New University Web Chat Features!

We released a major upgrade to University Web Chat on Saturday, October 3rd. It’s full of new features and improvements!

Major new features:

• Customize the full room and closed room messages students see
• In room alerts to moderators as chatters arrive and leave
• New screen to change the sub domain for your account
• New sticky scrollbar to ease reviewing of previous chats
• Instant email alerts when your room fills up and people are trying to enter
• Auto-suggest chatter name when chatting
• Direct message name highlighting in chat

Improvements:

• Chat messages can now be twice as long (up to 500 characters)
• Support for PNG logo uploads
• Improved color selection for Google Chrome
• New “Web Chat Guide” added to the help documentation
• Update email address in settings
• Chatter invite and moderator support for IE8
• Room closed and full messages will automatically link entered URLs
• Loads of bug fixes and little refinements

All free and paid account holders get the upgrade for free.

Sign up today!

Major new features:

- Customize the full room and closed room messages students see

- In room alerts to moderators as chatters arrive and leave

- New screen to change the sub domain for your account

- New sticky scrollbar to ease reviewing of previous chats

- Instant email alerts when your room fills up and people are trying to enter

- Auto-suggest chatter name when chatting

- Direct message name highlighting in chat

Improvements:

- Chat messages can now be twice as long (up to 500 characters)

- Support for PNG logo uploads

- Improved color selection for Google Chrome

- New “Web Chat Guide” added to the help documentation

- Update email address in settings

- Chatter invite and moderator support for IE8

- Room closed and full messages will automatically link entered URLs

- Loads of bug fixes and little refinements

University Web Chat Downtime: 10/3 from 7-9AM PST

We are excited to announce that the next version of web chat is coming out on Saturday, October 3rd.

We will be releasing details on all the new features soon. The upgrade is free for all customers, and you don’t have to do anything to receive it, we will upgrade your account for you.

In order to install the new upgrade University Web Chat will be offline on Saturday, October 3rd from 7 AM to 9 AM sunny Los Angeles time (PST).

Kindly contact support if you have any questions.

Thanks!

A helpful guide to recruiting with student-created YouTube videos

Here I go again, stressing the power of student-created recruitment videos. But it turns out I’m not the only one.

Stamats makes the same point, and they’ve gone even further: They’ve put together a great blog post full of practical tips and examples.

There’s only one thing I would add to Fritz McDonald’s excellent post. At the beginning, he laments the fact most recruiting videos only get a handful of views. But while he offers great advice on how to make a video worth watching, there aren’t any tips on how to promote your video.

The secret to promoting your video, of course, is to let everyone know it’s there. Often. And in many ways. For example:

• Tell everyone–students, colleagues, parents, applicants, the person who delivers the pizza.
• Mention new videos in your blog, email, web chat, FaceBook, Twitter, conferences and interviews.
• Post a link to it on your website, if you can’t actually host or embed it.

If you do all of these things, a lot of people will watch your video. Once. If you follow Fritz McDonald’s advice, they’ll spread the word and do some of your recruiting work for you.

Laptops, maids, vacations…oh my!

Does your school offer any extraordinary services or benefits to students? If your institution lavishes any special perks on their student body, be sure to get the word out through your website and social media marketing portals.

Highlights of special offerings compiled from My College Options and Mental Floss:

• University of New England lets its freshmen choose between a new bicycle or a Zipcar gift card.

• Stanford University offers students $282 through its Commute Club for carpooling, public transportation, and biking. Students also receive $96 in Zipcar credit.

• Wake Forest and Villanova University give incoming freshman a free laptop.

• Cottey College offers an all-expenses paid trip to Europe for the senior class.

• George Washington University, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Cottey College and Xavier University provide students who live on campus receive complimentary maid service.

• Davidson provides free wash and fold laundry services.

• Michigan Technological University owns its own ski slope where students can ski free of charge.

Idea for how to boast of your school’s premium perks:

Create an attractive PDF or image file handy that spells out what your school has to offer in a illustrative way that you can attach to emails or insert in to a webchat session.

Infrequently Asked Questions

College applicants share a lot of common concerns over the admissions process, such as deadlines, academic requirements, and how to apply for financial aid. These are easily handled in print. More difficult to address are the infrequently asked questions. “Who picks my roommate?” “Is there a fencing club on campus?” Live webchats can give you an opportunity to answer questions that applicants might otherwise feel are too too silly to ask in person.

Why not compile a list of the most unusual questions (with answers!) that you have fielded? This can create an ice breaker moment in the chat, and open up the field for the sort of off-the-wall questions that can end up making an applicant’s decision.

Still more reasons you should recruit Gen Y to help you recruit Gen Y

No, the title wasn’t a typo. In past blog posts I’ve strongly hinted that college admissions professionals should get help from student interns and other colleagues who are Millennials, to make the best use of technology as a recruiting tool.

Looks like I’m not the only one. Just four days ago, Sylvia Ann Hewlett wrote a post for the Harvard Business Review with the unambiguous title, “Let Gen Y Teach You Tech.” Among other things, she describes the way Time Warner recruited college students at “Gen Y Mentors.”

And it turns out, these mentors are just waiting for you to ask them for help.

