Here’s an easy way to differentiate your institution. Hold chat events for specific student demographics. For example, you could host a live chat event for international students, physically challenged students, or Engineering majors.
Applicants are more likely to participate when they see that their specific needs and interests are being addressed.
Here’s another variation to consider. After you’ve sent out the letters of acceptance, host a special live chat event for all the applicants who have been accepted. This is an incredibly efficient way to answer questions, and potential incoming students can get to know each other during the chat. This could also increase the chances that each student will choose to attend your institution.
The News & Record, a local daily from North Carolina, ran a piece this week called “The last generation to remember a world without the Internet“. It really drives home a point we like to make in our free webinar about marketing to Millennials: to this generation the Internet has always existed.
Realizing this truth has implications to your all of your interactions with this group, be that as a recruiter, an admissions counselor, an adviser or even a professor and mentor.
The Internet has replaced or converted much of what was considered normal parts of growing up. Take this anecdote about a girl playing a barbie:
“You know, when I was your age, we played with real Barbies,” I tell the young girl sitting at the computer. She giggles and clicks the virtual Barbie on her screen, instantly changing her hair from curly blonde to straight with pink highlights.
It’s important to realize that while you and I did this to write a paper, this scene will be a foreign concept to a Millennial:
I’ll never forget writing papers in middle school without the Internet. My language arts teacher would take us all to the school library, where we would sit at long tables with piles of books spread in front of us and take notes on index cards. Then we drafted our papers, by hand, on notebook paper.
The lesson here is that to market and interact with this generation you have to put yourselves in their shoes and try to see the world as they do, a world that revolves around the Internet and around mobile technology.
UPDATE 2: The upgrade has been rescheduled to June 27th @ 8 AM EST. We will be upgrading Web Chat’s network hardware. We expect our new features release to be in July. More on that later.
UPDATE: The upgrade has been rescheduled to June 28th @ 8 AM EST.
On Sunday, June 14th 27th @ 8 AM EST we will be installing a big upgrade to our flagship web chat product University WebChat. WebChat will be offline for about an hour — from 8 AM to 9 AM — for this upgrade.
We are excited to release this new version as it includes some cool new features for which our customers have been asking. I’ll post more details about what’s in the new upgrade as the date approaches.
Alison H, a Ford Fiesta Social Network "Agent"
As Jacob wrote a few weeks ago on Recruiting Millennials (he’s always beating me to the punch!), Ford is betting big on Social Networking to sell it’s new Fiesta, a car which has turned out to be highly popular in Europe.
Ford recently awarded 100 Fiestas to 100 millennials (Ford calls them “agents”) selected from over 4,000 applicants. The agents get to use the cars free for six months in exchange for completing monthly “missions” ad sharing their experiences through popular social networks, such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter.
For example, Alison H, pictured here, is one of the Fiesta agents, and you can read about her experiences with the Fiesta on her personalized website, which links to her Twitter (7,650 followers), YouTube (22 videos) and website.
Ford’s website, FiestaMovement.com pulls in content from all of their “agents” across the web to let visitors “follow the Movement in one convenient place.”
So what’s the connection? Imagine empowering and organizing 5 students from your incoming class to use social networking tools to tell your school’s story to the next cohort of applicants. Is it risky? Yes. But based on Ford’s gambit, they are expecting the payoff to be worth the risk.
Scarborough Research released a study on marketing to Hispanic consumers. Reaching this rapidly-growing demographic should already be high priority for you, and the Scarborough study confirms that recruiting Hispanic Millennials requires a strong Internet presence.
The highlight of the study is that Hispanics are 211% more likely to download content from the Internet than the general population.
Music is the number one download for this demographic, as it is for most. But if you produce videos, podcasts, or a PDF of your college catalog the Scarborough study may offer some encouraging news.
In a 2007 report, the Hispanic College Fund found that almost 98% of Hispanic high school students claimed they wanted to attend college or university. Obviously, many of these students haven’t followed through on their dreams, but our job is to recruit the ones who have.
Given such a plugged-in group within the ultimate plugged-in generation, your institution should have lots of great online content for Millennials to plug into. I can’t think of a better plug for blogs, podcasts, online video and chat rooms.
National Association of Graduate Admissions Professionals 2009 Conference, New York
Kathy Hua-Di, Recruitment Coordinator for the University of Southern California School of Social Work, and I will be presenting on Thursday (4/23) at the National Association of Graduate Admissions Professionals (NAGAP) annual conference in New York. If you won’t be there in person, read on to find out how you can make an appearance also, via web chat!
At our session, Technology 101: Recruiting Millennials Using Web Chat, we’ll be discussing how and why to use Web Chat to recruit millennials.
The generation of students entering college this year have never known a world without the Internet. Graduate schools that don’t communicate using newer technologies run the risk of missing out on some of today’s top students.
