Building Relationships Before the Bags get Unpacked: New Opportunities  Through Social Media

www.admissionsquest.com

ed Social Media
www.edsocialmedia.com

Monday, May 10, 2010

Building Relationships Before
the Bags get Unpacked:
New Opportunities
Through Social Media

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“I remember when...”

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We talked about the rate of change and its dizzying pace. I am constantly amazed at how fast
things are evolving & maturing. While creating this presentation and thinking about building
connections with students & parents, I decided to take a look at certain growth numbers
since I visited last year’s WBSA conference.

400

320

240

160

80

0
April 2009 February 2010

Source: Facebook http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?timeline ed Social Media

Facebook saw over 200 million new accounts added in less than 1 year.

150.0

120.0

90.0

60.0

30.0

0
April 2009 April 2010

Source: eMarketer: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007271
Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-stats-2010-4#twitter-now-has-106-million-users-1 ed Social Media

Twitter grew from 12 million in April 2009 to just shy of 106 million in April 2010.

Eric Qualman
www.Socialnomics.net
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I could talk facts and ﬁgures until I’m blue in the face, but Eric Qualman’s “Welcome to the
Revolution” does a wonderful job of laying out the fact.

Racing to
Tweeting to
2000followers!
1000 fans!

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Social media participation is growing. Schools are actively pushing to build their networks.

Connect with our school!

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We’ve created our channels and have begun to promote them - perhaps via email; on our
sites.

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All good steps in an effort to boost our networks and connect with a broad range of people
who matter to our schools. How many of us feature “follow us; become a fan, connect; etc”
twitter & facebook buttons on our sites?

What do you do
when you get there?

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Big question is how do you engage your network as it grows?

Create & share
compelling content.

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Your school enjoys a fan base that, for lack of a better word, “consume” your narrative stream or long story. The
object is to begin bringing applying families into this stream.

This requires that you give fans and families substance- not necessarily formality, but substance- events, stories,
narratives, happenings and achievement on campus. Show the ways students are growing and learning- real and
substantive. Engage your fans by sharing the school experience.

Photo credit: shanebee
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/shanesworld/21584252/

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How do we do this? I advocate that schools commit to a content library. One that isn’t as
concerned about polish, but a library that catalogs a form of content that offers a birds eye
view of what it’s like to “experience” your community.


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Something that you as an admission office can add to & draw from at key points in the
admission process to deepen your connection with prospective families. It can come in a
variety of forms- blogs written by students, livestreaming events, student produced shows,
videos ﬁlmed by kids, or blogs maintained by faculty.

Which methods you use most is determined by which media you can produce most consistently with
reasonable effort and quantity.

Show rather
than tell.

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I like to live by these simple words whenever we create content - show rather than tell.

Show rather than tell.

Photo credit: Northﬁeld Mount Hermon School
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/nmhphotos/4008777735/in/set-72157622454626351/ ed Social Media

If you’re talking about your great art program. Show students drawing by the creek. Highlight
their work on a regular basis.


Photo credit: Vermont Academy
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/31278469@N04/3919640397 ed Social Media

If you’re excited about your school’s fall mountain day. Show students climbing to top.
Interview them about the challenges of the climb and how the event impacts the school
community. Let them connect the dots and their share it with your online communities.


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We all talk about school spirit. Let your students capture it via short videos.

“Your fans love nothing
more than to see what’s
happening & feel connected
to your school.”

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Your fans- students, parents, alums- love nothing more than to see & hear what their kids &
their friends are doing.


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It all comes back to building a library. Check out the content when you need it. Add to it
throughout the year; keep it current. Use it to show what’s happening on your campus.


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You don’t have to be a tech guru to produce content (from left to right- edSocialMedia’s
Steve Ritchie & Ernest Koe; Hiram Cuevas, St. Christopher's School; Travis Warren, WhippleHill
Communications).

Point is that I suspect that most everyone sitting in the room use social media in some form
or fashion to journal daily life and stay connected with family, friends & organizations.


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It could come in the form of twitter...


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...or photo sharing sites like ﬂickr...


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or the most obvious of all... facebook...


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When you think about it from an institutional perspective, you likely already have a wealth of
content capturing campus experiences. It’s a question of aggregating it and checking out the
content from your ‘library’ when you need it.

Admission Timeline

Browsing School Visit Yield
for Schools & Follow Up Season

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Lets relate your content to the admission timeline to see how we can strengthen your
relationships so that when an enrolled student steps on campus they feel like they’re already
a connected member of the community.

By the way, this is an approximation of course- it may differ in your office - but it works. Lets
take the timeline and see how we can apply the tools & content to enhance & support what
you’re already doing.

Admission Timeline

Browsing
for Schools

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This is an approximation of course- it may differ in your office . Lets take the timeline and
see how we can apply these new tools to enhance & support what you’re already doing.

Admission Timeline

Student & Family Profile
•New family to boarding school
•Structured environment
•Talented writer
•Soccer goalie (collegiate talent?)
•Interest in audio/video production
•Interests in science with a
particular focus on sustainability

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Admission Timeline

•New family to boarding school

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"When we blog,
we tend to talk like humans.
When we write home page
copy, we write like marketing
brochures"
-Dharmesh Shah, Hubspot

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Even organizations like the New York Times & CNN have gone the way of the social web. They
use all sorts of media to tell the story from different angles - even soliciting their readers for
their opinions on news.

Use of blogs allow their reporters to add frequent updates that may or may not be part of
their daily reporting assignment. In many cases, they're expressing their points of view on a
variety of topics and allowing their readers to get involved via comments.

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What do families want when they ﬁrst come to your site? Proctor does a really nice job of
weaving their content with that of their fans.

