August
Caveat
Having read around and thought some more on the issues where I’ve played devil’s advocate recently, I realize that it is much more economically sound for a college with a yearly prospect pool of 5000+ students to engage in a campaign such as student blogs that will arguably only effect 10-20% (500-1000) of their prospects. At WWC, our prospect pool is small because of our size. With freshman classes rarely topping 350 students at most, dividing the prospect pool into smaller portions quickly makes our return on investment slip into the negative. For instance, it would cost us just as much to pay five student bloggers and give them digital cameras as it would a large school, but we would get much less return on the effort.
To further complicate matters, I am the only staffer working on the website. Larger schools frequently have whole departments or divisions to handle web content. My time comes at a premium, and it would be a mistake for me to get distracted by a project that only interests 20% of the market when I could be working on one that nets 80%.
However, that doesn’t make what I’ve said totally irrelevant outside of the small, private school environment. It never hurts to be frugal. While I’m not sold on the notion that student blogs work that well, I am very interested in tapping into social networks as a source for connections among prospects and existing students. If I were at a big school, I would be looking to the small guys to come up with the innovative ways to make their marketing money stretch the farthest. At least, that’s half the reason I’m reading all these blogs :)
September 20th, 2006 at 4:44 pm
Morgan,
My name is Chris and I am a student and marketing intern at Albion College in Michigan. Albion is a private liberal arts college of about 2,000 students. My primary responsibility is to figure out how we can utilize the internet and all of its latest trends to better reach prospective students. I read your blog regularly and agree with many of your criticisms of student blogs on the admissions page (though I think you sometimes forget that the average high school senior is an intellectual dwarf compared to Sam Jackson and other students on which you are basing your opinions).
Anyways, I would like to discuss social marketing sites such as facebook and Myspace and figure out how small colleges like ours could use them to increase our appliant pool. An idea that I will soon be testing in focus groups is the creation of an official college MySpace page. I have seen some colleges attempt this, but I dont’ believe any of them have done it correctly. I think high school seniors would be very receptive to a Myspace page with interactive multimedia such as podcasts and video podcasts (student created or otherwise) and student blogs. I feel that if prospective students discovered this information in the context of a myspace page, it would seem more authentic and less like college gernerated propaganda. I also believe that a Myspace page could (should) be home to information that would be too informal, critical, or risque to be contained on the normal homepage.
I have yet to discover a college that uses Facebook to recruit prospective students. With the privacy barriers involved in Facebook, it would require a full time employee to manage the account and befriend each high school student individually. For now, I think Myspace would be the only viable option, as far as social networking sites go, for college admissions offices to use.
Please let me know what you think. I am pretty new at this–in the past four weeks I have gone from never having heard of podcasts or RSS feeds to delving very deeply into the higher education marketing blogosphere. Your input would be greatly appreciated. I emailed you a few days ago, but received no response.
Thank you
Chris