August
Are Student Blogs Really a Good Idea?
Karine Joly’s article on student blogs as a recruitment tool has just come out in the latest issue of University Business. With so much enthusiasm and success stories surrounding student blogs, I think it prudent to step back and consider whether it is really the golden key that so many present it as. Karine, fortunately, ended the article on a word of caution. Sometimes having administrators reticent to make the commitment to hands-off creative license is a blessing. In my case, at least, we may have averted pouring lots of effort and money into a mistake. Here’s an anti-student blog perspective with some different arguments than you may have heard before.
When blogs first made their big splash in the non-geek world in the wake of the 2004 elections, my institution begin to have discussions of blogs as a recruitment tool. We weren’t the only ones either—very few colleges and universities had considered the idea of student blogs for recruitment prior to the media revelation that came with the success of sites like moveon.org and Howard Dean’s ‘net roots’ fundraising. Herein is the main problem with student blogs on college Admission sites. Instead of being driven by an interest and movement within the target market of college-bound high school kids, recruitment staffers jumped on a largely adult-driven bandwagon that owed its success to blogging-as-journalism while ignoring a market that would spend the next two years gravitating more heavily toward social networking services than anything called blog.
The internet as a whole is a sore spot for many college Admission offices. Its importance was rarely realized (often still isn’t) before competitor institutions were making the best of it and recruitment gurus were extolling its virtues on conference floors and in consultation meetings. By then, the institution’s website was firmly entrenched in the IT department where it had been little more than a marginally useful toy for years. The result was often intrigues and power plays as who-owned-what got worked out, then working painfully with IT to get design, content, and updates in place. Sound familiar? The result seems to be that many Admission folks, still stinging from dragging their feet on the college website, are poised to jump on whatever looks like the next-big-thing on the web. Now that there is even a Buzz Marketing with Blogs For Dummies, (out of nearly 200 results for a ‘blog’ search on Amazon books) blogs have certainly established themselves as a big thing.
But are high school juniors and seniors reading and writing blogs? Strangely, few ask that question before spending time and money setting up student blogs on their sites. Perhaps they look at the widespread use of sites like myspace.com and livejournal.com as justification. However, are these sites blogs? Will a prospect who reads his friends LiveJournal also be interested in your student blogs? Some recent polling of students would suggest that the answer is ‘no.’
We deployed a survey via email to our incoming and current students with the idea of examining general trends in web use. (Caveat: we have a unique niche market and only about 800 students.) What we found was rather surprising. Only 20% of those polled said that they “Read Blogs / Journals / Diaries” and only about half of that 20% said that they “Write Blog / Journal / Diary.” However, 51% responded that they use the social networking sites MySpace, Live Journal, or Facebook. This was an interesting disparity, since most of my peers in Admission/Recruitment tend to lump these social networks under the general heading of “blog.”
I continued my research and found similar results on a national poll. The National Research Center for Colleges and Universities (NRCCUA) conducted a survey of 1000 members of the high school class of 2006 from all over the US. Their survey found that 24% of students said they read blogs and 19% said they wrote them. They compared their results from statistics from the PEW Internet & American Life Project and commented that less teens in their survey read blogs than the PEW-reported adult readership of 27%. This seemed to suggest that blog interest was possibly more prevalent among adults, which made perfect sense if you made a clear separation between “blog” and “social network.” PEW’s numbers were much higher–38% of teens polled read blogs, but PEW also made no distinction in their questions between blogs and social networking sites, which could explain the disparity.
The lackluster response to the term “blog” stands in stark contrast to the continuing rocket-like rise of sites such as MySpace.com. The difference is clear and is one that should seem self-evident: high school teens are interested in associating within their own cliques and circles, which a social network allows them to do. More important by far than the presence of diary-style entries is the “friends list” and other features that are ubiquitous within the top social networking websites. In fact, the very popular Facebook.com does not provide space for user blogs at all.
It pays to know and understand the difference between blogs and social networks. You can harness a blog for recruitment purposes, but it is much harder to do anything with the social networking sites.
Wikipedia has a nice article on internet social networks, which you can find here.
Compare that with their article on blogs, which you can find here.
The end result for Admission/Recruitment marketers is that we are back again to the most effective and hardest to control message—word of mouth. A student blog on a college website may seem, within the euphoric world of the blog bandwagon, to provide access to that word-of-mouth world. The truth is that it rarely does, except when the “authenticity” is done very well.
High school students are very sensitive to authenticity and relevance within your marketing efforts. The response your student blogs receive will be one of students who understand that they’re not seeing a “real” journal. In the end, it doesn’t matter if you call it a blog or something else. When it comes down to forming hard opinions about your institution, the battle for mindshare will still happen in the comments section of a MySpace or LiveJournal entry. It will happen amidst prospects who know each other and are communicating within a familiar venue.
August 17th, 2006 at 4:10 pm
Your last paragraph here really sums up my own experience as a rising senior with student blogs and their (limited) perception among my friends. More would read them if they knew about them (when I point a friend to a blog from a student / adcoms at a school they’re interested in, they tend to become frequent visitors) but at the same time, my friends and I are more inclined to trust the statements of bloggers who maintain a strict independence from the institution they are blogging about. They can still be joyous and excited about it, of course, and even overtly promoting–but so long as it’s perceived to have been completely student-driven, that’s just a metric which counts in the schools favor. “Kids are so happy here, they make websites to try to entice others to come.” Alternately, “Though X writer describes X university as a mixed bag, I feel my doubts have been smoothed over by his/her honesty.”
For the admissions-flavored blogs, we look at them–or at least, I look at them–and regard them as a different type of marketing. Something else to be looked at and considered when thinking about schools and admissions, but something which has to be looked at in the same sense that the viewbook or postcards that inundate are mailboxes are received.
ALL THE SAME, I still wish more admissions officers would keep their own blogs (for those are particularly interesting) and also that they would facilitate student blogging, however questionable the motivation in doing so. As the volume of information increases, it can be hard to sift through the increasing noise–but at the same time, there’s more opportunity to find some very revealing gems.
on which note i’ll also add this your site here is a gem (thanks technorati!) and i’ll be reading it from now on.
August 17th, 2006 at 4:33 pm
[...] Morgan Davis is the Web Director at Warren Wilson, a small liberal arts college in North Carolina. He has a blog called erelevant which purports to be his “off-the-cuff blog about electronic marketing and working within higher education.” It seems to more or less fit that bill. I found it while snooping around on Technorati, and it has proved very interesting. On August 8th, Davis wrote a post titled Are Student Blogs Really A Good Idea? which is question which I answered earlier by saying “sorta depends, but yeah.” [...]