collegematters

2009-07-22T13:15:00.000-04:00

The challenge to blogging more often is finding dynamic, thought provoking, and relevant information, because that is my personal commitment to those who follow my blog. Since I am hot on the trail of improving my social media marketing skills, it should not be too difficult to fulfill that commitment as I continue to explore and discover more about how to use social (and business) networks to promote my business—and, by extension, your colleges and universities.

First, a few statistics to demonstrate why college administrators should consider social networks for connecting with prospective and current students. According to a recent report on social networking demographics available at marketinghub.info (they used Facebook member demographics as the sample population), 84% of the 22 million people in the US using Facebook are 14-26 years old. Forty-seven percent (47%) are currently high school or college students (I could not locate the breakdown of this statistic, but it would be interesting to know how many of them are high school students since for most colleges/universities that is our target market. The report also noted that 55% of these users are female. The short—and somewhat unscientific—interpretation of these statistics is: If you recruit traditional age students, they are hanging out in significant numbers on Facebook (and probably on other social networks in similar proportions).

Until I attended the Social Media Marketing seminar last week, I saw Facebook as my friends and family network. I have tried to preserve that distinction by referring people who found my listing there and wanted to connect to LinkedIn, which I saw as my professional network. I post items of interest about my hobbies and family events on Facebook, while my updates on LinkedIn are based on projects and activities related to my career. After careful consideration—and looking at the demographics on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, I will likely reconsider my initial decision to separate the two in that way. Here’s my reasoning based on data pulled from http://www.quantcast.com.

Total Users
Facebook – 90.8 million users as of July 17, 2009 (all are US users)
Twitter – 26.5 million users as of June, 2009 (all are US users)
LinkedIn – 31.4 million users as of July 17, 2009 (10.9 million are US users)

Age
Facebook – 23.6 million are over 34
Twitter – 13.2 million are over 34
LinkedIn – 8 million are over 34

Education
Facebook has 50.8 million users with a college degree (42%) or graduate degree (14%)
Twitter has 15.1 million users with a college degree (43%) or graduate degree (14%)
LinkedIn has 8.7 million users with a college degree (52%)* or graduate degree (28%)* OR LinkedIn college and graduate degree holders could be as few as 2.4 million users

Missing Data
There is no way to know from the available data what percentage of the US population in each site works in higher education, nor is there a way to know what portion of the LinkedIn users with college and graduate degrees are US users.

Assumptions
The assumptions I make about my target population are that senior managers are more apt to be in the over-34 age range and hold a college or graduate degree.

Conclusion
Based on my assumptions, Facebook would be the better social networking option for potentially reaching my target market because it has more users overall, more users in the over-34 age range, and more users with college or graduate degrees than Twitter or LinkedIn.

(By the way, if you are a statistician and my thumbnail assessment is seriously flawed, I’d love to hear from you! I realize it is not a sophisticated set of assumptions; however, given what data is available, it seemed to make sense.)

Once you decide what your typical student’s demographic profile is, you can decide which social network is most likely to reach the highest number of those people and begin your adventure into connecting with students through social networking with that site.

In the world of Social Media Marketing, there's always more to learn!

2009-07-18T14:06:00.008-04:00

Maybe you are already an expert in using Web 2.0 to get more exposure or increase your professional (or personal) network. I'm not, so today I attended a seminar on Social Media Marketing and realized there is so much more potential than I am using--or could ever possibly have imagined had I continued to rely on my own limited experience with this phenomenal tool. My next few blogs will focus on what I learned and what I am implementing to improve my web presence. Hopefully, as I share my journey, you will find some helpful information that you can use.

The first thing I learned that I wanted to share is I need to be blogging more frequently than I have in the past. Although I still promise not to swamp my readers with too many blog posts, I am going to use the blog to document my journey into the world of social media marketing in the hopes that others will be inspired to learn more about unlocking the potential of this vast resource.

There are many other things I learned about using the social media marketing tools well. For example, I learned about Ping.fm where I can update several social media sites simultaneously instead of trying to manage each one individually--that tip alone was worth the $25 fee for this introductory seminar even though I now want to reconsider what I post on some of the sites. Until now I have made a clear distinction between my personal (Facebook) and professional (LinkedIn) social networks thinking I didn't want my friends to have to weed through my professional posts nor my professional acquaintances to have to endure my personal tweets. I now know about creating groups to have more control over who sees what and where they see it.

