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.

“Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out”

Download this White Paper, “Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project” from the MacArthur Foundation.  The white paper summarize their five-year, $50 million digital media and learning initiative that sought to determine how digital media is changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life.  The paper explores how youths participate with new media and its implications.  The MacArthur Foundation also runs a blog about the study.

New NAFSA presentation offers tips for interacting with Millennials

The NAFSA: Association of International Educators west coast chapter (called region 12) posted a some really neat presentation slides that used our white paper as a source.

The presentation is called “Millennials and Beyond: and Understanding and Working with a New Generation of Students”. It covers some tips for interacting and engaging with Millennials. It’s a great read, and we are flattered that our white paper served as a source.

My favorite highlight from the presentation are the tips they offer for reaching the Millennial market. They include some neat ideas on blogging and using twitter.

Here are the first three tips from the presentation:

1. Become a Thought Leader
2. Hang out where your students or potential students hang out
3. Stay Connected!

You can grab the report here:
Download Report [PDF, 2.3 MB]

Enjoy!

Even the banks are doing it

As if we needed more confirmation that Millennials like interacting over instant messaging (IM), text messages and web chats. A new survey by Javelin Strategy and Research showed that the Millennial’s preferred method of banking is over the web, specifically IM on their PCs and text messaging on their phones.

Here is my favorite quote from the Ars Technica coverage of this survey:

A new survey conducted for Microsoft by Javelin Strategy and Research shows that “Millennials”—people between the ages of 18 and 30—heavily prefer interacting with their banks through higher-tech (and lower-human-interaction) methods like the web, IM, and SMS. Unsurprisingly, a large majority of Millennials surveyed said that they prefer to go online for basic banking transactions, like checking account balances (74 percent) and paying bills (70 percent). (Hell, doesn’t everyone who’s into technology does these things nowadays, Millennial or not?)

Young people tend to go a step further than most average people, though, when it comes to dealing with banking customer service. 15 percent reported that they prefer dealing with customer service over IM, and Canadian Millennials in particular preferred IM for a plethora of other activities, like receiving financial advice, opening a new account, or applying for a loan. Australian Millennials seemed to like receiving account alerts over SMS at more than double the rate of the general audience (23 percent).

Banking activities — like checking your account balance and moving money around — are notoriously sensitive transactions that users tend to want to ensure are secure, private and confidential. If Millennials are willing to bank over IM, then they definitely want to interact with your customer service (read: your admissions recruiters) over IM, web chats and texts.

Might be time to host that first web chat, setup that Facebook Admissions group, open an AOL IM hotline or send acceptances over SMS (text messages to cell phones). We cover all of these technologies, and more, in our white paper: The Millennial Environment: New Recruitment Strategies for the Next Generation.

We cover each next-generation Internet technology, provide links to more resources and reading for each technology and discuss how you can use these to enhance your marketing efforts.

New white paper: Recruiting Millennials

We are very excited to announce today the release of our new white paper:

The Millennial Environment: New Recruitment Strategies for the Next Generation

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If you want to attract today’s students to your institution — those digital, online and multitasking Millennial folk — you will need to play on their field. There’s still a place for catalogs, email, and maybe even the good old fashioned phone call. But if you haven’t harnessed Web 2.0 tools to enhance your recruiting efforts, you’re missing out on some of the brightest candidates.

In this white paper we review cutting edge Internet technologies that Millennials are using right now, and offer ideas and insights on how to use those technologies to market and convert your prospects into admitted students.

Get the white paper right now

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What the white paper covers

We’ve released a new white paper that outlines specific recruitment strategies for Millennials using their preferred technologies. This 10-page report explains and explores the major, popular online tools Millennials are using today: Texting, Instant Messaging (IM) and Chat, Video Sharing, Blogs, Twitter and Pod casting.

For each tool, we explain how it can be used for admissions recruiting, provide links to explore the technology further and include reactions, feedback and comments from the Millennials we surveyed for the report.

Read a snippet to the white paper right now

We posted a snippet of the white paper online. Check it out!

Hot to get the complete white paper

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