Last week on the Why Gen Why blog, Crystal Olig offers advice to her fellow Millennials on how to cope with Gen Y stereotypes at work. Her first tip: “Educate your more seasoned (ie, old) coworkers.”

Other tips include volunteering to test new technology and applying social networking skills “to make your company look good.”

As she elaborates on these points, one of the first things she mentions is, “Gen Yers are all about teamwork.” In other words, you’ve got a resource of tech-savvy people who are willing–even eager–to help out.

Back in the days of dial-up when I went to college, we had student reps who visited high schools to recruit new applicants. You should give these enthusiastic students the freedom to make your institution’s social media efforts shine–if you’re not doing this already.

This idea seems to be catching on.

New hardware upgrade complete!

The University WebChat hardware upgrade is complete. Let us know if you have any issues or questions:
http://www.universitywebchat.com/support/

Thanks!

Two simple things you should remember about Millennials

A couple of items caught my attention this morning.

First was a post in The Millennier in which Leah Hennessy knocks all the “well intentioned but TERRIBLE advice” about Millennials that pops up all over the Internet. She gives the example of a condescending employee handbook aimed at Millennials, and suggests a simple cure: Recruit a couple of Millennials to create the handbook, and it will resonate.

This confirms something that the University WebChat team has said on this blog and in our white paper. Get your students involved in the recruiting process. Put them on your chats and blogs. Let them make and post a video about your institution. Seriously, mull this over during the weekend.

And while we’re on the topic of weekend mullings, here’s something else to think about.

USA Today ran yet another story about the most-talked-about generation. And the paper came up with a new name for them: The Recession Generation.

About a third of the way in, the article quotes an adolescent psychologist who says Millennials are seeking “happiness not based on economic success.” He notes, “they talk more about having autonomy and freedom, not being as enslaved to material goals that they perceived their parents being caught up in.”

It struck me that this is more or less what experts were saying about Generation X a couple of decades ago. And about the Boomers before that.

“Generation X” got their title by rejecting the values and lifelong career paths of their parents. Freedom and autonomy were so important to young X-ers that in The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generation X is called “The Nomad Generation.”

The world is being flooded with research and data and commentary that imply Millennials are a new species, or a freak of nature. The technology and means of communication may have changed, as they always do, but basic human nature stays the same. All you need is an iPhone, a good blog and some webchat software. If you’re still uneasy, take Leah’s advice and recruit a few Millennials to help you out.

In many ways Millennials really are different. But a lot of what passes as characteristic of a new generation is really characteristic of youth in every generation. Don’t let the issue get too clouded. Keep it real.

Webisodes as the next marketing tool for higher education?

I may be completely wrong about this, but hear me out. Big companies like Coca Cola are creating Webisodes, essentially a TV series that’s aired online, where their product plays an intrinsic role in the plot. It’s a great way to reach Millennials where TV and print ads fail, it lets online media earn some money, and it puts product placement on steriods.

I suggest admissions offices try to copy this idea. As an institution of higher learning, you have the potential to do a much better job at a dramatically lower cost.

Coca Cola has the daunting challenge of making Nestea an intrinsic part of the plot. In your institution’s Webisodes, the campus would be the natural setting, and campus life would by its nature remain at the core of the plot. You wouldn’t ahve to worry about being sensitive in your product placement, because your “product” is what most viewers want to see.

Assuming your school has a healthy pool of film, media, and fine arts students, your production costs would be virtually zero. Webisodes could become a part of the curriculum, tapping into a wealth of creative energy.

On the one hand, your institution could provide access to cameras, editing software and other resources that would enable the project to stand out from the casual YouTube video recorded off a cell phone. In return, you wouldn’t need Coca Cola’s giant budget because your writers, actors, and crew would be working for grades and credits. This could also be an excellent job as part of a work-study program.

The key to making this work is getting the students to own the project and run with it. You may have to impose some obvious guidelines, such as forbidding racism and excessive drug and alcohol abuse. But if the participants get the message, “We won’t censor you but you will be graded on this” they’re likely to do a first-rate, professional job.

Coca Cola is paying to run their Webisodes on game consuls and some internet sites. If you’ve got the budget, it may help to do some of this as well. But even if you just run your Webisodes on free sites like YouTube they’ll come up in a search, and your students and alumnae will share them with friends and family.

The trickiest part of this, especially for a large institution, would be the necessary collaboration across multiple offices, departments, and disciplines. I didn’t say this would be easy. But there’s a phenomenal opportunity here. I’d like to see someone do it.

2008 Graduate Admission Professionals Salary Survey Results

The 2008 National Association of Graduate Admissions Professionals Membership Survey Report is now available online http://www.nagap.org/MembersOnly/reports.asp (Note: The report is only available to members.)

A quick summary from Kristen Sterba, Chair of the Research and Global Issues Committee:

• A total of 743 NAGAP members (46% of 1,620 members invited) completed the survey.
• Survey respondents continue to be largely female (74%) and most hold a minimum of a master’s degree (74%), consistent with data from the 2006 survey.
• Annual salaries ranged from $20,000 to $160,000. The average salary for all respondents was $58,910, while the median salary was $55,000.
• The 75th percentile salary was $70,000.
• Salaries continue to be directly correlated to educational level, and women earn less than their male counterparts at both public and private colleges and universities.