What if F. Scott Fitzgerald were an admissions officer?
A bit of fun before the New Year…Slate offers a rather interesting analysis of how F. Scott Fitzgerald perceived students from the Big Three.
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Social Media Poll
I noticed this poll today on CampusTechnology.com which asks if colleges and universities are using social networking sites for recruitment. So far, it looks like the majority of institutions have not explored this medium with 60% of respondents saying their school does not use social networking for recruitment. Are schools missing the boat?
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Happy Holidays from Intelliworks
As the holiday season approaches and the New Year looms large, it is always a time for reflection. Time to take stock of the highs and lows for the year and to celebrate the meaningful progress made.
Here at Intelliworks, a major consideration in any such exercise has to be the state and mindset of our leadership team. I couldn’t be more pleased with the maturity demonstrated by the team throughout the year, and the seriousness with which it has set about pursuing our organizational goals. The team appreciates the gravity of the task at hand, and brings to all endeavors a grim determination to succeed. It is exactly this earnestness which makes our team not only so effective, but also such great guests at holiday festivities.
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Holiday Cheer: Low Tech, High Touch or High Tech, Low Touch
Many B2B and B2E marketers stress out at this time of year over holiday greetings to customers. Do you try to be funny? Sentimental? Promotional? If you try to get too funny, you may miss the mark, and (at best) not make people laugh or (at worst) offend people. Try to get too sentimental and you could seem insincere. Try to be too promotional, and you risk turning people off completely.
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The Mystery of the Purloined Facebook Group
There’s some stellar dectective work going on at SquaredPeg to get to the bottom of who exactly is setting up a number of “Class of 2013” Facebook groups for colleges and universities across the country. It’s scary to see just how easy it is for someone to use your brand, and (perhaps) mislead people about your institution. While it’s unclear what the intentions of these groups are, it’s certainly not school lead which means anything can happen.
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A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
From a post by Brad J. Ward on SquarePeg.com, it looks as if people who are not official representatives or constituents of institutions are falsely creating Class of 2013 Facebook Groups for incoming students. One word for this: shaky.
Being an alum of SUNY Oswego, who by the way have a great Computer Science program, I was notified via the SUNY Oswego page on Facebook.
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The Branding Best
A few weeks ago, I wrote briefly about the benefits to colleges and universities that differentiate and create a great brand for themselves.
This past week, University Business took that concept many orders of magnitude further, in its story: 50 Best Branding Ideas: How colleges and universities are successfully creating and communicating their brands.
At the outset of the article, Barbara O’Malley, chief communications officer at The University of Akron (Ohio) is quoted as saying: “When the strategy is clear and the creative and communication consistent and supportive of the strategy, branding is powerful and can benefit a university greatly.”
The article goes on to highlight some fantastic success stories from campuses of all shapes and sizes. I was particularly pleased to see the University of Connecticut referenced in the article for its “Always Part of U” campaign, which has been well received by members of the UConn community, as well as by University Business.
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Your Mom’s on Facebook
According to a recent report by American Council on Education, Mapping New Directions: Higher Education for Older Adults, the proportion of the population over the age of 55 is expected to grow by 50% over the next 20 years. As many in continuing education and community colleges know, older students are starting to make up more and more of their student body. However, 40% of the institutions surveyed by ACE do not make any efforts to ID these students’ needs and offer them outreach or help with financial aid. This group, with their varying experiences and needs, can seem like a challenging group to reach but help is coming from an unexpected place- Generation Y.
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Blogger’s Block
Life has been pretty hectic here in the last month of the calendar year. So much so, that I have undoubtedly been fairly delinquent on the blog front. But, I was able to participate in an event last week that shook me out of my recent blogging- drought and helped cure my case of Blogger’s Block.
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Survey Says…
A couple of weeks ago, we posted a story about a graduate marketers survey that found 55% of those polled said online marketing resulted in the majority of their leads. Last week, we posted a survey of our own looking to see what you consider to be your top marketing and recruitment challenges for 2009 (it was a follow up to this survey on marketing and branding challenges that we learned about from Andrew Careaga).
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