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!

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!

From a lofty mountain peak in Colorado, Timothy Wihera offers a recruiting tool on Brazen Careerist that you could probably apply to your recruiting efforts.

He talks about a company called Which Wich that gives you a free sandwich if you bring in a picture of yourself and a Which Wich bag on one of Colorado’s highest peaks.

Timothy Wihera suggests ways that management could adapt this to a type of “Employee of the Month” program, honoring employees who bring in photos of themselves doing something awesome. It’s a win-win, because employees get some recognition and appreciation for something that really matters to them, and management gets to really know the employees better.

I can see lots of ways you could make this work as a recruiter. Collect photos and videos of your students doing interesting things while wearing an official campus jersey or hoodie. Offer free lunch to applicants who send in pictures, videos or stories about applying to your institution.

In fact, you could offer a really good prize for the best applicant photo, and stimulate a wave of interest in your campus. Anyone who enters the contest is clearly a good lead, so this can be a really practical tactic.

You’re going to get a wealth of creative content when you start doing this. Be sure to share it on your blog, website, FaceBook and…you get the picture, I hope.

By the way, send us a picture of you or your colleagues successfully doing this, and we’ll give you a free webchat account.

I would have missed out on this excellent article if Gen Y blogger Crystal Olig hadn’t brought it to my attention. (We’re trying to get her to post something on our blog, so stay tuned!).

About two weeks ago, Advergirl cited some interesting stats on social media use by colleges, but she went a step further and noted four institutions that got some tangible success out of their use of social media.

The secret isn’t just to get the maximum number of fans on your FaceBook page.  The winners got there by “understanding the needs of their audience, setting clear objectives and then picking the tactic that makes the most sense to deliver results.”

Obvious stuff, perhaps, but not always easy to put into practice. Advergirl gives four very different examples of campuses that did it.

The New York Times recently published an interactive graphic displaying the results from the American Time Use Survey.

On the blog, Boomers vs. Millennials, writer, Carol Phillips, makes this observation on the millennial generation’s time shift, “…that Millennials appear to be ‘nocturnal’, here’s the evidence. They go to bed later and sleep later than any other age group. At 11:11AM, 11% are still sleeping; at 11:10 PM 53% are still awake with 14% watching TV or movies, 6% socializing, and 3% talking on the phone. Interestingly, just 2% are doing homework.”

Use this data to guide your webchat session time schedules. Your attendance rates will increase if you can adapt to the time shift. Try holding webchat sessions after 11am or in the evening to capture a greater audience.

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.

The annual Beloit College Mindset List gives an insight in to the minds of their entering freshman, most of who were born in 1991.

Highlights from the list:

• They have never used a card catalog to find a book.
• Chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream has always been a flavor choice.
• They have always been able to read books on an electronic screen.
• Women have always outnumbered men in college.

View the complete list here: http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2013.php

I had some fun taking a look at the list from 2003 to see how much changes in a decade.

Some problems are good to have. If you’ve scheduled a chat event that’s so popular and well-promoted that you’re over capacity, you should congratulate yourself. And then take these steps to make sure everyone gets to participate in your chat.

Leverage your popularity to promote your institution

Before the chat event, it’s a good idea to see how many attendees have registered. If it even looks like you’re getting close to capacity, you may want to reach out to everyone using email, a blog post, or whatever media works best for you.

Your message can start with “Due to the extraordinary level of enthusiasm, we may not be able to accommodate everyone.” From there, you can mention the date and time of a future chat event, offer a transcript of the highlights, or some other benefit.

You could also do this right after the event, apologizing to anyone who was unable to attend. The key is to emphasize that there was a great demand for this event. This popularity makes you look good–and ultimately makes you more popular.

Tweak your message

Using the latest version of University WebChat, anyone who tries to get into a full chat room will see a message that says “chat room full.”

In the near future we’ll be releasing a new version of University WebChat which will allow you to customize this message. You can use this feature to offer future chats and other alternatives for those who didn’t get in, as mentioned above. You can also include a subtle brag about the exceptional turnout for your chats.

Take the easy way out

Most admissions professionals opt for a simpler solution. They upgrade to a package that allows them to have a higher number of chatters. Remember, you can use University WebChat as often and as long as you want. The only limitation is the maximum number of chatters you can have at one time.

But if you need to go over this limit, you can upgrade any time, at very affordable rates. Having more attendees is a great problem to have, but it’s still a problem.

If you haven’t yet set up your own chat room with your institution’s branding and logo, you can create one in minutes with the permanent URL of your choice at https://www.universitywebchat.com/manage/signup/.

Did I mention there’s a free version? You can also upgrade to accommodate more chatters at any time.

The real phenomenon isn’t Gen Y’s attachment to Google and texting. The truth is that you’re never too old, and once you try the technology you’ll be hooked, too. The human brain is wired that way, it turns out.

Slate.com ran an article this Wednesday called “Seeking,” which describes the mammalian brain’s natural eagerness for news and novelty. In fact, there’s research that animals in captivity prefer finding their own food to just having it given to them. (I’m going to try this out on my cat.)

Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp coined the term “seeking” to describe the state of mind we’re in when we seek out new information excessively, compulsively, or even obsessively. Seeking is what makes us look up random facts about celebrities during a lunch date, or follow the blow-by-blow accounts of a friend’s ordinary day.

There’s an opportunity here. This instinct plays right into the search for an institute of higher education, the search for the right program on the right career path, the ideal environment and the most compatible people. Almost every interaction you have with prospective students and applicants will drive this seeking instinct, from visits to your website to live web chats to in-person campus tours.

With a little creativity, you can turn the marketing process into an adventure of discovery. Invite prospective students to a scavenger hunt (either on campus or online). Give them some “clues” that will lead them to an interview with a former student who lives in their town.

When your institution is already a good fit for someone, you can lead them to seek more information and make that discovery on their own.