The proliferation of blogs in academia should send a clear signal to recruitment and retention professionals in higher education. YouTube.com launched a “private” channel dedicated to college videos indexed by institutions. Want to see the highlights of last weekend’s game (or last night’s party)? It’s easier than ever to share videos with friends at your college on YouTube-join up and add videos to the pool. You can also start or join groups within your college, to hook up with others who have the same interests.

More than sixty institutions are already listed in the index and any university can suggest theirs. It’s very easy to set one up. An edu email address is required to sign up, check out and upload videos. This new service seems to have the flavor of a “facebooked” YouTube.

If you think that this is just a passing fad, check out the number of visitors each day at YouTube.com. This video blog has become such a player in the field of public persuasion that the Republican National Committee was exposed for trying to discredit the Al Gore movie An Inconvenient Truth by posing as a student that lampooned the film.

Andrew Careaga, Director of Communications at the University of Missouri-Rolla, is the co-chair of the CASE Annual Conference for Senior Communications and Marketing Professionals. Andrew has also been blogging at Higher Ed Marketing since November 2005. In a Q & A with Higher Ed Marketing, he comments on the evolution of blogs as a recruitment tool.

Like any communications revolution – the printing press, broadcast, and so on – the Internet revolution is disrupting conventional approaches to communication, and community. Consider how the printing press gave rise to books and pamphlets, which disrupted the oral tradition of passing along knowledge from generation to generation, and which gave rise to universities, which became a new form of community that disrupted traditional life in the village, and you get some idea of the power of media to alter communities. Imagine how empowering it must have been for the student to have a book full of ideas to read. Imagine how disruptive that must have been to European society. No wonder they called that era the Enlightenment.

Now, think about how the advent of the Internet has also created a different kind of community – a virtual community that is unbound by time or geographic space – and opened up new and disruptive communications opportunities. I’m trying not to get too metaphysical here, but technological change has an enormous impact on communications. For people in the PR and marketing business, the social networking capabilities engendered by the Internet means users – that is, anyone online – can easily create, edit and disseminate information that can easily be found.

This means that we’re no longer in control of the message. I’m not sure we ever were, but these days it’s easier than ever for a student, graduate, professor or staff member to spread a message about our campus via a blog, a video on YouTube, or a message on MySpace or Facebook. We need to be aware that these new media tools – blogs, social networking sites, etc. – affect how people share information and ideas, form community, and express themselves.

Anyone in the business of marketing and communication should learn as much as possible about these tools. We’re communications professionals, right? Then we need to understand the media being used to share and spread information, and we need to learn how to use these tools to become part of the online discussion.

I often go back to something Dan Forbush (founder of ProfNet, now part of PR Newswire) told some of us at a conference back in the mid-90s, when the Internet was young. He said something along the lines of, “We’re in the middle of a revolution, and in a revolution, kings lose their heads. Therefore, think like a peasant.” Thinking like a peasant doesn’t always come naturally for those of us who have been trained in traditional methods of PR and marketing. But we need to learn some new communications skills.”

The University of Pennsylvania’s College of Arts and Sciences has instituted a requirement that every student will be a blogger. This is the first step in a relationship management program that will enable students and institution to become familiar with each other. The current requirement is not meant at this time for the blogs to be available for public consumption. Only the student, academic advisor and authorized administrators will have access.

Commenting on this program on the website insidehighered.com, dean of College of Arts and Sciences Dennis Deturck said, “We’re trying to give the adviser some context, so the relationship doesn’t start as ‘who the hell are you?”

Hayling Price, a Penn rising sophomore and undergraduate assembly representative who didn’t participate in the pilot program, said he would find keeping an academic journal useful. “I was lucky enough to have an adviser who had a common interest with me, so we had a good rapport,” Price said. “But that isn’t the norm – most people have less to talk about with their advisers, so this would help”(insidehieghered.com, 2006).

The advantage to the University is that trends relative to student needs or operational issues can be addressed prior to further recruitment of students. The blog also gives the university a point of differentiation when recruiting students. There are some issues with this approach as the public does not have access and the blogs are not editable. This could force students to be very selective in what they record. Robert O’Toole, Arts Faculty E-learning Advisor at the University of Warwick says, “So a student makes a mistake, and then must post a comment or a follow up entry to correct the mistake. OK, that forces them to reflect upon the mistake and the reasons for making the mistake. That’s a pretty extreme form of reflective thinking. Is anyone that disciplined? Is anyone comfortable with behaving in that way? Would we want all of our mistakes to be recorded permanently? Would anyone then ever take risks with what they write? Would anyone ever write anything worthwhile?

Bernard Lane says in his article Blog on and Start the Debate for Australian Higher Education, “My conjecture is that they will find that this approach makes their students very uncomfortable about the technology. They certainly will not get good quality, engaged and involved blogging.”

The University of Sydney is paying 10 students to blog about their college experience. “We got hundreds of applications, it was a massive recruitment task,” Joanna Cohen, Sydney’s marketing information manager says. Bernard Lane reports that Cohen is “blog mistress” of Sydney Life. She reviews all the entries before publishing. The bloggers put a personal spin on campus life for curious, even apprehensive school-leavers. Like most blogs it has regular, journal-like entries with a comment thread. But the home page banner carries the university shield.

