I’m going to start with a higher-ed marketing horror story:

I recently conducted several focus groups of college-bound high school students. One topic I explored was preferred sources for college information. Generally these students – who were affluent, well-educated, and bound for top schools – were suspicious of social media websites such as Unigo, College Confidential, and College Prowler. They questioned the reliability of the comments. Most had visited campuses and felt these visits gave them much more reliable first-hand information.

But one student told a story that should send a chill down the spine of anyone working in college communications. She had received a viewbook in the mail that had totally struck a chord. She spent an hour pouring over it. At the end of the hour, the school had moved to the top of her list. The viewbook completely sold her on the institution.

Then she went to a social media website to check out the school. There she read not one but several comments that completely altered her view. Students wrote that this particular college’s community was socially narrow and homogeneous. All the students did in their spare time was drink. As quickly as the viewbook had built a positive impression, these comments tore it down. She crossed the school off her mental list.

No sooner had she finished her account than two students added that they had the same experience with other name-brand colleges. What a horror story! This shows you the force and speed with which third-party comments can derail years of costly, time consuming marketing effort. And there is not a college in America that can assume it is immune from this impact.

Social media sites have such enormous potential to derail a college’s formal marketing efforts that schools should act now to confront this new reality and not wait until such sites grow in reach and sophistication. This is one communications trend where colleges cannot afford the luxury of being late adopters. Colleges need to define a new communications staff position for social media marketing. They need to build expertise in this area. And it needs to be in-house expertise.

What should this communications staffer do? The first step is obvious: inventory all of the institution’s social media involvement surveying the style and substance of comments. Next, develop a social media marketing plan.  I have written before about the limited ways in which most colleges and universities engage with social media. They view it as a new public relations channel, using Twitter and Facebook to circulate news about events on campus. These are not good uses of social media and in the long run will have virtually no impact in the higher education social media space.

The real direction for social media presence of an academic institution is to raise the intensity of positive participation on social media sites by an institution’s fans so that they will outweigh the inevitable naysayers. This will be accomplished by means of social media strategies that are less centralized and more organic to the culture of an institution. You cannot take the old paradigms of public relations and marketing and apply them to social media. A social media strategy needs to build positive presence by leveraging positive feelings among members of the community – faculty, students, and administrators. These should not be paid spokemen for the administration. They should be people who participate of their own volition in a voice and style  in which they are comfortable. A social media communications staffer should to be the facilitator for this activity, not the chief spokeman.

There is little time to waste. The impact of social media on the college selection process will grow quickly. At this point, colleges can make a relatively small expenditure to stay out in front of the social media revolution. Those who do not will find themselves at risk, playing a costly game of catch-up down the road.