Rachel Reuben

This update is part 3 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. See: article 1 | article 2

We continue to be extremely pleased with the engagement and relationship building inside Café New Paltz.

Quick Bites (stats as of 7:30 p.m. Feb. 9):

• 282 members (1,323 initially invited on Jan. 2)
• 712 photos posted by members
• 38 discussion forums
  • topics include finding roommates, academics, pets in residence halls, residence hall questions, and more
• Videos: We’ve posted 7, they’ve posted 4
  • Ours: 2 episodes on residence life, dining hall, around town, 1 week update, visit campus contest, welcome to Café New Paltz — average ~100 views each
  • Theirs: One member posted a video of herself singing the national anthem at her high school’s basketball game, another posted a tour of his room at home (parts 1 & 2!), a guitar riff, and a “name that riff”game
• Birthdays: We’ve toned down our initial exuberance of 4 separate videos plus all of the other publicity on the site about member’s birthdays. We now have a text box on the top of the page as soon as they login that calls out birthdays, we post on their walls, and feature that member for the day.

Google Analytics

• 8,111 visits
• 78,631 pageviews
• 17.03% bounce rate
• 10:27 avg. time on site
• Top 4 features: home page, chat, member profiles, forums

Things we’ve learned:

• Scripting, producing, editing & posting 1 video every week is not realistic for our current staffing resources. We’ve loosened that timeframe to be a week and a half to two weeks between them if needed. Interestingly, the video views aren’t as high as we’d expect them to be.
• These accepted students are eager to form relationships, to figure out who they’ll room with — already. This is 5-6 months earlier than the traditional process.
• We’re reading a large number of posts in the forums by people who have paid their deposit already and are committed to coming to New Paltz.
• Lots of anxiety being allayed earlier in the process. They’re finding roommates, and other students with similar interests (music, academic interests, extra-curricular activities, etc.). They’re asking if they can have cars on campus, if people go home on weekends, how many classes they will have to take, will their AP credits transfer, can they paint their residence halls, etc.

Next steps

• On February 21 we will be inviting our first round of general accepts – approximately 1,000 of them – to join the community. From that point on, invitations will be sent to the latest round of new general accepts every two weeks.
• In early March we need to start giving more serious consideration to what comes next. What happens after May 1, other than seeing how many of these members actually pay their deposit. Should we shut down the Café? Does it turn into a first year student community? What do we do with the members that choose not to come to New Paltz? Given the great amount of activity and interaction, I don’t see how we can shut it down, but we have to have a number of internal conversations between divisions to carefully plan the next stages.

What do you think our next steps should be?

I’m presenting a free Webinar this Wednesday at 2 p.m. ET in conjunction with the folks at OmniUpdate to talk about a project we’ve been doing for first year students for the last two years in our portal, Luminis. We recently started using OmniUpdate within Luminis, which has made the content management aspect of this project way more manageable.

I’m going to talk about:

• how we made the My First Year tab within our Luminis portal (my.newpaltz.edu) a success
• how we made the management of this portal easier using OmniUpdate
• how we technically “finagled the code” (yes, that’s technical!) in Luminis to enable portal channels to be easily editable

Register today! If you have already registered, e-mail me (rachel dot reuben at gmail dot com) or tweet me (@rachelreuben) and tell me who you are and what you’re hoping to get out of this! There’s still time for me to customize this presentation!

Date: Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Time: 2:00 PM Eastern
Cost: FREE!
Location: Online – your computer, your location.

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.