Rachel Reuben Consulting, LLC

Looking for something new to try this spring for your recruiting efforts? I recently saw a demo for CollegeWeekLive and was quite impressed with its features and the possibilities it creates for recruiters across the country.

Side note: This may seem like a sales pitch, but it’s not. I don’t work for CollegeWeekLive, nor am I a current client. I’m just an impressed individual who works in marketing and communication at a university, and wanted to share this with you, as I hadn’t heard much about them before seeing this demo.

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Last summer I did research for my independent study project in graduate school that resulted in “The Use of Social Media in Higher Education for Marketing and Communication: A Guide for Professionals in Higher Education.” The research was largely done in June and July 2008. During this time, very few universities were actively using Twitter.

When I did that research, I concluded:

We haven’t found a definitive way to use Twitter for marketing in higher
education yet. Some have suggested it can be used in conjunction with other
social media tools, such as student bloggers also having Twitter accounts they
update more often than their blogs, to serve as another tool to promote their new
blog entries. Others have suggested it can be used in emergency situations,
such as the shootings that happened at Virginia Tech (Swartzfager 2007), or
using it in place of a live chat service for recruitment (Wilburn 2008).

Since then I’ve noticed many universities trying to figure out ways to leverage their presence on Twitter, not only establishing one, but by actively finding ways to promote their use of it to engage community members.

Some universities, including mine, use services such as Twitterfeed, EasyTweets or HootSuite to pipe their existing RSS feeds into their Twitter accounts, so that every time something new shows up in the feed, it automatically tweets the headline and link to the full story. This is a simple way to have news, events and blog posts automated.

But, there is so much more that can be done to use Twitter in a less robotic way. The piece that seems to be lacking greatly is human interaction. We’re having conversations with prospective students on Facebook, in Ning communities, and even through YouTube. Why not extend this in the natural conversation environment that is Twitter?

Neil Bearse, the Manager of Web Based Marketing, at Queen’s School of Business in Kingston, Ontario is a leading example using Twitter to engage prospective students. Neil has TweetDeck running a great portion of every day with a search for the term “MBA” in one of the columns. While this may seem awfully broad, he has proven how local he can make it. He saw some tweets come through the stream by an individual in Europe, wondering whether it was manageable to complete an MBA online, while he continued to work. He responded with words of encouragement, indicating that Queen’s MBA participants routinely complete the program in this fashion, and offered tips for maintaining balance while completing graduate studies. In a curious twist of small worlds colliding, this individual was already a graduate of a Canadian University, and was contemplating relocating to Canada to continue this studies. His experience and aspirations made him a great match for a Queen’s program offered in Vancouver.

Conversion potential for this one search that Neil jumped in to talk to: $70,000.

Not sure who to start conversing with? Setup a search on search.twitter.com for the name(s) of your university. Subscribe to the RSS feed. Listen in once or twice (more if you can swing it) a day. Set up a free listening station. Find people that are talking about your university, follow them, and start a conversation with them. Setup a search in TweetDeck, or the application of your choice, with keywords you are interested in following.

Use technology to your benefit to engage in conversations. Don’t just use it to spit out robot feeds, or you may be missing key opportunities that Queen’s School of Business will gladly jump on.

Do you have any stories like Queen’s School of Business you can share with us how your university is using Twitter?

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?

A couple of weeks ago I argued reasons why it might be more effective to piggyback on existing strategies that exist at your institution rather than create a stand alone social media strategy. In this post I alluded to considering your Facebook Fan Page like a Cafe, which was inspired by Chris Brogan’s post entitled, “Cafe-Shaped Conversations.” After putting the two together, and brainstorming with some colleagues, we came up with “Cafe New Paltz,” an exclusive online community for fall 2009 accepted students. We’re using Ning and will launch this on January 2.

I teamed up with a colleague in our Office of Undergraduate Admission (Shana), who I’ve worked closely with on our Facebook Fan Page over the last year, among other eRecruiting-related initiatives, as well as my graduate assistant. My Senior Web Producer has an uncanny way of seeing inside my head and making my visions become a design reality (see graphic on right).

The idea Shana and I pitched her boss builds on their strategy to increase the academic quality of our incoming fall 2009 student body. There are more specific goals within that overall theme that I’m not going to disclose here, but this is a trend we’ve been working on for many years.

We’re going to start by inviting the ~1,400 early action accepted students into this community when we send them an e-mail through Ning’s invitation feature on January 2. Around March 1 we plan to invite the general accepted students pool to join in.

My graduate assistant and Shana’s intern will be serving as the community’s “baristas.” They have been working together to develop ideas for the content they’re going to produce inside this community. They will have weekly videos called “Flavor of the Week,” and every video will end with an actionable request to engage the accepted students to produce content of their own within the community. Shana is even sewing them custom aprons to wear. :)

This is an exciting new adventure for us, although I know there are many universities have created communities for accepted students for the last few years. I plan on this being the first post in a series of posts about “Cafe New Paltz” that will document this project and the milestones along the way. I’m hoping it will be a resource for those who have not started something like this, and can be a place where we exchange ideas to build stronger communities for our students. Given the tight budget climate, this is the type of initiative that can score big for little financial investment.

This project is extremely timely given the recent Facebook scandal for the class of 2013 groups. I know these accepted students will still use Facebook, but I’m glad we’re giving them a safe, gated community to interact with each other without any squatters trying to take advantage of them.

Tell us about your community! Or, are you trying to start one for the first time?