Fortunately, you don’t have to be tech-savvy to reach Millennials, or Generation Y. Web-based chat is an example of how new Internet technologies can be adopted at a low cost and with little training. Kathy Hua-Di will provide an overview of the electronic communication tools that are natural for this year’s incoming freshman and suggests ways that these tools can become an integral part of the admissions process based on her experience using Web Chat at the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work.
I’ll be providing a demo, and discussing some research findings about how recruitment professionals are using webchat, who they are inviting to chats, and who is participating in web chats.
If you won’t be able to attend, but would like to make an appearance at the conference, join the following web chat room at the specified time and date, and you’ll be able to participate in a live web chat during our conference session! If you plan to participate, please send me an email, so I can acknowledge you in the Web Chat during the session.
Join the NAGAP Web Chat Conference Session Live
Thursday, April 23, 2009
8am PDT / 9am MDT / 10am CDT / 11am EDT
http://nagap.universitywebchat.com/chat6843/
I hope to see you there!
Mission Statements — and generally large blocks of text — tend not to resonate with this millennial. And it seems your correspondent isn’t alone. A neat post over at BrettHummel.com explores the effect of these in employing Millennials:
To understand an employer brand, a person must first understand what an employer brand is not. Human resource executives often make the mistake of defining an employer brand through a slogan. Many of the management and entrepreneurial books suggest that creating a slogan energizes and focuses employees on a company’s goals. While that may have worked in the 90’s, we have become a society completely over stimulated with slogans. According to Nike we should “Just Do It”; Canon seeks to “Beat Xerox”, but much like advertising messages, Millennials have tuned these catch phrases out of their conscience.
The key word for me at the end of that post is “tuned these catch phrases out of their conscience”. We know Millennials are inundated with marketing messages every minute or every hour of every day, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that generic, “mission-statementy” language just doesn’t resonate with this group.
The lesson? Drop the slogan and manage your school or program like a brand. Engage in the online discussion happening right now about your school, in typical Millennial haunts like Facebook and MySpace. Join the conversation, offer your opinion, and provide the instant information and customer support access this group needs.
Brett’s advice for building better marketing language is relevant for higher-ed:
The normal corporate jargon of achieving synergy, strong partnerships, and value for the shareholder serves no purpose defining a company or the creation of its employer brand. Instead of vague mission and vision statements, corporations should define themselves with a series of short, powerful statements that can be easily transmitted throughout the community and workplace.
On April 1st, YouTube launched YouTubeEDU, an aggregate of videos around higher education.
If you’re hungry for constant learning, this is a great resource for watching lectures and interviews. But I’m not sure exactly how useful it will be for recruiting Millennials for your institution.
YouTube EDU has its share of recruitment videos, of course. But a quick sampling of these didn’t show me anything I hadn’t already expected.
There are a number of slick, corporate-like productions that most prospects will ignore, and some gritty recruitment efforts, such as a job fair which would probably be good except that the background noise drowns out the voices of that narrator and the students being interviewed. One video offers 45 seconds of a giggling sophomore who gushes about how much she loves her college mascot, without explaining why she or anyone else would want to attend that particular school.
If any Millennials are really going to rely on YouTube to select their campus, they can find relevant videos more quickly by doing a normal search. I don’t see how YouTube EDU offers anything special, aside from maybe weeding out the junk videos like “Drunken CSU student vomits in pool.”
But don’t write it off just yet.
This is the classic Web 2.0 style, where you “just build it and see what the masses do.” And we don’t really know what they’ll do.
Getting your institution’s videos onto YouTube EDU needn’t be a top priority just now, but it may be worth keeping an eye on the site.
An article over at online magazine metromode tells an interesting story about Millennials working in civic roles that are usually filled by senior citizens:
“It’s all about giving back to the community,” says Amy Lampinen, a 25-year-old who was just appointed to the Historic District Commission of Royal Oak. She says there’s one other person she works with who is also in his early 30s. “And it’s important for someone my age to be here. As a young person I can give a fresh perspective. It’s an investment in the community. Other young people see a young person involved and it makes them feel represented and invested to stay here.”
Within a decade this Millennial generation will be the largest the in United States, and they will become more and more involved:
“The millennials are the second largest demographic right now in the United States,” says Arnold Weinfeld, president of the Michigan Municipal League Foundation. “In a few years they are going to take over the largest demographic – the baby boomers. We have to reach out to them. Get them involved.” There are an additional 70 million residents in the U.S. 17 and under. Compare that to the 77 million baby boomers and you see what Weinfeld is getting at.
Given the economic climate — where layoffs and scarce work for newly graduated students is scarce — this trend of civic employment can only increase. Is your program well-suited to serve this niche? Are you telling this story?
