admissions and student recruitment – Page 5

Friday Five: what we blog about when we blog about blogs

Today’s Friday Five indulges in a bit of navel-gazing, tossing out five links about blogs and bloggers, by bloggers, on their blogs.

Data-mine your blogs for reusable content. A recent post by Kyle James (aka dot-edu guru) of Wofford College (which has a slew of blogs) suggests that colleges and universities dig into their institutional blogs to find content that could be used elsewhere on the institution’s website. Good idea, Kyle. Maybe we should call it content mining.
Why no Apple blog? Unlike Dell, Google or Microsoft, Apple has never felt the need to have a corporate blog. I’ve always thought this weird. So does Business Blogwire‘s Easton Ellsworth, who speculates that an official Apple blog might make the company more accessible to “the masses who find Apple snobby and elitist.”
Speaking of official corporate blogs … The best of them — like Google’s — offer valuable services and tips, and in so doing they add value and build their reputations. Case in point: Google’s announcement on Thursday of an upcoming free cross-product webinar for webmasters.

Three of our most useful products for website owners are Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Google Website Optimizer. On July 8, we’re joining forces to bring you a free webinar about all of them so you can learn more about how they can boost your website when used together.

Nice touch, Google. Nothing snobby or elitist there.
An admissions dean who gets it. A few weeks ago, I found out about “Dean J,” an admissions administrator who blogs, by reading this article about her (article via Academic Impressions’ e-newsletter). Dean J is the nom de blog of Jeannine Lalonde, the assistant dean of admissions at the University of Virginia. As the C-Ville article points out, Dean J has an “easygoing Web personality.” It’s refreshing to find such a voice in a world of recruitment spin. No wonder readers of her blog “quickly latched on to a source of much-needed information about the admissions process at UVA.” Nice going, Dean J.
The most powerful persuasive element of blogging. It doesn’t take a psych degree to figure it our, according to Copyblogger. Blogging allows people to like you, and people like to do business with people they like.

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Problems with portals

Seth Meranda hates portals. That much is clear from this lovely rant against the portalization of higher ed websites.

To Seth’s way of thinking, portals are a manifestation of all that is wrong in academic administration. They are “a poor excuse of bolting on a silo of political process to a university’s website.”

Not only that, but:

Portals are not designed for the correct target audience (students), rather they are designed to enforce out-dated, non-user-centric workflows that appease [non]decision makers. Furthermore, portals fail to aggregate the student life experience. They do not combine all aspects of student interests (academic, residence life, involvement, advising, athletics), instead they primarily focus on only the academic side.

In addition, portals do not provide branding. Slapping your logo on the top and scheming the colors isn’t branding. Branding is entrenched into user experience. Branding revolves around your students’ experiences and expectations related to your institution. Portals cheapen brands by lowering user experiences and hindering expectations.

Seth goes on to advocate “a more holistic, user-experience-centric approach. ‘Experience Architects’ need to work with students (current and prospective) to determine online content and design. Student input needs to become the dominating impact on our future realignment strategies. … The ‘Experience Architects’ will hold the conversations with students, and both will work collaboratively.”

Ron Bronson tends to agree. Riffing off Seth’s post in an entry of his own titled Portals Aren’t Solutions, he writes: “If more innovation, collaboration and assessment of what students need was being done, we’d be able to go a lot further along in creating useful applications and leverage the talents within our own walls a lot better than we do.”

I can’t say I disagree with either Seth or Ron. But it would be nice, for the sake of debate, to hear a different perspective.

I wonder what Paul Redfern‘s take might be on the topic. Paul presented a good session about merging portals with university websites at the CASE Communications, Marketing and Technology Conference earlier this month. Paul is the director of web communications and electronic media at Gettysburg College, he seems to have found a happy medium. Maybe he’ll join the discussion. Paul?

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#CASECMT: day 1 take-aways

Getting ready for Day 2 of the three-day CASE Communications, Marketing and Technology Conference in San Diego. In a previous post, I mentioned that today would be my “sponge day” — my chance to site back and absorb a lot of stuff, since I wouldn’t be presenting — but plans have changed. The student panel we were to have fell through, so instead all of the breakout sessions will be repeated during that time. Which is a good alternative, as it gives attendees to attend all three sessions if they wish. (Or, as will likely happen tomorrow, a chance to blow off early from the conference and spend some time exploring San Diego.) So, it’s turned into a working day again, but that’s cool.

