Truth in avatar
I spent yesterday at a conference in Austin, Texas where about 35 administrators, mostly from community colleges, came to discuss the strategies and tactics for deploying technology in marketing their higher education programs. It was a great day, the speakers were enlightening, and the attendees were both engaged and engaging. And while there were valuable points of discussion throughout the entire day, one brief interaction stood out to me as particularly worthy of follow-up. It went like this:
People were getting excited about the undeniable marketing possibilities represented by a range of different “Web 2.0” technologies. As if on cue, one attendee raised a hand, acknowledged the “coolness” of these various web services, and innocently asked just how schools could measure and justify the inevitable and potentially sizeable effort / risk that might accompany them.
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Bridging the Digital Divide
Ever since my first job out of college where I had the opportunity to work on a project (indirectly) for America’s Promise Alliance, I have always been fascinated by the “digital divide” in America and looking for ways to help close the gap between the technology haves and the have-nots.
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Mythbusters (Part II of IV)
One of the most confusing aspects of social media is that in order to have a successful strategy, you need to follow some rules of traditional marketing and scrap others. Knowing what to keep and what to rewrite determines whether or not you’ll be able to effectively connect with your constituents. My next two myths examine what tenants of traditional marketing hold true for social media and what needs to be updated to reflect the social web.
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4 Follow-Up Techniques to Improve Email Marketing
I’ll be blunt: email marketing works.
There’s no doubt that it can be one of the most powerful (and cost-effective) eMarketing Techniques in your toolkit.
But one of the problems we’ve seen with email marketing has always been the fact that on average, marketers should only expect an open rate between 20-40%.
Relatively speaking, this could be viewed as a high amount of people viewing your message.
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Impact of Social Media on College Recruitment Grows
Who said higher education institutions are slow to adopt change? A new study announced today by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth finds that colleges and universities are outpacing corporations when it comes to the adoption of social media technology. Accordingt to the report, “Colleges and universities are outpacing U.S. corporate adoption of social media tools and technologies (13% of the Fortune 500 and 39% of the Inc. 500 currently have a public blog, while 41% of college admissions departments have blogs).”
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Inquiry Management - Part III: Reporting on Inquiries
In this article, the third and final installment of the Inquiry Management series, I will walk you through the steps of creating a reporting solution for Inquiry Management. I use the word ‘solution’ intentionally so as to place emphasis on the coordination of several features in Intelliworks to provide you with relevant, meaningful metrics to measure the impact of efficient Inquiry Management to your institution.
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How can your admissions team do more with less?
While interest in higher education has increased in recent months, many schools are faced with budget cuts and declining endowments that will make it difficult for their admissions and enrollment departments to support demand, and balance the quantity of new applicants with the quality of students their institutions desire.
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Mythbusters (Part I of IV)
Walk into almost any living room in America and you’ll see that all of the furniture is angled to face the television. Walk into the living room of my group house and you’ll see a couch and about 5 chairs arranged in a circle around the coffee table. We have no television. No, this isn’t a self-righteous rant about the evils of TV- the truth is that we were too cheap to buy one and it’s a good way to trim the fat off our utilities. We all love TV but we watch our shows online. As such, our internet is a main source of entertainment in the house.
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Kid’s Stuff? I don’t think so.
Think social networks are only good for recruiting undergraduate students? Think again.
Conventional wisdom indicates that professional networking sites like LinkedIn are where adults spend their time while sites like Facebook and MySpace are where the kids hang out. This may be true to a certain extent, however, Karine Joly points out an interesting study today from the Pew Internet and American Life Project that finds adults are rapidly buying into the non-professional social networks, and it may make some higher education recruiters rethink how they approach the social web.
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Wherever they are, be there.
At Personify Education, the Intelliworks Users Conference, back in July 2008, Luis Casas, Director of Marketing and Recruiting at FIU Business, gave a great presentation on marketing higher education programs to today’s students: “Branding and Recruiting for a Web 2.0 Generation.”
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