Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

I have now been tracking the Butler Class of 2012 Facebook Group for 6 months. For more background, check these posts:

• Here come the Fall 08 kids… (January 10, 2008)
• Tracking the Facebook Group (February 6, 2008)
• Facebook Class of 2012: 3 Months Later (March 26, 2008)

I have also set up a new page that will dynamically refresh as the weeks continue, and include more in-depth charts by month. You can find the Class of 2012 Research page here.

Here’s the chart after 6 months, which is tracking Members, Wall Posts, and Discussion Posts:

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Have you thought about that?  I have been today.  I am putting together a 2nd round of emails because registration for our campus visit days are down.  While trying to answer the question “What can I say to make this student/family believe that they should spend the time/gas/money/energy to visit our campus?”, several questions ran through my head:

• Are students visiting less campuses than in the past?
• Are they lumping visits together into one trip to save gas?
• What happens when your planned visit days don’t line up with theirs?
• Do you have sufficient material online to show your campus to students who can’t make it?
• Will ‘09 graduates choose campuses closer to home if gas prices continue to rise?
• Do you allow flexibility for visitors to come when they please, or are they locked into a set presentation time?  What happens if they can’t get from College XYZ down the road to your 1pm presentation before it starts?  Are they going to miss out? Are YOU going to miss out?
• Are Admission Counselors making the most efficient trips on the road, or are they doing business as usual?
• Do we need to got to as many college fair and school visits as we used to?
• Can you get the student to see the visit as an investment?
• Are you doing everything you can to make them feel like it was worth the trip?
• What’s the average ROI on a visit to a high school? Is there a Long Tail?
• Do we care enough about our students who visit to give them a $10 gas card for the effort?
• Couldn’t we cut out a mailing or two to fund this goodwill gesture?
• Which would students remember more, the brochure or the gas card?
• What if the gas card was rechargeable, and we filled it with another $20 on move-in weekend after they applied/enrolled? How would that affect retention?

And those are just 15 questions that have run through my head in the last few minutes. Just thinking/typing out loud here.  I’d love to hear your thoughts, and other questions you are thinking about when it comes to gas/gas prices as they relate to the recruitment process.

With all of the tools readily available at your fingertips, how could you afford to not use them?

Yesterday I had a meeting with BUMegan about some communication for incoming freshman. Previously, the ‘welcome week newsletter’ has been a word document around 5 pages long. Gross. So we started brainstorming about what to do this year. Email? eNewsletter? Welcome Week Blog? Post the info to the Facebook Class of 2012 group and the BUForums?

So I went to my network of higher ed professionals on Twitter for advice.

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Just had a Google Alert come across that Hobsons has acquired CollegeConfidential.com, which has thought to have been a fairly reliable and unbiased source for high school students and parents everywhere. How will the community change as a result of this acquistion?

I’d expect to see collegeconfidential.com turn into a paid forum registration for ‘premium content’ soon. Either that or Hobsons just wants to do a little datamining and pimp their products. They will figure out some sort of revenue stream though, and I’d guess that it’ll put the user experience at risk.

I am trying to get out of their ‘Chat’ solution right now, and looking at a few options that I have heard many good things about. Chat University is an absolute joke. Look at this. Or any ChatU site really. Appealing? Not a bit.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this thread to see how the community reacts.

Free is here to stay? I guess I’ll hold on to that thought. Economics and a little $$ can do some crazy things.

[Press Release: Hobsons Acquires College Confidential]

Let’s talk a little bit about expectations of an admission website, and the evolving nature of it. I’m going to speak in terms of the Whole Product Concept, which some of you might be familiar with. It looks like this:

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about uses for Twitter in Higher Ed. I’ve said before (here):

[...] having the kids sign up for Twitter is just another barrier to communication. While I am typically an advocate for universities using services rather than reinventing the wheel, Twitter has yet to prove its stability to me.

There has also been a lot of talk about Twitter, how to use it in Higher Ed, what might be effective, what might not be, etc. I’ve sort of sat back and soaked this all in, watching developments at other universities and trying to think of how I can use Twitter to enhance a student’s experience on our site.

