After launch, they allowed parents to suggest discussion topics
   Parents didn’t want to talk about the pillars, but their experience
   DePaul realized this community could only be a community for parents, couldn’t be scaled to include other audiences
3. More lurkers/readers than participants
   2.5% members are content creators, then content readers and raters
   There are super users, extremely active posters: “The Parents of The Parents”
   DePaul engaged them as bloggers.
4. If you ask feedback, do something about it
   Thank people for their feedback – even if it’s negative
   If you can solve the problem, do it. DePaul did it with an issue around their Health Services
5. Even if people have something negative to say, most will find a nice way to say it
   People are respectful of the institution and want to help
   Offer the possibility to contact you directly (Ask DePaul) so if they have something bad to say they will be able to do it directly
6. Don’t use cash incentives
   Send thank you emails
   Send free stuff to top posters
7. No need to build it from scratch
8. People join communities to connect with each other
   Encourage people to submit pictures
   First discussion topic should be introductions
   Make it easy for parents to connect off-line too (150 said they would like to do it)
9. This takes a lot of time
   It requires a daily commitment from several offices
   Community management shouldn’t be outsourced
10. Figure out your specific goals
    Difficult to measure word-of-mouth

Communities are a great way to do ongoing market research
DePaul just launched its second social community: Kellstadt Link.

I’m currently wrapping up putting together my slides and handouts for the following 4-hour workshop I’ll give at the AMA Symposium for Higher Education on November 16, 2008:

Blogging Boot Camp: How to Start and Develop a Successful Blog

Since I would have never been asked to present this workshop without this blog, I thought it might be a good idea to invite your input about its content.

Hey, you’re the readers and some of you are also bloggers!

So, here are my questions to you:
Is there anything you’d like to know about blogging in a higher ed setting?
or, if you’re a blogger yourself, is there anything you wish you had known before starting your blog?

Please post your reply in the comments (I’ve finally added a subscribe-to-comments plugin, but haven’t had a chance to test it yet, so let me know if it doesn’t work)

I wrote about UF previous campaigns and videos in the past.

So, when Joe Hice, AVP for Public Relations and Marketing at the University of Florida, emailed me about their new Gator Nation ad campaign earlier this week, it didn’t take me long to check it out.

The TV spot (that I can’t show you yet unfortunately – but I will update the post as soon as it’s possible) will debut this Friday at Gator Growl and during halftime of the Florida vs. Georgia game on Nov. 1.

What I found really interesting in this new campaign is the fact that it has a user-generated component relaying the main theme of the TV sport “Remember when you became a Gator.”

On its companion website, InsidetheGatorNation.com, all the Gators (UF students and alums) are invited to share their own Gator story on camera by uploading and tagging it on YouTube.

When I check yesterday, several dozens of videos were already available and had been uploaded by a few YouTube users, so I asked Joe more about it.

We did a “soft launch” of the Remember When concept about two weeks ago. Working with our student PR agency — Alpha Productions — we’ve been out collecting Remember When stories from a variety of people. I think we have more than 80 videos posted and just as many written stories.

Here’s a my selection of some of those stories available on YouTube:

Tonight at the Gator Growl event, UF will also be introducing its mobile Remember When video booth as Joe explained in his email:

The mobile booth is a 30-foot box van with Plexiglas sides and back panels. We’ve created a bright orange and blue billboard-type ad for each side and the back and we invite people to come in and tell us their Remember When stories. The video studio is actually set up right inside the van. Pretty cool stuff. When we’re not using the van for video, it will be cruising the area with our billboards.

Go Gators!

Later today, I’ll be hosting the second webinar of “PR School 2.0″ presented by Andrew Careaga from Missouri S&T. Yesterday, Matt Herzberger did a great job with his session “Monitoring 360.”

Earlier this week, I announced via email the winners of the prizes drawn among the people who took the HEE/eduStyle/uWebd survey. And, I got a couple of email from people who wished they had won.

This got me thinking about an easy way to make everybody a winner, cheer you up and fight the recession blues.

If you register and pay for both last webinar series of 2008 offered by Higher Ed Experts, you’ll receive a $25 Amazon gift card. No drawing, no tough question, just an instant win… for everybody actually.

• You win because you get a $25 Amazon gift card to buy that special book or something
• Your institution wins because it can provide great professional development (5 webinars about hot topics: social networks, online communities and email marketing) to a whole team (geez, to the whole campus if you have a big, big LCD screen) for just $540 per connection
• The webinar speakers win because they will get bigger attendance to their series (and they are compensated proportionally to attendance)
• Yours truly wins too by reducing HEE promotion budget for the end of the year (hey, the economy is tough for everybody)

So, just to be clear, here are the conditions again to get your $25 Amazon gift certificate:

• Register using your email address for Social Networks MBA (Nov 11-13, 2008) at www.higheredexperts.com/socialnetworksmba AND Email Marketing 360 (December 2-3, 2008) at www.higheredexperts.com/emailmarketing360
• Pay for both series (payment will be final – no cancellation or refund for the series allowed, if something prevents you from attending, you’ll get access to the recordings on-demand – didn’t I tell you that everybody wins no matter what?)

Got questions? Just email karine@higheredexperts.com