Before you assume I’m a complete radical you should know that I’ve got a project rolling out for another client that features a large, beautiful viewbook. I’m very excited about that one too. For me, marketing solutions are situational. No solution is right for every circumstance. The viewbook should do wonders for my one client while Tufts, I hope, will thrive without one.

We didn’t just eliminate the viewbook for Tufts. We got rid of the entire suite of traditional admissions publications. There is no search brochure, visit brochure, financial aid  brochure, mailing postcards, as well as no viewbook. They are all gone. Finito.

What we replaced them with is not a radically new idea. It’s been around for a few years. We created an admissions magazine that will be produced trice annually and mailed to everyone in the admissions funnel. This saves enormous cost and direct-mail headaches. A printer with a high-speed web-press spits out the magazine in two weeks and mails it the next day. A great advantage of the magazine approach is that it enables us to be much more responsive to changes and trends at the university. We don’t need to wait for a semi-annual viewbook update to feature a new program. We can simply feature it in the next issue of the magazine.

I would never have gone down this road if I could not simultaneously realize another, ultimately more important, goal – integration of the Tufts Web and print marketing campaigns. Our new magazine, entitled Jumbo, can be found both in-print and on-line at the brand new Tufts Admissions Website. Everything hinges on the user friendly CMS produced by my colleagues as Fastspot, and provided to Tufts through Door. No. 2. This CMS  enables the magazine’s writers and the entire admissions staff to regularly update content without any help from IT. The CMS offers a platform for building social media community around Tufts admissions. So, no, print is not made obsolescent in the new era of Web-based marketing, but it does change its stripes. Print becomes more flexible, streamlined, and nimble. It reflects the tone and pace of the Web which is becoming the pace of our world. Jumbo is our attempt to keep one institution up with the trends. Let’s see how it fares.

What I am talking about is the right way vs. the wrong way for communications office staff to define their role as content producers for a school website. What I’ve seen all too often is people who take the old journalistic model and simply transfer it to the web. It’s no wonder. Many web writers at colleges and universities started out as journalists.

What I see is people who put a premium on content production. They measure their performance by how much original content they produce for the web. Sometimes this content takes the form of press releases. Other times this content takes the form of faculty and student profiles that are posted at an intense rate.

Rarely do people ask if anyone actually wants to read this content, nor if it is loaded onto a place in the architecture that provides a meaningful user experience. Production of content is viewed as an end in itself.

This is the old journalistic model applied to the world of the web. Journalism views information as a one-way pipeline: The journalistic entity – be it TV, radio, or print – generates content which is then disseminated to consumers. But the Internet is breaking down the one-way paradigm and replacing it with dialogue. Content of the old-fashioned variety is still important, but less so. Authoritarian voices now compete with amateurs, hobbyists, and consumer-generated content.

The primary role for in-house web writers at colleges and universities is as facilitators for engagement not producers of content. They should be evaluated using analytics – measurements of how many visitors come to their pages and how long those visitors stay rather than by the quantity of content produced. If an individual is wedded to the old journalistic model and insists on defining his role as shoveling content into a one-way pipeline then the college is best parting ways. The need for such people is limited and their perspective is a drag on developing a vibrant web presence.

What are needed are in-house web content strategists who understand their facilitation role. They will generate new content in the course of doing their work, but not as an end in itself. They will focus on architecture and know the importance of avoiding dead areas on a site that degrade the overall user experience. They will take pride when their own voice takes on a subjective personality that encourages dialogue and user participation in the site. They will be fun and open to input from the user community. They will collaborate with the web designers. They will represent the world of the external users in in-house discussions about new features and changes. They will, as a result of their efforts, nurture a vibrant, engaging web presence.

Unfortunately, we live in a time when there are many highly qualified  journalists looking for work. Let’s hope that colleges and universities do not take the path of least resistance and hire such folks to write for their websites without insisting on a mindset change. No one should be hired to work on a university web site without proving that he can subordinate his own desire to produce original content to the greater goal of facilitating dialogue. There is a right way and a wrong way to write for the web. At stake is the ability of an organization’s website to advance its greater marketing goals. The potential is great. The right staffing is essential.

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.

Well here’s a future that is coming to academic institutions very soon . . .