Day 1 take-aways

Opening keynote: “What You Need to Know About Today’s College-Bound Teens” (Fritz McDonald, creative director, Stamats). This was a thorough review of conclusions drawn from Stamats’ 2007 TeensTALK study on the attitudes, lifestyles, trends, etc., of this market segment. McDonald covered a lot of territory here, much of familiar to anyone in college/university marketing — about what millennials expect from their college experience, their life aspirations, etc. For the admissions folks at the conference, it was probably just a rehash. But I thought it gave us a good starting point for our discussions about technology and marketing, since college-bound teens have never known a world without so much of our technology (and so much marketing). But what stood out to me most were these tidbits:

High school sophomores are already preparing for college — and in a pretty sophisticated way. For instance, 47 percent say they’ve already decided where they’re going for college. So if we’re trying to recruit high school juniors and seniors, nearly half of them have already made up their minds. We need to make contact with them much earlier than we have in the past.
The campus visit is crucial — but they don’t really want to spend a lot of time with the admissions staff. Let them meet and talk to students. Also: don’t oversell. These kids have grown up saturated with marketing messages, and their crap detectors are pretty sensitive. Let the experience of the campus visit sell the place for you.
Word of mouth rules. Teens still rely on word-of-mouth recommendations from family members, peers, teachers, etc.
Online, it’s all about search and social networks. But we already knew that, right?

“Building Online Communities” (Tim O’Keeffe, Colgate University). No report. Paul and I missed this one as we were working with the IT guy to get Internet access for our breakout room. I’m hoping one of the other presenters will send me a report to post here. (Or any other conference-goer who would like to post a blog here, email me at andrew DOT careaga AT gmail DOT com.)

“Exploration of the Uses (and Misuses) of Flash in Higher Ed” (Casey Paquet, Eckerd College). Entertaining but with some substance. Paquet presented some examples of Flash campaigns, some pros and cons of Flash, and some alternatives. Paquet brings an interesting perspective, having worked in PR and web development as a freelancer and in the gaming industry. His point that higher ed is always about six years behind the curve in terms of PR, marketing and web development is spot-on, but I think he’s being generous. Some of us are more like eight to 10 years behind the curve.

Some of the examples of Flash usage in higher education that Paquet shared (view and decide for yourself whether they work or not):

Eckerd’s holiday e-card, a clever JibJabish approach featuring the college president and the web dudes (Paquet and his two colleagues).

Ben and John, from Franklin & Marshall College.

Kettering’s clever stick-figure School Daze series.

William Woods College’s Got Duck? campaign.

Paquet ended with a list of good and bad uses of flash.

First, the positives. Flash is good for:

multimedia content (such as YouTube, flash-based video)
entertaining people
building a mini-site
appealing to emotion

Flash is not so good for:

core navigation — not only is it “a pain in the butt to maintain” but it is rife with accessibility and usability challenges
displaying important information
building an entire site

And now…breakfast.

#CASECMT conference preview (liveblogging from DIA)

Updated Wednesday morning, April 9, with a continuation of Tuesday’s posts with more complete agenda info. (If you like, you can go straight to the update.)

Killing time at Denver International Airport, awaiting my connecting flight to San Diego and the CASE conference on Communications, Marketing and Technology — or #CASECMT for short. That’s the hashtag I’ll be using to identify Twitter comments from the conference as well as in the blogpost title and categories. I plan to update both here and on Twitter (go to twitter.com/andrewcareaga to follow along).

So while I’m waiting to board, here’s some background on the meeting, what my role is, and some thoughts on what to expect in the coming days.

The crowd. We should have a pretty decent crowd for this conference — 140-something at last count. A quick glance at the attendees list shows a nice mix of public and private institutions from across the country, as well as some independent schools and some representation from Canada. (I just took a quick scan of the list; there may be participants from other countries.) I’m hoping the group is participative and involved. I’ll do what I can to keep the program interactive, and I know all the other presenters will too.

My role. I’m taking part in three sessions on two closely related topics. The first has to do with benchmarking and assessing web strategies. I’m co-presenting with Paul Redfern, director of web communications and electronic media at Gettysburg College, and we’re doing the session twice — once tomorrow afternoon and again on Friday morning. Paul and I have had a few conversations about the subject, and I think we’ll tag-team pretty well on it. (Paul’s going to approach the topic more from an institutionwide perspective, using analytics and other techno-tools, and I’m going to talk more about the reputational and strategy aspects.)

My other session is titled “Monitoring Your Online Reputation,” and I’m flying solo on that one. It’s the first session of the day on Friday. I’m looking forward to talking about this subject, as it’s one I hold dear to my heart. There are many, many resources online that can help us monitor (if not manage) our online reputations and impressions. We just need to know where to find them, how to use them, and be aware of the limitations of these resources.

I kind of feel like a fish out of water here. I think I’m the only presenter with a PR background. Most of the other folks presenting are from web/electronic marketing. But that’s cool. I always like mixing it up with people who may bring a different slant to the subjects.

The rest of the conference:

Day 1 – Wednesday, April 9

The conference begins at noon with a keynote address by Fritz McDonald, creative director at Stamats, called “What You Need to Know About College-Bound Teens.” Description:

Explore the fascinating world of today’s college-bound teens. Learn how they spend their time; choose their media; and who influences them. Session includes a careful review of how they choose a college; what factors they weigh in that decision; and an analysis of the college-choice characteristics most important to them.