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No, i’m not trying to sell you a product. I’m trying to sell you on usability testing. That’s right, with only $10 and 10 minutes YOU can IMPROVE your SITE! (insert big logo and web 2.0 graphic here)

Last November I did a usability test with Marcie, a senior at a local high school. There was one question I wanted to ask her because I was pretty sure I knew the answer already, I just needed it recorded for proof to others.

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It’s no secret that I love Flickr. It’s a perfect blend of community and functionality in the web 2.0 world, and it’s an extremely powerful tool.

Could it also be your solution for an electronic photo database management system?

Let’s take a walk at what Flickr has to offer you, and how it can help you organize your campus photos and provide some additional value to your workflow. We’re going to get pretty in-depth here, so buckle up and refer back often.

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I’m back from a very refreshing week of fun and sun in Florida with my wife, and am starting to get settled back in the office and get caught up. While I was out I tried my hardest to avoid work email/RSS/Twitter, but it’s just impossible. To my credit, I left 75 work emails unread and 700 posts in my Google Reader, and did pretty well at avoiding Twitter.

Vacation also allowed me to take a step back and look my profession as a whole. I read or re-read a lot of great books:

• Fat Envelope Frenzy
• All Marketers are Liars
• The Price of Admission
• Cluetrain Manifesto
• Made to Stick
• Join the Conversation

Right now is a ’season of change’ for me both personally and professionally. Vacation couldn’t have come at a better time; in the week leading up to my trip our Director of Admission resigned, our Assistant Director had a baby and went on maternity leave, and our print coordinator (my counterpart) and main web designer who did the butler.edu redesign put in their 2 weeks. Needless to say, change is in the air. With new positions come new opportunities, both for those leaving and those arriving. Change can bring more change, good and bad. And while we are filling positions, there are a few things I can look forward to/lobby for.

For example, our current CMS only allows me to change content on sites within go.butler.edu. I can’t control anything on the homepage, navigation, etc. and only recently got access to the callouts in the margins. (A post on that and web usability has been sitting in my drafts for months. I’ll get it out in after I have a little more data.) With the new web designer vacancy, I am going to lobby for access to the ‘ArtApp’, aptly named after the guy leaving. It is the ‘CMS backdoor’ that allows access to these sorts of things. No better time than now to cut red tape. I was hoping Art would give me the keys before he left, he has very similar feelings as me about the CMS limitations.

Another opportunity will be revamping emails, etc. Currently, I design emails and the copy comes to me. We’ve really worked over the past year at refining the copy into an ‘email-compatible’ format. I kid you not, previous emails have been more than 1.5 pages long in Word… imagine that in a 550-600px box. *shudder* The person leaving the position has been great at recognizing this need and helping to cut text before passing it on, and she has also been a wonderful liason for me to the print department for getting photos for emails. With the absence of this position, I am going to try and get access (finally) to the campus photo library for emails, and start working more on text edits and getting our electronic materials to match the print versions better.

All of these positions will be hard to fill; our team works so well together and hopefully we can find some people to step in and hit the ground running, but still be able to bring us some fresh ideas and thoughts on what we’re doing here. I haven’t even been here a year, and at times I feel myself slipping towards the dreaded rut of moving along with business as usual year after year using previous materials and methods.

In all, it’s good to be back. Do yourself a favor and take some time off if you haven’t recently. It’s healthy for you. Winter is pretty much gone, so get out and enjoy the weather. You don’t even have to go anywhere far; just enjoy a day to yourself. Take a photo walk around your hometown, read some books, play with your kids, work in the yard, wash the cars, clean out the garage, go to a presidential rally, or just do absolutely nothing. But take a day off. There is so much more out in the world other than work and keeping up with the 9-5. The blogs will be here when you return. The emails really aren’t that urgent. The project can wait a few more days. And when you get back, you’ll be refreshed and ready to start back up again.

It’s really hard to believe that nearly 3 months since I first posted about the Class of 2012 group on Facebook, and 2 months since I went public with the data tracking. I mentioned on that post that I would post occasional updates, and I thought the 3 month mark would be a good one.

Here’s the chart after 3 months, which is tracking Members, Wall Posts, and Discussion Posts:
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