Rachel Reuben

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?

If you’re having a hard time convincing your administration that social media is worth the investment, try coming at it from a different angle — and I’m not suggesting writing the “social media strategy” we’ve all been hearing about lately. My theory? Piggy back on existing strategies at your university.

Stamats Integrated Marketing conference earlier this month I was all jazzed up to write a social media strategy. Fritz McDonald and C.J. Cunniff from the Interactive Media division of Stamats gave a fantastic presentation to close the conference on developing an effective Web 2.0 plan. They outlined twelve steps in developing this strategy.

But here’s where my thinking is now different — the steps they offered, the foundation they provided, would work for just about any form of media – not just social. I have sat at my computer staring at the screen, poised to write my college’s social media strategy with these twelve steps in mind. I haven’t been able to get into it. And the other morning, it struck me why. Do we really need one?

My campus has lots of strategies. Our president has eight solid vision points to guide us internally. We’re very fortunate right now – our undergraduate admissions office has more applicants than they know what to do with. However, they have some key strategies they are employing this year to continue to increase quality of the academics of our incoming student body. They are targeting select populations to increase diversity. They are concerned about the upcoming decline in high school graduates, significant increase of Hispanic graduates, and fewer white non-Hispanic graduates in the United States

More than likely, there are already strategies that exist on your campus. Find out what they are. Learn all you can about them. Then, pitch that person/department/division an idea using social media that will further their strategy and assist in achieving their goal. If you know more about their issues, they’ll be less reluctant to think you’re coming at them with yet another Web-based hair-brained scheme (even if they do think the term “Web 2.0” is still cool).

Social media isn’t the solution to the upcoming decreasing number of college applications. It’s not the solution for attracting the higher quality students. What it can be, is a strong spoke in your marketing wheel, but don’t try to convince your administration that it is a replacement for the things in your marketing mix you’re hearing prospective students are no longer interested in (viewbooks, CDs, etc.).

Most universities aren’t going to give up printing viewbooks in mass, going to large college fairs, and certainly wouldn’t dream of closing down their admissions Web site that reaches millions. The masses need information, and you can’t have individual conversations with every single prospect. Or maybe you can. Maybe you at least make it seem like you are. That’s where social media comes in. It’s not going to replace any of the traditional spokes in your marketing wheel. It’s not going to be “the one thing” that makes the difference in your recruiting efforts this season, but it can certainly make an impact, make your university seem more personal, and provide that higher level of customer service that could potentially knock the socks off a prospect.

Spending time focusing on the personal interactions you can have with your target audience will benefit your larger scale efforts. Pretend your Facebook Page is a small Cafe. Introduce yourself. Make friends. Engage your fans. But don’t give up on the larger-scale, more traditional tools in your marketing mix. These individual conversations are important – especially if you’re conversing with someone who is a member of an underrepresented group you’re targeted, or has very strong academics. The outreach to these individuals will cultivate relationships, and this is where viral marketing begins. These prospects will likely tell their friends about their early experience with your university (especially if it’s personal and meaningful), and word will spread. But in the end – you’re still recruiting to the masses, and you’re still trying to achieve overarching strategies. Don’t forget the bigger picture, but to get there, you have to cultivate the snowflakes before the avalanche begins.

What do you think? Let’s discuss.

Matt Herzberger’s (@mherzber) Session @ #stamats08

*Watch the Presentation Video*

Goals & Research

• migrate old posts, move to WordPress, ability to add multimedia, social media linkage, easy for writers

Research

• evaluate what’s out there (both .edu & .com) – <3′s NYTimes.com
• talk to writers – what are their needs
• themes/designs/templates (SocialMediaRelease.org) – SMPR template

Goal: Make news sexy!!

RSS = plumbing (if only you could see the photo to go with this slide – classic!): You may not know it, but you’re consuming RSS

Problems

• writers: put it in play to see what works
• comments: convince to enable, monitor
• consistency
• add multimedia: writers tend not to care

Measurement

• tools
  • Pay: Vocus, CustomScoop, Trackur
  • Free: Google Alerts, Technorati, Blog Pulse, Compete, del.icio.us

Future: What’s next

• Do reporters in your area want RSS feeds instead of e-mails, faxes, paper press releases?

Examples:

• Check out Texas A&M Engineering News site
• MizzouWire
• University of Illinois, Springfield
• BU Today
• Stanley Cup Winner JS Giguere Tackles…
• WebEx launches the Green Guide to your Office
• Doritos

How to practically start w/ limited resources:

• use WordPress – known for 5 min install
• redeploy writers – they’re already writing, just change where they’re putting it
• they’re already taking photos – use them here
• find creative ways to add sound & video – try SlideShowPro. Beauty of YouTube – they don’t have to be polished. Flip & Kodak video cameras.

Social Media News Release

MNR on MNR

The following was a paper researched between May-July 2008, and written and published in August 2008 by Rachel Reuben as her independent study project as part of her MBA program at the State University of New York at New Paltz. 

This summer I did an independent study research project in pursuit of my MBA (expected graduation is Dec. ’09). The focus of my research was the use of social media in higher education, specifically for marketing and communication.

This guide originally started with the premise of being co-authored with my sponsoring professor, and we planned to seek publication in an academic journal, and to present it at an upcoming conference. Unfortunately our schedules did not work out for the original concept, so I hope the guide as it turned out will still be useful to high level administrators in academia. We do plan to beef up the data analysis section and re-visit its focus into an academic publication later this year.

In July I produced a survey that was distributed via three listservs (uweb, HighEdWeb, SUNY CUADNet) and Twitter, asking what tools colleges are using, which offices maintain them, how often they spend maintaining them, and what target audience(s) they’re primarily using them for. I ended up with 148 unique colleges/universities responding to the survey.

The Conversation Prism

The tools I focused on for the purpose of this survey included Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, blogs, and del.icio.us (now delicious.com). This research project culminated into writing a guidfe geared towards high level administrators in higher education, such as President’s and VP’s who have heard about social media, but need a complete introduction to the concept and potential. However, I do believe the data presented provides some solid statistics for mid-level Web, marketing and communication professionals to use to convince their supervisors that some forms of social media may be very beneficial to their overall marketing and communication mix.

Download: The Use of Social Media in Higher Education for Marketing and Communications: A Guide for Professionals in Higher Education (PDF)

Key Takeaways:

• Facebook has great potential for our purposes, and just over half of those surveyed already have a Facebook Page for their University. MySpace is not only loosing ground with the general population in terms of the number of active users, but it’s also not popularly used in higher education.
• YouTube has enormous capabilities and potential. This is an area where you can really see a lot of ROI with no real post-production costs and an infinite audience (vs. creating CDs/DVDs, paying for postage to mail, distributing at fairs, etc.).
• Higher education hasn’t quite found the right niche for Twitter yet. It has great potential in the future, and there are a few ideas floating out there that may take off in the coming months – it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
• In this guide I discuss concerns and implications for adopting (or not) social media, and illustrate some best practices in the higher education industry.