“I think it’s working because I don’t domesticate it too much,” says Cohen, who was fascinated by blogs before she came up with this official use for them. At Sydney Life, she doesn’t see a lot of room for posts about dating or wild nights. She says subjects more suited to the readers include how to make friends in first year, insider tips for enrollment day, study and procrastination, as well as immersion in campus clubs and societies (Australian Higher Education, 2006).

An excerpt from one of the Sydney Life blogs reads, “As most of you readers could relate, one of the perpetual struggles in the life of the average uni student is learning the art of time management. For many, uni consists of a lot more than just lectures and tutes. A vast majority of us work casual jobs in our spare time (for everything from HECS and rent to groceries and a bit of extra pocket money), do cocurricular things like sports and music, and around this have to find time to fit in family, relationships and friends. And that’s just the beginning…”

The freedom to express and have a conversation with prospective students is the first step toward developing a university brand with personality and human characteristics. Tracking comments and feedback to a blog is a simple task. Essentially, the university is using students as recruiters. There is no doubt this offers a great cost-perrecruit advantage compared to other necessary recruiting tactics like fairs, direct mail and open houses.

On the website beingedu.com, Emily Chang addresses the operational cost in her article How Much Does a College or University Blog Really Cost? “While blogging has been accepted and advanced in industry by major technology movers several years ago, (Google Buys Pyra: Blogging Goes Big-Time in 2002), higher education has been slow to adopt the paradigm of publishing daily, timely personal voices for marketing reasons. Bloated price quotes from consultants don’t help the situation.

Consider the usual audience. Blogs used in higher education for undergraduate or graduate recruitment are targeting a web-savvy market of high schoolers and undergraduates. From thirteen-year olds to thirty-something’s, blogs are as normal as IM.

The popular blog community Livejournal has more than 7 million users with over 10,000 posts per hour. Another social blog space, MySpace, has over 12 million users. Blogs used for recruitment need to allow freedom for students to tell their own stories beyond the usual “I love this school” or “orientation was fun” rhetoric. I’m certainly not advocating unmediated blogging on a public site, but there needs to be freedom to the writer’s voice. Schools that don’t take the conceptual leap are simply creating diaryversions of testimonials and not really exploring the full potential of blogs” (Chang,
2006).

From an academic perspective, blogs are being explored in e-learning settings as well as in real classrooms. While some in higher education are still learning about blogs, the offspring of the self-publishing blog movement and the iPod revolution has already been born in the podcast.

At Marymount Manhattan College, Professor David Gilbert has launched a class project called Art Mobs in which his Organizational Communication students produce (unofficial) audio guides for MoMA, and make them available as podcasts. The site is a hosted at Typepad blog site.

“Maybe if we demystify the price of implementing the “latest” technology, we’ll give our communications teams, administrators, marketing directors, IT department, admissions directors, and faculty the chance to strategically think through the implications and to explore what’s already possible” says Professor David Gilbert.

At Oregon State University the recruitment and admissions department is promoting the addition of international bloggers to their website, thus expanding their recruitment level to new continents. Dan Karleen talks about blogging in academia on the website syndicateblog.Petersons.com. He says, “They realized the growing need to communicate with an international audience in a similar way they were reaching a domestic audience. For those of you who are skeptical about admissions blogging, you should spend a few minutes talking with Blake” (Referencing Blake Vawter, Assistant Director of Admissions at Oregon State University).

“It will be interesting to see how they blend the domestic and international aspects on a single blog. They’re using WordPress, which means it’s very easy to provide a separate RSS feed for all posts in a specific category, e.g. International Students. I bet we’ll see them do this.”

In the article License to Recruit? Admissions-sponsored Student Blogging Can Get
Real Results for Your Institution author Karine Joly (2006) speaks about the number of universities that are already implementing blogs as a recruitment tool. Should you launch your own student blogs to support your recruiting efforts? How can you ensure these blogs about college life will end up generating more applications as well as bigger and better classes of freshmen? Beyond the media hype, can these interactive diaries translate to better yields?

Joly says “Consider why they can help attract the best prospective students and persuade them to attend your school. Everything comes down to the Holy Grail of authenticity-or at least a perception of authenticity.

Whether you call them Millenials or NetGeners, today’s prospective students just don’t buy marketing messages delivered on glossy brochures. They’ve spent their teen years watching all sorts of reality TV shows and fallen in love with their “transparency.”

They rely on their peers’ opinions and recommendations on music, movies, and education. And, according to the report “Teen Content Creators and Consumers” (Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2005), 38 percent of all teens who are online say they read blogs.”

Dan Crouch, Web Services Manager and Enrollment Manager at Oregon State University says, “There are already many student blogs at OSU and we wanted a different message to be conveyed about our expertise in Admissions and what sets OSU apart from other institutions. Hence why we consider our blog a business blog.

As for the success of our blog, we’ve been thrilled with the results. Our audience isn’t limited to just prospective students either. It’s used as a tool to educate others on campus as well as other peers in the Admissions community about what we’re doing as a department. And one of the best side benefits has been the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) employed on the blog and our visibility on search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc… So much so that we’ve gone a step further and deployed a web marketing campaign with a leading SEO/SEM firm out of Portland.

Our pilot project has yielded very impressive results, especially when compared to more traditional (and expensive) media like radio and television advertising. Plus results are easily tracked, making a good argument for future funding.”