Central College Web marketing

I recently presented about using social tools professionally for the annual professional development series on our campus. I was asked to give this same presentation to the enrollment and financial support council which contains some of the senior leadership at our institution.

While originally the presentation focused on the tools, I tweaked the presentation slightly, to focus on the benefits of using social media to augment our marketing efforts. I also asked the twitterverse to pass along ideas for what they would tell senior leadership.

There were some great ideas and some themes in the responses. Including:

• Don’t focus on the tools, focus on the conversation.
• Social media is about the relationships and relating to the audience.
• Social media is an extension of customer service.
• Facebook status and twitter are the new small town front porch.

I feel that the presentation went well and opened some eyes as to the kinds of things that our prospective students are doing online. As always there are challenges in using social media effectively and we will certainly see some growing pains. At the least, some of the senior leadership is aware of what is happening with the Web and how it is affecting our recruitment efforts.

You can check out all of the information from the original presentation when you get a chance. The original post is different from what was presented today, but the ideas and concepts are the same.

The role of the Web site is constantly changing, and the pace is faster than ever. With social media being part of the new frontier, we are constantly searching for ways to leverage this new medium specifically for higher education.

Typically higher education is slow to evolve and adopt new technologies so it is refreshing to look at different industries to see what they are doing. Joe Gaylor from FJ Gaylor photography passed along this article from the Washington Post via twitter this morning about Barrack Obama’s new-media gurus. Putting aside political views, it is interesting to see how they are leveraging various technologies to build their campaign.

Why does this team “get it?”
Let’s start with video. They have shot more than 2,000 hours of video and uploaded 1,100 videos to their youTube site. Pretty impressive numbers, considering the campaign is a little over a year old. Using youTube to connect to the voters is unique in the fact that you can bypass mainstream media to get your message out.

Next is text-messaging. While the debate goes on as to how invasive this method of advertising is, I find it particulary fascinating that people are willing to pay $.10 to get a campaign message from Obama. While it might be invasive, it is a personal form of communication. The high school students that we are recruiting almost always have their cell phone with them. You know a message going to their cell phone is going to be read, especially if they are willing to pay $.10 to get it.

On top of these two pieces they are already leveraging many of the social media sites like twitter, facebook, flickr and more.

Obama’s online operation “gets it” by using all of these tools to support their cause. When will higher education “get it” that running a Web site is not enough? Developing a complete online presence is key. Mobile is a component of the new communcation landscape, but I have yet to hear of an institution using it interactively.

Who will be the first higher education Web team to “get it?”

Welcome to the Central College Web marketing blog. The purpose of this blog is to facilitate communication with the general campus community regarding the marketing efforts on the www.central.edu Web site.

My hope is to vary the topics enough that we encourage a healthy discussion in the comments of each post, while educating different campus constituencies. It also helps to gather feedback on some of the new marketing efforts that we implement on the Web site. I also hope that it provides an opportunity to provide examples of new or unique ideas on other sites.