Rachel Reuben Consulting, LLC

About ten years ago when e-mail became mainstream at colleges/universities, departments were skittish about having a separate dedicated e-mail account as a way for their customers to contact them. They worried about work load creep, and customers expecting a quick turn around time for responses. Most of these folks still preferred to be tied up on the phone with their customers at that point.

Now, most departments are long on board with the dedicated e-mail account. And it’s mutually understood that customers will receive a response within one to two business days at most.

Enter… Facebook.

Your college/university has a Facebook Fan page. It’s getting littered with wall posts from prospective students eager for information about your institution. They’re posting at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night and re-posting “helllooooo??” by 11 a.m. Sunday morning if they haven’t received a response yet. Holidays? Doesn’t matter. Receiving posts on Christmas Day and New Years Eve get the same reactions.

How do you handle this if you’re not looking until you get back to work again Monday morning?

Do you know how many lost opportunities take place if you only monitor your social media efforts during the traditional work week? Other fans of your page may jump in and try to be helpful. If they’re right, fantastic. It’s the ones who spread misinformation you have to worry about and is why it is critical for you to keep listening periodically throughout the weekend and evenings during the week.

If you’re going to jump into social media – you need to be able to realistically support it. Expect to check your Facebook Fan Page at all weird hours of the weekend and evening. If you can’t, find someone on your team that will. Students are a great resource for this — but of course you need to find someone you can trust who will not only be genuine, but maintain a level of professionalism and accuracy while speaking in “their language.”

Social media has blown the traditional work week out the door. It’s made it harder and harder for professionals to disconnect. The new culture is all about “the now.” Text message me now. Instant message me now. They don’t want to wait until tomorrow. Should we train them to slow down, or just ride this wave with them?

Photo credit shindohd

Saving Big: Winning strategies to get better results even with a crunched budget: February 4 & 5, 2009

“Saving Big” is a 2-webinar series that will show you how embracing the right digital approach can help you dramatically cut costs while still meeting the needs of your target audiences. It will show you why and how social media can become a very budget-friendly asset in the battle to attract, engage and win over the brightest, but also why and how to save on any publication budgets without alienating readers and compromising editorial quality.

Recruiting on a budget 101: Master plan to win the social media jackpot with prospective students
.eduGuru Rachel Reuben, who is also the Director of Web Communication and Strategic Projects at SUNY New Paltz, will explain how to make the most of social media to upgrade your recruitment strategy and differentiate your institution. She will also share a road map to help your admissions office catch up with the latest recruiting techniques at a fraction of the more traditional approach’s cost.

Taming the print beast: How to stretch the publication dollars of your institution
Joe Hice, AVP for Marketing and Public Relations at the University of Florida, will help you understand why you should give a closer look at your publication budget in these tough economic times. He will also share the winning strategy (as well as some practical tips) that led UF to save more than a million dollars on its publication budget.

For more information, visit the HigherEdExperts.com site.

This update is part 2 in a series about Café New Paltz, an exclusive online community using Ning for our fall 2009 accepted students at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

Wow. That about sums up the reaction my colleagues and I have had since launching Café New Paltz on Friday, January 2.

Quick Bites (stats as of 8:30 a.m. Jan. 7):

• invited 1,323 early action accepted students
• 169 members
• 143 photos posted by members
• 6 discussion forums started by members — including one with 33 replies

Videos
We posted two videos when we launched. I’m actually surprised at the low number of video plays, in relation to the number of members and their other activity. Everyone we have chatted with in the Café has been raving about them.

• Welcome to Café New Paltz (2:06) – 66 views
• Visit New Paltz (contest – 1:14) – 65 views

Jingle + Birthdays
My graduate assistant and his brother produced a catchy jingle for Café New Paltz that we use in the beginning and end of every video.

We noticed we have two birthdays in the community today. We’ve posted 4 happy birthday videos for them — one from the Office of Undergraduate Admission staff, one from two current students working in the Welcome Center, and one from each of our baristas. We also posted birthday wishes on their walls and pushed an activity update to the “latest activity feed” to wish them happy birthday.

Google Analytics Snippets (Jan. 2-6)
 

• 1,539 visits
• 18,758 pageviews
• 20.40% bounce rate
• 13:54 average time on site
• top 3 features: home page, members page, chat page, and one person’s profile page (he’s popular!)

Finances

• paying Ning $24.95/month to remove the ads
• paying Ning $4.95/month to point to custom domain
• paid $10.19 for domain name for one year

Anecdotes
Over the weekend our baristas spent countless hours (on their own time, without being asked!) inside the Café striking up conversations and making new friends. They let the community decide what the next videos are they will produce (we’re calling them “Flavors of the Week”), and the order they will be posted.

Some snippets I saved from one of many weekend chat sessions:

• “I must be going. i’m definitely gonna log on again though, this is an amazing resource.”
  
• “Yeah this is a pretty great thing set up here”
  
• “Yeah, I’ve never run across a school with something this helpful and people this nice before! It’s great!”

They were also correcting each other’s grammar and spelling during one chat session. :)

A parent called my colleague in the admissions office to sign her daughter up for an event that is advertised in the Café. She said her daughter was very impressed with the Café and wishes other schools did something like this. The mom was very impressed with how much we were doing for our accepted students, and also commented on how cute and entertaining her daughter thought the two guys doing the videos were (our “baristas”). 

Next Up?
This Friday we’re going to send a re-invitation to the balance of original invitees that haven’t responded. The four videos our baristas are working on include residence life, dining services, clubs/sports/intramurals, and around town.

Plug for upcoming Webinar
Want to hear more about how to recruit on a budget? Sign-up for my HigherEdExperts.com Webinar in the Saving Big series, which will be held February 4.

Am I missing something I should be tracking? What are you interested in learning? What does the activity in your communities look like?