NACAC Report Finds Use of Social Networking Tools on the Rise in College Admission Offices

National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) released a white paper (to members only) on college admissions offices use of social networking activity.

From NACAC.org site:

“Social media tools, like Facebook, Twitter and blogs, are key to communicating with this generation of students,” stated Joyce Smith, NACAC CEO. “While still no substitute for face-to-face interaction, social media have opened lines of communication and inquiry for both students and institutions that were inconceivable only a decade ago.”

Other findings of note include:

• More than half (53 percent) of colleges monitor social media for “buzz” about their institution.
  
• A majority of colleges maintain a presence in social media, as 33 percent of colleges maintain a blog, 29 maintain a presence on social networking Web sites, 27 percent maintain message- or bulletin-boards, 19 percent employ video blogging, and 14 percent issue podcasts. Thirty-nine percent of colleges reported using no social media technology.
  
• Eighty-eight percent of admission offices believed social media were either “somewhat” or “very” important to their future recruitment efforts.

Visit NACAC.org for more information.

Millennials have “Grown Up Digital”

“Technology is a part of their life, it’s like air,” says Bill Tapscott, author of “Grown Up Digital.”

I wanted to share this great podcast from December from net@nite with Amber and Leo.  Author Tapscott discusses how the net generation is a force for change and how the cynical views of this generation don’t hold up.

You can download the first chapter of “Grown Up Digital” here.

Learning from Ford Fiesta’s millennial marketing gambit

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.

Do you Twitter?

Twitter, Twitter, everywhere, Twitter, Twitter here and there.

George Stephanopoulos (@gstephanopoulos) interviewed John McCain via Twitter. Senators like Barbara Boxer, Russ Feingold and Claire McCaskill use Twitter… and so do tons more people in the government. Even Lance Armstrong takes take from cycling to tweet.

Even the blogger at higher ed marketing uses it.

So what is Twitter? It’s a micro-blogging service that encourages people to post short messages no longer than 140 characters and answer the question “What are you doing?” That’s really, if you can believe it. Just a service that lets you post short phrases and follow other people who use the service.

So why do you need to know about Twitter? Well, besides that tons of your prospects are twittering (and you can read their Twitter feed to get a better idea of who they are), you can use it to bring your message (your great program and school) to a medium where willing people will listen.

Give it a try. Here are a few ideas for getting started:

1. Sign-up, it’s free.
2. Name your account for your program, like “upennmed” or “ucdavisbio”.
3. Ask your work studies if they use Twitter. I’ll bet that you will find some that do. “Follow them” in your Twitter account.
4. Link to your Twitter page from your admissions home page.
5. Start writing tweets! Mention stuff like upcoming deadlines, simple anecdotes that you encounter as an admissions officer and news about your program.
6. Decide on a schedule — maybe three tweet a day — and stick to it for three weeks.

After three weeks I’ll bet that you have lots of prospects following your feed and you will be engaged in an exciting conversation with your inquirers about your programs and your admissions process.

Not all scary: Millennial blogger highlights the positive

Millennials often get a bad press, describing this generation as being lazy and entitled. So it’s nice to remember this generation — like all others — has it’s good and less good points.

A recent blog post by a Millennial, blogger and marketing student caught my eye. In his post “Marketing to the Big Scary Monster”, he explains that as a marketing student is often bombarded with loads of disparaging statistics, comments and ideas about Millennials. In his post he does a nice job of highlighting several positive traits:

1. Compared to 1995, teens today are more likely to embrace their parent’s
   values.
2. The average combined SAT score has risen nearly 15 points since 1996.
3. Read the rest.

His blog is well written and insightful. This Millennial is clearly communicating well in the medium that he is comfortable with and grew up with: the Internet. It looks like he uses blogs, Twitter (micro-blogging) and Facebook (a social network).

It looks like he is already in school, but what about his cohorts who aren’t yet in graduate school? Is your marketing plan engaging with these prospects on the Internet? If it isn’t, does this worry you?

How to use admissions blogs to recruit Millennials

You probably believe in the potential value of blogs, since you’re reading ours. But when we researched our recent white paper, we discovered something interesting.

Most of the admissions officers we talked to said they felt admissions blogs were important. And the students we interviewed who said they visited blogs generally found them useful. But a surprising number of Millennials told us they had never visited an admissions blog.

