Dan Karleen from Thomson Peterson’s and Rob Pongsajapan from Georgetown University served some real meat about the higher ed admission blogosphere at the lunch table on “New Voices: Observations from the University Blogosphere†at the EduWeb Conference yesterday in Baltimore.
Nina Sossen, Web Communications Director at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is one of the seven very nice people who agreed to share their notes with all of us who couldn’t attend the EduWeb conference this year.
If you have an interest in higher ed admission blogging but don’t have blogs yet, you should probably try to attend Nina’s presentation this afternoon: “To Blog or Not To Blog.â€
If you already have student blogs, I’ll have more interesting interviews for you soon, as my August column for University Business tries to answer the question of return on invesment for these initiatives.
Dan Karleen from Thomson Peterson’s and Rob Pongsajapan from Georgetown University led a Lunch Topic Table on “New Voices: Observations from the University Blogosphere.â€
Dan and Rob have been working on a study of eight universities actively involved in blogging programs with current students blogging as part of admissions marketing. Their research is being conducted in conjunction with the Society for New Communication Research.
The institutions they surveyed were:
Ball State University
Biola University
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Maine College of Art
Oregon State University
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
University of Dayton
University of Vermont
All of these institutions are activity blogging – updating their blogs at least one time a week – and are using blogging software.
Why are universities using blogs?
Some want to be “in the club.†Others, for example Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), do it because they want to be able to have students tell their story outside of the context of the admissions office materials.
The intended audience is prospective students, but they found that parents, parents of prospective students and current students are also reading the blogs.
Recruiting bloggers
Recruiting student bloggers carefully is essential for success because it’s important that the student bloggers carry through on their commitment to write the blogs.
Compensation
All schools provided some sort of compensation to the student bloggers, either direct or indirect payment (for example gifts). They also provided necessary tools for blogging: digital cameras or audio recorders.
Blog Software
Using blogging software like Blogger or WordPress has advantages for universities setting up blogs.
1. Once they’re set up, blogs are easy to maintain
2. Blogs look more “blog-like†because they’re consistent with other blogs across the Web
3. They control spam
4. They help connect to greater blogosphere
Comments
Many university blogs turn the blog comments feature off, either because they are afraid of the quantity of comments or of the questionable content of the comments. Dan says that not including comments misses a critical piece of information of blogs and some might say it’s not a blog without comments.
Audio and Video
Incorporating audio into blogs wasn’t very popular because students had to keep the audio narration going which was a lot of work. Using video to tell the story was more popular.
Dan and Rob will be presented the results of their study at a conference in Boston in the fall.