Following the keynote, Tom O’Keeffe, director of web content at Colgate University (and the guy who roped me into this gig), will present a session on building online communities. I’m looking forward to this one. Tim and the folks at Colgate are doing some good stuff with new media, including putting their news site completely into a blog format (Movable Type) to foster more interaction, and just to make it easier to manage (I suspect). Next up is a session on the uses — and misuses — of flash, presented by Casey Paquet, web manager at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla. Yet another subject I’m looking forward to delving into. Then at 4:15 comes our breakout session, along with two others I wish I could attend: “Planning, and Implementing, a Successful Redesign” and “You’ve Bought a CMS, now how do you make it work?”

Ack. Boarding call. No time to talk about the other two days. Check the CASE website referenced above for more info. Let me just add that I’m really looking forward to the presentation from the guy from Six Apart (creators of Movable Type and Typepad) on Thursday. There’s also a panel session with some real live students that I’m looking forward to.

OK. I’m off. See you in San Diego, or on the innerweb.

April 9 update:

Interlude: While I was waiting for my connection in Denver, I got an email from Paul Redfern that he was grounded in Dallas due to the American Airlines inspection snafu. So we weren’t able to meet over dinner last night. I hope he made it in OK. All of the presenters are scheduled to meet later this morning.

Day 2 – Thursday, April 10

This is my “sponge” day. I have no presentations, no obligations (until the faculty panel at the end of the day). I can sit in on the presentations without distraction, absorb the discussions, and maybe even learn something. And it looks like a great day to do that.

Here’s what the day looks like:

Paul Redfern of Gettysburg kicks it off with a session called “Personalizing the Web: How do Portals and Web Sites Connect?”
Judging from the description and my conversations with Paul earlier, I think he’s going to be talking about options for those who don’t use portals — how colleges and universities can have some sort of website/portal hybrid. “How do schools create an integrated approach to the Web and utilize both Web 2.0 and Customer Relationship Management functionality to create a Google-and Amazon-like experience? Find out at this session.”

Next up is “Connecting with Alumni Using Online Communities,” a session I’ll absorb and bring back to our alumni director. The presenter is Elizabeth Allen, assistant director for communications for the Cal Tech Alumni Association. Cal Tech is one of the few elite technological universities we at Missouri S&T look to for ideas and inspiration. I’m looking forward to this presentation for many reasons.

After lunch, a moderated panel with college students is scheduled. It’s always good to hear from the students. It reminds us why we do what we do. Or it should, anyway.

The final session of the day is the one by Michael Sippey of Six Apart: “Always On, Connected, and Available: Social Media and Emerging Trends.” I’m expecting great things from this session, which promises that we will “tour tomorrow’s social media landscape and discuss how state-of-the-art tools are being used today. Learn how the ideas of connectedness, pervasiveness, and speed will drive how we create content, consume content, and connect with others online.”

Day 3 – Friday, April 11

The day begins with my presentation on monitoring online reputations, followed by a re-do of the three breakout sessions. And then it’s over. That sounds so final. Kind of sad, actually. And the meeting hasn’t even started yet. But it will soon, and I need to get my act together quickly for today’s event.

Loads of links: March 13, 2008

So it’s St. Pat’s Week here at Missouri S&T, where we’ve been caught up in all manner of revelry and enjoyed a beautiful spring day yesterday to welcome the Patron Saint of Engineers’ arrival into our fair city. Not only is it St. Pat’s Week, but it’s the 100th Annual St. Pat’s Celebration, and that makes it extra special and extra busy for us. Ergo, not much time to blog. But the RSS feeds are running over with good stuff to share. Here’s some of it. More in my shared items.

Facebook? Not in our house! A nice rant about student recruitment in the era of social networking, with great discussion in the comments. Chime in.

Data like a drug. Why do we love to web-surf for data so much? Because it triggers a feel-good opiate-like chemical in our brains.

Worst. Mascots. Ever.

Yet another blog to feed our data jones: Measurement Matters, a new social media/PR measurement blog. Hat tip: @kdpaine via Twitter.

Dennis Miller’s Observations from CUPRAP and how the times for higher ed PR they are a-changin’.

How to influence the eduStyle awards.

Roger von Oech on avoiding arrogance. “This [arrogance] is devastating to the creative process; in a world that is continually changing, every right idea is eventually the wrong one.”

Faculty members should learn to dance, and their students should teach them. A psych professor’s modest proposal.

Experimenting with the social media release.

Sproutbuilder is a site where you can create all kinds of multimedia content — or “sprouts.” “Sprouts are interactive and portable chunks of web content. Some people call them widgets, mashups or mini-sites but we just call them sprouts.” Gotta check this out. Hat tip to @JeremyWilburn via Twitter.

20 free ebooks or white papers on web design.

The unexpected trap of writing for social media, wherein Copyblogger cautions us to “always remember that the quality of the content is paramount and be vigilant not to sacrifice that quality upon the altar of optimization.” (Keywords: content, writing, search engine optimization, SEO.)

25 marketing ideas from the SXSW swag bag. Good stuff. (Note to self: Metanotes.) But the swag would be nice, too.

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