Last week I was talking at a conference for higher education marketing people in London. The delegates came along to hear a packed schedule of talks that ranged from universities describing what they were doing to market to students online, to other sites such as Bebo promoting their wares.
I was there to talk about how universities shouldn’t fear user generated content websites, places like TSR, blogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook. Websites where students can write anything about anyone (within the rules of the website). I wanted to show then how they too can take advantage of these online tools.
Companies generally have been pretty scared about user generated content, they no longer have the solid grasp of their reputation that they used to, word of mouth can now spread very widely. What existing students say about a university is the top influencing factor prospective students take notice of when making their choices of where to attend.
So I tried to put their mind at ease and show them how they can benefit by reading what is written about them online. How they can modify their practices and generally investigate issues that their students have written about online because most of it is valid stuff. Here’s a example, this TSR user can’t find the info she wants on the Northumbria website:
http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?p=12115122
A representative from Northumbria was in the room when I showed this post and she was really interested and said she’d look into it for sure. It’s a simple example but shows that universities can learn and benefit from what is written about them. I know of another university that reviewed and changed their course offer procedure because they read on the student room that it was taking ages for anyone to hear from them.
I used the results from the survey we have been running on the site to show just how balanced most most discussion on TSR and elsewhere on the web tends to be. Of the users that completed the survey 77% said they would respond with their own views if their university was being criticised unfairly online. Similarly only 2% said they’d go out of their way to criticise their university.
Universities are creating profiles in Facebook, they are watching what’s being written about them in blogs and on forum sites but they haven’t quite got to grips with how much they can interact in this world that they feel out of place in. Clearly some uni’s are more tech savvy than others and some unis don’t have to worry at all about this sort of thing because they just get enough applicants whatever.
The future online role of traditional university student ambassadors is interesting, we’ll probably see more and more the same people that show students around in open days creating freshers pages on Facebook and posting answers to questions on TSR. I think this has got to be a good thing for everyone as long as its not done in too much of a promotional way and that its about information provision.
Take a look at the replies to the survey referred to above if you wish:
http://tinyurl.com/63rexm
(the open ended questions are not visible for privacy reasons)
- J