I just completed a round of focus groups with extremely able college bound high school students. In the course of the conversation, I had a chance to ask them if they had used third party social media sites, such as College Confidential, Unigo and College Prowler, in their college search. The majority of these students had not. Of those who had used the sites, several were circumspect about the information they found. However, there were two students who said clearly and categorically that they had eliminated colleges that had previously been on their short list because of negative reviews they had read on one of these sites.

So right now the weight given to social media sites in the college selection process is not so great, at least not with the kind of students that were targeted by this particular piece of research. But I can tell you with absolute certainty that the importance of student reviews on social media sites in the college search process is only going to grow. Today it might be a minority of students who would be dissuaded from applying to a college because of negative reviews on such a site. In a few short years, it will be many, many more.

Most colleges and universities are ignoring this trend in part because their plates are full with other issues and in part because third party reviews of the college experience challenge what they view as their traditional prerogatives. Academics hate the idea that on-line conversations out of their control could be used to evaluate the quality of their courses or their teaching. This attitude infects administrators in charge of student life, dining etc.

Regardless of whether they like it or not, this future is fast approaching. It won’t be helpful for institutions to bury their heads in the sand and pretend this sort of thing will go away (not, that is, if they depend upon enrollment revenue for their survival).

Here are the two steps they should take:

1. Immediately create a position in their marketing and communications department dedicated to social media marketing. Colleges need to get up to speed quickly about the social media world. They need in-house expertise and savvy.
2. Focus on creating opportunities for their fans – current or prospective students, faculty, alumni or staff – to engage in on-line social media. Ultimately, there is no way to silence critics in the social media world. The only way to counter them in the future will be to outnumber them with positive comments.

This second activity involves a paradigm shift that I doubt most institutions are up to – moving from an introverted posture to one that is more transparent and open. So it is predictable that at least some institutions will be blindsided by the rapid rise of third-party reviews on social media sites and find themselves trying to play catch-up. That’s a future you can count on.

Proponents of the Great Books approach have an aversion to sociology and they aren’t too strong at history either so they generally resist efforts to ground their own movement in broader historical trends. But it isn’t difficult to locate the movement.  The specific issue that founders of the Great Books approach were addressing was the professionalization and specialization of knowledge in the American research university that was well-advanced by the dawn of the 20th century.  In the view of the founders, compartmentalization of knowledge inhibited the possibility of engaged public discourse and so threatened participation in a democratic society.

(For a recent conventional reiteration of this trope see Liz Coleman’s TED talk.)

When you read the pronouncements from the founders of the Great Books movement is seems clear that there was also a broader target, which was the subordination of intellectual life to industrial processes. Great Books champions constantly referred to educating students for freedom. Implicit is a critique of the extent to which intellectual life in mainstream advanced societies grew in the 20th century to be a tool for the production of value.

When asked to describe their reasons for selecting a Great Books program rather than a more typical college education, students say they chose it because they didn’t want their life to feel like an assembly line. They didn’t want to feel like their education was simply jumping through one hoop after another. They wanted a chance to step off their assigned path and have a chance for genuinely free and reflective thought.

Today there is a whole new intellectual movement movement having nothing to do with the Great Books that talks a great deal about freedom. Look at the titles of these recent manifestoes:

Lawrence Lessig. FREE CULTURE: HOW BIG MEDIA USES TECHNOLOGY AND THE LAW TO LOCK DOWN CULTURE AND CONTROL CREATIVITY

Yochai Benkler, THE WEALTH OF NETWORKS: HOW SOCIAL PRODUCTION TRANSFORMS MARKETS AND FREEDOM

This is an entirely different kind of freedom than that discussed by champions of the Great Books. Lessig and Benkler are talking about freedom that arises with the breakdown of the industrial production model of intellectual culture. With the world-wide diffusion of personal computers connected via the Internet, centralized control of the production of information is undermined. Today billions of people across the globe have the ability to engage socially, intellectually and politically without mediating authorities. According to Lessig, Benkler and many others, the 20th century industrial production model of intellectual life is dying, replaced by a less centralized, more participatory form.

Does an education that was founded to address one kind of restraint remain relevant in this new era with its potentially huge expansion in intellectual freedom? I do not know the answer. But one thing I know for sure: It is not sufficient for proponents of the Great Book program to pretend nothing has changed and claim to be as relevant as they ever were. The ground is shifting at a remarkable pace. Do we really need the Great Books Program today or do we need a new education that more fully takes into account the profound changes in our intellectual culture? I would love the hear this question seriously addressed by proponents of the Great Books program.