This is the classic online dilemma: You build it, but they don’t come.

We did manage to find some exceptions, and you’ll find links to some outstanding and successful admissions blogs in our white paper. There are two strategies that seem to consistently make these blogs effective.

The first is simple. You have to publicize the blog. In your emails and other correspondence with applicants, on your main web pages, and every time you interact with Millennials you should make them aware of your blog. Whenever possible, give them a specific reason to visit your blog.

The other big blogging secret my be unnerving to some. The secret is to let students post in the blog, uncensored. This gives your blog an authenticity that may be missing if every post was written by an admissions counselor. The most effective (and popular) blogs have a healthy balance of posts from both the students and the administration.

We’ve included a lot of information on blogging and other technology in our white paper, The Millennial Environment: New Recruitment Strategies for the Next Generation. You can download it here.

Tap into the activist energy of Generation We

A lot has been said about Millennials’ sense of entitlement and overconfidence. Yet many of them are ready to take responsibility for the problems they’ll inherit but didn’t cause.

A new video on Gen-We.org takes this to a new level. Steely-eyed Millennials, half of whom are either soldiers or in the middle of a kung-fu workout, talk seriously about their “damaged future.”

“We must vote in unprecedented numbers,” they admonish the viewer, and even if you think they’re naive you have to give them credit for their earnestness and concern.

Trophy kids they are not, and these are probably the driven, globally aware, farsighted Millennials you’d like to recruit for your institution. How can you do it?

On a practical level, Gen We has a FaceBook group that boasts over 1,300 members even though it’s been in existence for less than a month.  As a broader strategy, emphasize your institution’s future orientation. Show them how your institution will prepare them for the role of world problem-solvers.

Should you be using Facebook to recruit millennials?

Image from Kennesaw State University Admissions photos on Facebook

Using social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace can be a double-edged sword, with some millennials telling Admissions officers to “Get Out of MySpace!“.

Now BusinessWeek presents the other side of the story in an outstanding article, “The Admissions Office Finds Facebook“, on how some savvy admissions professionals are reaching out to top students using Facebook. From the article:

[Scott] Minto [director of the admissions office at San Diego State University's Sports Management Program] is part of a small but growing number of graduate school and college admissions officers who are aggressively using Facebook to recruit students for their programs… By drawing students to Facebook, schools hope to keep in constant touch with potential students, as well as provide them with important updates on the school, without bombarding them with dozens of e-mails and mass mailings.

According to Business Week’s research, there are about 60 schools that have developed official admissions recruiting groups or fan pages on Facebook. Here are links to several from the BusinessWeek article, as well as a few I discovered in our research for our forthcoming whitepaper on using technology to market to millennials.

University of Arkansas Admissions (525 fans)

UC Davis Undergraduate Admissions (1,137 members)

Rotman MBA Admissions (393 members)

Southern Nazarene University Admissions (309 fans)

Kennesaw University Admissions (509 fans)

Do you know of others? Post them here.

Millennials to universities: “Get out of MySpace!”

Image from MySpace profile: It seemed like a good idea at the time...

We have been researching which technologies can be best used by higher education organizations to reach out to millennials. (The white paper on this topic will be out next month.) While interviewing several millennials for the paper, I was surprised to find sharply-divided opinions about universities and colleges reaching out to millennials on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Some millennials seemed to feel that this was natural, and appropriate. Others felt that a university presence on social networking sites was an invasion of the millennial’s privacy and inappropriate. As one high school student applying to callege said: “OMG, I don’t want my college to see my MySpace page.”

I subsequently ran across this fascinating article from the Guardian’s Education edition (November 5, 2007):

“Businesses are banning social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook — but, to the alarm of students, universities are using them more and more… [A] research exercise carried out by the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc), called the Learner Experience Project, has just revealed, amazingly, that students want to be left alone. Their message to the trendy academics is: ‘Get out of MySpace!’ “

I’m guessing that this dichotomy is going to become an increasingly important issue. Facebook and MySpace are anything but private, and the youthful rantings and flirting of an 18-year old are likely to be embarassing to when the writer is now a 22-year college college graduate old looking for a job. I know that I look up potential candidates on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Google before making a hiring decision.

(Image thanks to m e l t via Flickr.)