There was an article earlier this week in the Baltimore Sun about colleges getting involved with social media marketing. The reporter’s angle was largely confined to Facebook and related activities. It centered on admissions offices tapping existing student networks and creating institutional presences of their own on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. There were the expected comments.
The issue of social media marketing for educational institutions is so much broader than this. Much of the way admissions offices currently use Facebook and Twitter amounts to glorified extensions of their public relations activities. They use social media to announce news and events of interest to followers. This is bound to be of limited value because most prospects for an institution have no interest in a PR feed. The majority of prospects aren’t followers.
Current social media platforms are just one sign of a tectonic shift in the structure of the information society – away from the centralized production of information and toward user-generated information. In the future, people will generate their own content (i.e. text, music, video) and select which content they consume based on their own preferences and the preferences of social groups with which they affiliate. This tectonic shift changes the paradigm of marketing away from a push model to a two-way-dialogue model. This shift undermines the traditional approach colleges and universities have taken to marketing themselves, as it does for other segments.
As David Dalka points out in a very valuable blog post, social media marketing strategies that take full account of the changes in information structures can be costly and time consuming. An example of such cost was described on the front page of today’s New York Times in which colleges are profiled paying current students to blog on their behalf. As Dalka points out, it is unlikely that most colleges and universities will expend the dollars needed to develop full-blown social media marketing strategies. They are already strapped for marketing dollars. This is an additional expense.
However, there is another approach which is more consistent with the ethos of educational institutions and will be the direction at least some institutions take. This is to create tools by which the members of an institution become more active in social networks – become more prominent twerps, bloggers and friends – not for financial gain but as a natural part of social and intellectual life on campus. The role of the institution is not to fund social media participation directly but to create tools and incentives for members of its community to engage more actively than they are currently in social media.
An example of such an inducement is the College.Be. site just launched by UMBC. Because this is a media aggregator site, the barrier to participation is low. All students need to do to participate is connect their identity on the site to existing blogs, Flikr, YouTube, LastFM and Twitter feeds. As the site builds in intensity and activity it creates an incentive for more students to join. In this way the institution’s social media footprint is expanded.
There is nothing wrong with an institution encouraging members of its community to become prominent and responsible participants in social media networks. Indeed, you could argue that this is an important and valuable educational function as we advance into the new media age. This is a utility that goes well beyond Facebook.
Mark, spot-on analysis, both on what’s happening today and where it’s all going/should be going for higher education. Participation rates in social media by colleges and universities are inflated because of what you have described. Your solution makes a lot of sense. It will require marketing leaders to be even more connected on their campuses so that they are able to convert community members to the institution’s social media marketing initiative–quite a challenge on college campuses where marketing is not usually seen in a favorable light. Thus, your last point about framing it as an educational function is worth considering.
“It centered on admissions offices tapping existing student networks and creating institutional presences of their own on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. There were the expected comments.” – Most schools would rather leverage the free tools that their audience is already on rather than recreate the wheel and pay some agency to develop an overpriced microsite.
“Much of the way admissions offices currently use Facebook and Twitter amounts to glorified extensions of their public relations activities.” – You obviously haven’t done enough research in this space.
“In the future, people will generate their own content (i.e. text, music, video) and select which content they consume based on their own preferences and the preferences of social groups with which they affiliate.” – More evidence for just meeting them on their platform of choice rather than trying to re-create the wheel with your ‘hip and trendy’ sites.
What happens when UMBC students graduate? Do you anticipate them coming back to this site? Or even coming to it in the first place? They’re already on Facebook now, and will continue to be. I’d rather have a connection to them on a site they visit daily/weekly than pay to develop a platform that will have a few months of traffic and die off (it happens all the time.) Facebook is a long-term strategy, and it’s a sustainable connection, from prospective student to student to alumni. The moment they stop coming to your fancy microsite, you’ve lost them. It’s apparent this blog post is only for self-promotion of what you can do (charge a school for a fancy site) compared to what you don’t understand (the strategies leveraged in the article).
Setting a date on my calendar to see if this is still around in 6 months, or if it dies off like most microsites.
Jeremy – Glad to hear that you are so happy with your Facebook strategy. Why don’t you let us know which institution you represent, then we can all get a sense of your marketing efforts.
Mark,
Great post, and interesting insights into the work we have been doing. Obviously Jeremy is missing the point that the UMBC site IS an aggregator, requiring little interaction with the site itself in order to continue sharing fresh and relevant content – long term. The problem with focusing exclusively on Facebook as an admissions strategy is that prospective students on Facebook are reluctant to connect with Admissions departments of the 10-15 schools they may be considering. By creating the unique aggregator site, we are not only allowing the UMBC students to promote their school and their lives, we are creating a space for prospects to get an unfiltered look, vs. a controlled “admissions oriented” Facebook fan or group site.
The appeal of this, or its long term success is yet to be seen. However, isn’t it our jobs to try pushing the boundaries to see what else might work better? A site like the be.umbc.edu site exists somewhere in between a primary college or university Website and Facebook. I think the landscape is large enough for multiple experiences and ideas, and I look forward to continuing to explore how to leverage the content being created by students in order to connect with potential students.