Category: Guest-blogging

Guest post: Andrea Michnik on developing effective higher education taglines

Today’s guest post comes from Andrea Genevieve Michnik, director of marketing and enrollment with the Semester in Washington Journalism Program at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Follow her on Twitter at @AndreaGenevieve or @SIWjournalism, and look for her at the upcoming EduWeb and EduComm conferences this summer.

Developing effective higher education taglines

Some would argue that taglines are among the most important parts of a higher education brand identity. Combined with logo identity, tone and theme, taglines are important. But, are they successful at representing the college experience?

Consider higher education taglines. Do you remember the tagline of your alma mater? Does it accurately portray the environment and experience of going to school at that institution? If you can’t remember, that should tell you something about its effectiveness.

Accuracy is relative; dependent upon the opinion of those involved at all institutional levels. Higher education marketers, potential students, current students, parents, alumni, administration, governing boards and additional important stakeholders all become potential focus groups. Representatives from each constituency should have a say in the keywords of a tagline. Not sure if a current tagline is yielding desired results? Consider conducting a survey or poll. It’s a simple and easy method to gauge effectiveness.

Take a look at the issues in building an identity campaign for the Semester in Washington Journalism Program at George Washington University. Since it is branding a part of an institution, this project is a challenge. It’s important to maintain certain elements of GWU’s identity, but at the same time differentiate the program from the competition.

Check out this great collection of 3,500 higher education taglines put together by the Indiana creative marketing firm Richard Harrison Bailey/The Agency, where you can search by keyword or institution. Take a minute and perhaps look at the taglines of your competition.

Should an institution look to update its identity or tagline? How would you decide if a tagline resonates with target markets? What factors should be considered? Share your thoughts, examples and ideas here. Look for an update in a week on the progress of creating a tagline for the Semester in Washington Journalism Program.

Guest post: Paul Redfern’s five principles for social media strategy

I’m pleased to kick off this week with the first guest post on this blog. It comes from Paul Redfern, director of web communications and electronic media at Gettysburg College. Thanks, Paul, for responding to my call for guest bloggers.

If you do a Google search for “social media and higher education” it returns over 23 million webpages. My copy of University Business magazine arrived today and there was an article on 10 Twitter Tips for Higher Education and Five Steps to Developing a Powerful Social Networking Strategy. Put in a conference presentation on social networking and it’s accepted (and you get a big crowd). If you keep your eyes open you can find a webinar almost once a month on the topic. Follow a few higher ed people on twitter and more often than not it’s the topic of conversation. Higher ed to our credit is trying to figure it out. Some have. Some have not. Some never will.

In the last year I have participated, commented, created, and tried to understand social media for my institution. I came up with the following five guiding principles for our strategy in the next year. Some of of our plans will create lots of engagement with our audiences. Some of them will flop miserably. If you are afraid to fail social media may not be for you.

Here are my five principles. What can you add?

  1. Each piece to the social media puzzle may be small but collectively they add up
  2. Social Media needs to be integrated into our traditional approach to communications and marketing
  3. Social Media is word of mouth marketing for prospective and current students as well as recent graduates
  4. We do not have control of the message and we can take advantage of that fact – we need to listen
  5. Social Media will play a critical role in the future of brand, marketing, and institutional visibility