For more than ten years I’ve been asked by colleges to feature these programs in their marketing materials. I have found that the reality of study abroad is hard to capture. Obtaining useful original photography is a challenge. There are photographers who will gladly visit a study abroad site, but of course there are costs. Since most institutions sponsor or participate in multiple programs, you really need to have a photographer visit several locations around the world.

(At this point I need to include a shout-out to my friend and colleague, Melody Ko, who travelled for me with a service mission to rural Nicaragua to shoot a feature for the Tufts viewbook. She is a great talent who was wiling to undergo significant hardships to bring back moving and heartfelt images.)

You can ask students at the sites to forward images but the vast majority of images they send are snapshots that they take on weekends when they are visiting tourist destinations. Used in a brochure, these don’t capture the study abroad experience particularly well.

The problem in part is that the profound educational experience that occurs during study abroad cannot be easily captured in static words or images. Often the life-changing experience grows out of unstructured parts of everyday life – as part of a home stay, making international friends and overcoming the challenges of living in a foreign country. You can ask students to write about their experiences abroad. The quality of their account depends upon their skill as writers.

Enter social media. One of the many great benefits offered by a social media approach to college communications is its ability to depict the richness of the study abroad experience in an honest, multi-layered and student-centered way. This is something I’ve learned first-hand by watching the evolution of the UMBC social media aggregator site that was launched a month ago. If you look at that site, you will see the way that photos, Tweets and videos from abroad are blended into the overall presentation of the institution. UMBC happens to be a public institution that has a fairly strong but largely overlooked study abroad capacity. The aggregator site brings the reality of study abroad experiences alive in real time, while they are happening. I don’t think a prospect could spend much time on this site without understanding the global dimension to a UMBC education.

The UMBC site is just the start. As social media apps become more sophisticated, it will be possible for current and prospective students to understand that contemporary education does not just take place on a campus but at sites and locations across the globe. Social media offers a wonderful new tool for marketing study abroad.

I recently had an experience that underscored Bruce’s point and suggested that higher education institutions must not ignore social media if they are interested in recruiting diverse and under-served populations.

I was on-site at one of my clients – a highly prestigious Northeastern private college  – and I met a freshman in a focus group whom I’ll call Manuel. Manuel came from a fairly modest high school in the Los Angeles area. Many students from this high school do not attend college at all, and those who do attend in-state public institutions. Manuel was the exception. One of the best students in the school, he got excited about the prospect of attending a private liberal arts college by a presentation at his school by a Claremont colleges representative.

I was enormously impressed by this young man. Working independently, with little input from family or friends, he assembled a coherent and thoughtful list of selective national liberal arts colleges to which to apply. The list was so good you might have thought he worked with an independent college counselor. But he did not.

None of the schools that Manuel ended up applying to visited his high school. He did attend a college fair at the University of Southern California but much to his disappointment it featured in-state public institutions exclusively. As he firmed up his list, he did become aware that at least one of his colleges was hosting a reception for interested students in his area. But the reception was being held at an exclusive private school and he reasoned that the reception wasn’t targeted at him. Manuel did all of his research while flying under the radar of the schools he was considering. He never met an admissions officer nor visited any of the campuses.

Manuel conducted his research on-line. He said that he found the print materials that the various colleges sent out fairly useless. He also found little of value in the college websites. Neither gave him the information he was seeking. Instead, he focused his attention on 3rd party on-line resources and social media sites such as Unigo. He did tell me that once he settled on the particular college where I met him, he faithfully followed an independent student blog that discussed college events and issues. But he spent little time on the college’s official website.

I think Manuel’s experience holds important lessons for colleges and universities. In trying to reach beyond their traditional communities and attract new more diverse populations, on-line social media platforms are going to be very significant. Truth is, social media platforms are going to be significant for all college bound student recruitment in the future. There are Manuels of every ethnicity and class across this country and around the world. But these resources will be especially important to students who fall outside the traditional pool for private higher education. Colleges that are committed to diverse student communities ignore social media marketing at their peril.

Like all new social media platforms, the launch is something of a social experiment. We build it and we help seed it. But we don’t know exactly what is going to happen once it launches and it gets turned over to the wider college community. Needless to say everyone involved with the project watches the site pretty obsessively these days.

