Month: October 2013

Paranormal activity in social media

ZombieWalkWith Halloween approaching, we’ll soon see kids (and more than a few adults) dressed up as their favorite scary creatures. All manner of make-believe zombies, vampires and ghosts will come knocking on our doors.

Fortunately, Halloween happens just one night a year. And it’s all in fun. Those ghouls and monsters aren’t real.

What IS real, unfortunately, are the social media manifestations of these nightmarish archetypes. As this Steamfeed Media post points out, for some social media users, every day is Fright Night.

Steamfeed’s Carrie Keenan describes the three most common types of social media spooks:

  • The zombie. Known by their mindless auto-tweets and RSS feeds, these mindless creatures are easy to spot. “Hold onto your brains when you see them coming and run!”
  • The ghost. “A ghost user is one who creates a business account because they ‘should’ be involved in social media,” Keenan writes. “They soon disappear into the internet ether never to be seen again.”
  • The vampire. These blood-sucking creatures “take your hard work and give themselves credit,” scraping content from your blog or website and passing it off as their own.

There may be more fiends out there, but these are three common ones in social media.

It’s okay to pretend to be one of these on Halloween. Just remember to be a real human the rest of the year. The same goes for your social media identityo.

Photo of ComicCon 2013 Zombie Walk by Hooman.

For student recruitment, rankings still matter

Here’s some disturbing news for those of us who wish college rankings would just go away:

According to recently publicized results of a poll of prospective college students, the rankings of college and university programs by media outlets like U.S. News & World Report continue to have a significant impact on the college search process.

The consulting firm Art & Science Group, conducted an online survey with 846 college-bound high school seniors in November and December 2012. Here’s what they found:

  • Two-thirds of students surveyed indicated that they had taken college rankings into account in their college application decisions.
  • Students with the highest SAT scores (1300 or higher) were more likely to have considered the rankings in their application decisions than students with SAT scores of less than 1300.
  • Nearly two-thirds of students surveyed “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree” that the rankings are “very important in trying to sort out the differences between colleges.”
  • About two-thirds, respectively, somewhat or strongly disagreed that the rankings “don’t matter” and that they “don’t matter to me, but they matter to my parents.”

So, yes, the rankings remain relevant. And with the proliferation of new ranking organizations out there, and the White House’s push to have a grading system for higher education, these types of numbers games will continue in a variety of forms. Just in the past year, we’ve seen the rise of many “ROI” (return on investment) rankings, like this one. Look for this trend to continue. Since U.S. News owns the reputational ranking category, other groups, from publications like Forbes and Washington Monthly to salary-information services like PayScale, will focus on ranking schools by ROI or affordability.

Beyond the rankings

But the Art & Science Group folks suggest other factors may play an even greater role in students’ decisions on picking a college. Things like “substantive and atmospheric insights and information from the campus visit, interactions with parents, information on the web and in print materials, and more personal forms of contact with prospective students … can have a greater influence than rankings.”

Furthermore, “we would argue against spending too much institutional time, money, and energy on hand wringing over rank per se and on attempts to improve it. For most institutions, it would be far better to focus on planning strategy that strengthens an institution’s competitive position on a substantive basis: differentiation based on educational approach, student experience, innovative teaching, and the like.”

In other words, your time is better spent developing and refining your institution’s brand persona and messaging, and developing ways to deliver that messaging to your prospective students.