5 social media lessons for college admission officers

The Lawlor Group invited chief enrollment management and higher education marketing officers from several of our client institutions throughout the country to hear from social media thought leader Brian Solis at a Minneapolis event hosted by Kane Consulting on July 27. As Solis shared insights from his new book, Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate and Measure Success in the New Web, our guests considered several of his remarks to be directly relevant in applying social media best practices to the college recruitment process.

1. We are defined by what we share and who we know. “What I found most compelling about Brian’s presentation is his sense that our online connections define who we are,” said Madeleine Eagon Rhyneer, vice president for admission and financial aid and chief marketing officer at Willamette University. “So I am going to rethink how I present Willamette to the broader world, and who and what we connect to.” Our actions in online communities equate to “social currency” that we invest in (or diminish) with every posting we make, according to Solis.
2. We are speaking to an audience with an audience. “We’ve moved from in-person word of mouth to social streaming from audience to audience. It opens up access to many more influencers, but we need to inspire and engage them,” said Nancy Davidson, vice president for enrollment at Augustana College (Sioux Falls). “Brian’s notion of connecting through psychographics instead of demographics is exciting, especially considering the demographic challenges that Midwestern colleges face. Will this new era help us more readily connect with students across the country and around the globe? It certainly creates opportunity.”  
3. Our stature is defined by relevance, resonance and significance. Solis stressed that the social web gives us the ability to earn a sense of prominence. “This is an opportunity for us to establish our beachhead and gain a foothold while we are still fighting our battles elsewhere,” said Dan Meyer, vice president for admission and financial aid at DePauw University. “I was relieved to hear Brian say, ‘Start small and experiment. You will see where you are successful and can then develop those areas further.’ ”  
4. Reputation, trust and relationships are earned through action and words. “We need to constantly be in touch and in conversation with our audience when they have the need to engage with us—and that takes time and requires more meaningful engagement,” noted Tom Willoughby, vice chancellor for enrollment at the University of Denver. “Brian’s advice was, ‘Don’t think campaign, think continuum.’ Quite often we think of marketing campaigns over a designated period of time to drive the results we hope to achieve. Then we vanish for a period of time until the next campaign. Instead, we need to be ever present.” 
5. The key is creating content that is believable. “We’re in the nascent stages of a whole new way of community building with our multiple constituencies,” said Ken Anselment, director of admissions at Lawrence University. “Brian suggests that by using new media tools thoughtfully to provide believable, empathetic content, we can provide environments and opportunities for those communities to interplay with each other more. Those of us who really think about and employ what he’s saying will be the innovators in the next stages.”

As our own John Lawlor and Lynsey Struthers recently pointed out during their presentation on social media at an executive summit of the New American Colleges and Universities consortium, higher education institutions face several obstacles in their efforts toward full immersion in the social web (.pdf). Nevertheless, we were struck by Solis’s assertion that “social objects” (posts, tweets, videos, etc.) are the future of marketing and communications. “They are the catalysts for conversation,” he said. “If you don’t have them, how can people interact with you?” Social media is not a silver bullet. But it does need to be one arrow in your marketing quiver.