Though many of the channels that we included in the site are active, we’re all a little tickled that the coolest and most vibrant channel on the site is definitely the Twitter stream. If you’re one of those people who doesn’t get Twitter or thinks it’s boring, take a minute to check out this stream of comments. It’s a lot of fun. We even got an endorsement from one of the tweeters:

. . . actually, to all of my UMBC Twitter friends, why aren’t you ALL on be.UMBC.edu. It’s fucking sweet- go sign up!

So I’m thinking pronouncements about the unpopularity of Twitter among college students may be a bit premature – at least for this group of engaged students at UMBC.

Independent schools cater to a narrow social segment where attitudes are deeply engrained and hard to change. Day school markets are constrained geographically, so schools do not have the option of expanding into new markets where their image might be easier to change.

I don’t give up hope. I think it’s possible for independent school to move the dial dramatically. Most, you see, are at a pretty rudimentary stage when it comes to marketing. With a little effort and a willingness to topple some sacred cows, a school could make significant inroads in their local market. Here are the steps I would suggest:

• Chuck the viewbook.

Admissions communications efforts at most independent school still center on the production of a viewbook. But viewbooks have a major shortcoming as marketing tools in the independent school communications stream: their impact is largely confined to the moment when they are distributed. A parent contacts a school and is either mailed a viewbook or handed one upon visiting. In a best-case scenario, the parent and/or student spends a good amount of time with the viewbook exploring the programs and attitudes of the school. However, even in this best-case scenario, parents and prospective students rarely if ever refer back to the viewbook later in the process. At the point when they winnowing down a list of schools or when they are selecting a school from a set of options, they do not return to the viewbook. They have moved on to first hand impressions as the basis for their actions. So the ability of the viewbook to influence actions at critical junctures is limited. As such, it does not merit the volume of time and resources directed toward it. (Please note: these comments apply  to independent day schools and not to boarding schools where viewbooks play an important role.)

There are some really impressive viewbooks out there. That of the Chicago Lab School is perfect in tone and style. Everyone should call  Friends Select in Philadelphia and get a copy of the viewbook they produced last year. But I would like to hear from those schools whether in the time since they introduced their new viewbook they have singificantly moved the dial in terms of perceptions or competitive position. I’m thinking that the answer will be no.

• Invest in a high quality brand strategy and a fresh and comprehensive identity system

Because we’re going to be doing without a viewbook and instead employing a serious of less expensive and shorter brochures and cards for mailing, it is critically important that we have a fine-tuned message and that all our materials convey a consistent set of fonts, colors, design, tone and photographic style. Many independent schools are fairly good at using their logo consistently on all their materials but they need to go beyond that. They need to develop a comprehensive family of  colors, themes and tone – in other words, a “look” – for all their materials. It is critically important that this  look be carried through consistently in web and print. In most cases, schools need to freshen up  their logos so that they are optimized for on-line environments.

• Upgrade your website

All aspects of the website need to be improved. The writing needs to be professional and produced with an eye to readability in an on-line environment. The photography needs to be carefully selected and consistent through. The information architecture needs to be simplified with a clear priority given to first time visitors and those in the course of the admissions process. The design needs to be fresh and engaging. The message developed in the brand strategy needs to ring loud and clear on the homepage and every other page of the site.

• Develop two social media marketing strategies – one directed at upper school prospects and one directed at parents of kindergarten and lower school prospects.

Independent schools are in the exciting situation of having two major audiences for social media marketing. The first are upper school prospects. Today, virtually all middle- and upper-school students are involved with social media platforms such as Facebook. These platforms are probably the best way to reach out directly to students considering one’s upper school.

The second audience is just as, if not more, interesting – the parents of today’s lower school students. These are Gen Xers, the people who pioneered the use of interactive media in their professional lives. This is an audience that will be highly receptive to social-media based strategies. As independent schools evolve, creating dialogue via on-line media will become a more and more important part of the admissions process.

If an independent school got behind a strategy such as this, dispensing with the things that don’t work and focussing on excellent delivery of those that do, they could move the dial. I can’t stress enough the importance of a comprehensive approach. All the messages, look, feel and tone need to be consistent and carried through in all media. That is the way to change perceptions and leapfrog the competition in an entrenched independent school market.

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.