The presenters (Eric & Tina Bryant, owners and web designers at Core Zero Creative ) really know Web 2.0 and how to use it to increase a company's exposure on the Internet by developing a strategic social networking strategy. Social networking sites they overviewed included Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and they covered blogging, SEO (tune in again if you don't know what that is), bookmarking, link posting and so much more. Of course, this was just an overview, but I came away from just two hours with some tips I can put into practice immediately...like blogging more often!

Speaking of Expectations…

2009-06-16T22:21:00.000-04:00

Current student retention wisdom points to student engagement as the pivotal element for reducing attrition. Student engagement is the art of connecting students to the institution through activities, programs, communities of learners, interest groups and the like. We generally believe student engagement begins once a student is sitting in classes. Consider, however, that student engagement begins at a much earlier stage in the student’s relationship with the institution.

In the last blog I cautioned colleges to ensure that accreditation visiting teams have a consistent experience of the campus in its collateral materials, campus experience, and self-study report. Creating cognitive accord—the sense that things fit together as expected—is not only important in the accreditation process, but also crucial to student engagement. Students form expectations about their college experience well before they even begin the college search. Students want to find a college where they believe they will fit in and enjoy a sense of belonging. In the early stages of a student’s college search, the college’s collateral materials are central to helping students form expectations. Viewbooks, catalogs, websites, and other information provided by the college all communicate particular images that students subconsciously match against what they hope will actually be their college experience. If these materials communicate a mixed or masked message, students will sense a hollowness that leaves them uncertain about the institution, or more specifically, their fit with the institution. Likewise, if the catalog, viewbook, website, etc. deliver a consistent and unswerving message, it is easier for the prospect to see him or herself as a future student. That perception—based on the image presented by the college and the student’s sense of fit with that image—engages the student at a fundamentally instinctive level.

Any of the following situations could indicate your institution is creating cognitive dissonance rather than the cognitive accord necessary for prospective students to not only become your students, but also your graduates:

• High number of inquiries, low percentage of appointments
• High number of appointments set, low percentage of appointments held
• High number of appointments held, low percentage of applications
• High number of applications, low percentage of students actually attend
• High number of new student enrollments, high student attrition rates

If any of these situations occurs at your institution, let College Matters review your catalog, viewbook, and website to determine whether you are communicating a clear and cohesive image to prospective students, identify what reasonably would be the prospect’s expectation of your institution, and/or conduct a full site audit that includes comparing the campus experience with the expectations set through your collateral materials. To schedule your review, contact siteaudit@collegematters.us.

Books, Movies, and Trailers

2009-03-07T20:28:00.000-05:00

Would you agree there are few things more disappointing than reading a very good book then being disappointed by the movie version? As a reader, I have a certain expectation about what the movie will be like after I have read the book (or vice versa). When the two do not closely mirror one another I find myself disappointed, disillusioned and sometimes confused about which experience was real. There is a cognitive dissonance that is created when my expectations are not met by my experiences. I have a theory that the accreditation process is much the same experience. I'll share the short version of that theory here.

The accreditation self-study report is the book you write to tell the story about your school. The visiting team reads the book and visits the campus to "see the movie". The extent to which those two experiences match is the single most influential factor in how the team reports back to the commission on your behalf. The team reads the self-study report before arriving on campus. When the team arrives they are seeking to validate their interpretation of your self-study report and are concerned with the congruence between your report, their experience of your school, and how you present your school in the trailers (all the written materials that represent your institution--catalog, website, advertisements, etc.).

The consistency between the story you tell in your publications (the trailers), the narrative in the self-study report (the book), and the team's experience of your school during their visit (the movie) is often the only thing commissioners actually know about your school when they make their final determination to award accreditation because the only information often available to commissioners is what is inclided in the team's report and your self-study.

If my theory is correct, the primary concern during the self-study itself is ensuring collateral materials presented to the team are current, fairly represent the institution's current practices, and are reflected in the language and tone of the self-study report. You will also want to ensure that what the team experiences while on campus is what they would expect to find based on the expectations they created from reading the materials you provided. Make sure the movie and the book mirror each other and that the trailers adequately represent both.