Browsing for Schools & The Inquiry

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Hyde has a done a really nice job of talking about & showing their school in through many
voices. They avoid typical marketing speak and focus on language that ﬁts their culture. As a
result they’re able to use images, video, sound & text to paint a clear picture of who they are
and give families a reason to remain connected with them via their social media channels.

They’re able to answer everyones questions & make folks feel warm and at ease.

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They invite people to see what they do and they support it by consistently producing content
that captures and presents what happens at Hyde. It comes in the form of streaming their
twitter feed, like Proctor.

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Using video produced by students & faculty to show events.

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And inviting site visitors to not only read & watch, but ask questions...

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For those of you who don’t know this is Chuck Will’s blog at Proctor. He’s a leading voice and
the institutional memory to a certain extent. He knows current student & parents, alums, you
name it -they know him and he knows what the school stands for. His job is to capture that
in words and pictures 2-3 times a week.

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His posts capture the attention of prospective families and gives them a way to stay
connected to what’s happening at Proctor- he helps them to envision what it’s like to be a
Proctor student.

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Northﬁeld Mount Hermon’s NMHbook - a dedicated section of their site
(www.nmhschool.org/nmhbook) that aggregates all of their social content providing an up-
to-minute snapshot of what’s happening on campus both from the perspective of their
faculty & students.

“Brian Rosenberg aka the President of Macalester College”
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I don’t know if it started out this way, but this is one of the most effective outreach pieces
I’ve seen. It was done by the President of Macalester College. Self-deprecating humor,
showcased his campus, told you a lot about the school and what the feeling about the
campus is like.

“I have received several hundred e-mail messages from alumni,
parents, current and prospective students, as well as from other
college presidents and from folks I simply cannot identify, and from
countries including Pakistan, Japan, Spain, Singapore, and China
—where one alumnus, from the class of 1950 no less, managed to
circumvent the national blockage of YouTube and get the video
directly from the college's server. Amazing.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/article/What-I-Learned-From-YouTube/65141/ ed Social Media

“Yet positive responses to our annual-fund solicitations spiked after
the video's appearance, reminding us that reputation, institutional
pride, and general good will can have as significant an impact on
development efforts as projects that are more deliberately focused on
raising dollars—and are far more expensive.

With this project, I have begun to learn about the nature and power
of the social media that are reshaping the way we communicate
with one another and should be reshaping the way organizations of
all kinds communicate.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/article/What-I-Learned-From-YouTube/65141/
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Admission Timeline

School Visit Yield
Browsing & Inquiring
& Follow Up Season

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Admission Timeline

School Visit
& Follow Up

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Photo credit: Pumbaa80

Interest in Soccer
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Soccer_ball.svg

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Interest in Soccer

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Talented writer

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Interest in audio/video production

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Students in a new media course at New Hampton School have created & produced a weekly
student produced news program called New Hampton TV. They report on a variety of topics
from world news, to campus events, to humorous roving reporter bits.

Interest in audio/video production

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I showed this clip for 2 reasons - 1 it made me chuckle & 2 because it reminds me of the
president’s day video.

2,941 views October 2009
New Hampton School TV
www.newhampton.org/tv

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Interests in science with a particular
focus on sustainability

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How many schools in this room participate in the Green Cup Challenge? How many share your
videos with prospective students & families, especially those who’ve demonstrated an interest
this area?

Show rather than tell

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Every example of content that I showed you came from outside of the admission/
communication office. It’s a product of the classes, daily life, athletics and each does an
excellent job of showing what it’s like to experience your schools. Perhaps even more so than
a highly tailored marketing piece.

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Facebook and tour guides.

Admission Timeline

Browsing School Visit Yield
for Schools & Follow Up Season

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Admission Timeline

Yield Season

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Yield season

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Facebook groups for a variety of purposes. Lets focus on newly admitted students. I can
share Northﬁeld’s approach: With every acceptance, they sent an invitation to join a facebook
group. The students then went through, saw links and different discussion topics. Students
run the discussion and talk to each other unless they asked a question NMH’s admission
office had to answer.
What are you all doing? Experimenting?

Yield Season

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Jesse Bardo

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Last year Jesse Bardo was tasked with managing social media in their admission office.

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NMH started out fast posting basic updates. Sports scores, travel schedules.

www.nmhschool.org

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Jesse understood that a web site is fast in terms of posting information, but that social media
offered a faster, more focused opportunity to connect with fans of the school.

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Social media provides an opportunity to publish instant information to large networks. But
Jesse knew that he needed to do more than publish scores and travel schedules to excite their
fans. He used these new tools to plug people into the incredible stories popping up on
campus each day.

Newspaper

SID Radio

English Dept Math Dept

Science Dept
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He built a network of people on campus. Folks feeding him stories about the goings on on
campus.

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His ‘sources’ loved seeing their stories appear on facebook, twitter, ﬂickr, etc. The
excitement fed their desire to provide Jesse with more information.

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Majority of tweets or facebook updates point to an item of substance. Giving the fan or
follower more to consume and additional reasons to connect.

4394

1505

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Great numbers supported by compelling, meaningful content. Makes the relationship that
much stronger.


Final thoughts...
•Focus on building your
content library
•Show rather than tell
•Build on something that
already works

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www.edsocialmedia.com

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Stay Connected!
Peter Baron
AdmissionsQuest

Email

pbaron@admissionsquest.com
Phone

(617) 623-4212

Twitter

twitter.com/peterdbaron

twitter.com/admissionsquest

twitter.com/edsocialmedia

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vimeo.com/boardingschools
Youtube

youtube.com/user/BoardingSchools
Flickr

ﬂickr.com/photos/30990415@N02/

Site

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Building Relationships Before the Bags get Unpacked: New Opportunities  Through Social Media

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