Apple is in the unique situation of having a seemingly untouchable brand.  They’ve managed to find the marketing fairy dust that makes all of their products simultaneously symbols of status and edge (as edgy as a computer can get, anyways).  

Although they’ve had a few missteps with their products, the fan boys will inevitably line up at ungodly hours to be the first to get their hands on a shiny new iproduct.  Their brand is a result of nothing less than an intense control over every single outward-facing aspect of the company.  It’s one of the few major companies I can think of that has little to no company-sponsored social media.  

When the controversy over the reception for the iphone reached a boiling point, it came out that posts on the Apple message boards regarding the issue had been deleted and the company was still sticking with its firm stance that there was no issue.  Even during the press conference you really had to read between the lines for any acknowledgement that the complaints about the phone were valid.  Through most of  its existence, Apple has insisted that the people at the controls are in full control and know what’s best.

This type of steadfast denial is growing rare in a world where thousands of complaints can be quickly compiled into blogs, Twitter feeds and news feeds.  Apple has shrouded itself in such secrecy and continues to speak to customers from the top down.  As Apple continues to exclude itself from the conversations that are occurring more often from the bottom up, I wonder how long it can keep the goodwill that it has worked so hard to garner.  

By now, you’ve no doubt seen the latest internet meme to take the world by storm…the Old Spice Man and his personalized responses to just about anyone asking for his advice.   As reported by PC Magazine, “Old Spice this week capitalized on the popularity of its recent TV advertisements with a series of YouTube videos in which “Old Spice guy” Isaiah Mustafa answered questions from the Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit communities.”  The response has been wildly popular and blogs ranging from Techcrunch and Mashable to the Huffington Post have picked up the action.

The Old Spice campaign is surely an excellent case study on integrating your social media efforts across various sites (as one publication puts it…they actually found a way to make YouTube social).  

However, while Old Spice Man has found it in his heart to dish out advice on everything from grooming to relationships,  the one thing that’s been missing was some advice for college recruiters.  Until now…

Finally, Old Spice man chimed in on how his followers should select a college.  I hope your school’s prepared to offer a B.A. in One-Handed Ship Building and a Minor in Philosophy/Bazooka Shooting.

When asked about their knowledge regarding several different social media tools, there was a huge jump in awareness from 2008 to now.  The year, for the first time, admissions departments were asked about Twitter.  Fifty-nine percent of the schools surveyed were using Twitter for constituent communications.  This was the second most popular form of social media to use; the first was social networking. 

However, research into how teenagers evaluate colleges has shown that they are more likely to use the college’s website over social media channels.  Twitter in particular, sticks out as a tool heavily used by admissions teams, but not really consumed by their target audience.  In this article, a director of marketing found that 40% of admissions departments used Twitter, but only 15% of students were engaged through Twitter. 

Part of this is reflected in the fact that Twitter is mostly used by an older demographic (which we wrote about last year)- so while it may be essentially useless for a teenage audience, it may be more effective with adult learners.  These studies underscore the need to keep track of how many prospects are visiting your various social media presences and report on the interactions taking place.  With so many constraints on resources, small operations should need to make sure their time and money are being funneled into the right channels.

This report is definitely worth checking out- although some the research will probably just put into number what you already know, there are a few surprising findings.  For example— higher education and charities have adopted blogs at a rate of over two times that of Fortune 500 companies.  

Twitter stats from Quantcast:

Quite simply, with an in-house list that you build on your own you’re marketing to people that have already expressed an interest in your institution.  

Across industries, marketers agree that email marketing is most effective when you send relevant content to recipients that opt-in to receiving communications from you.  This week, MarketingSherpa’s chart of the week lists the most effective tactics in order:

Rented lists are clearly not viewed as being effective.  So why do institutions keep spending money on renting/buying lists?  Perhaps it’s because the market for education is different?  Students take tests so that they can get into a college?  So naturally, they’d want to hear from my college, right?  Wrong.

We recently did an analysis for a large undergraduate school on the East coast and found that their success rates with homegrown lists were not only better than with rented lists, but WAY better:

Both in terms of view rates and click through rates, the in house lists won every time…and on average they were far better than the average rented list of names.  Why?

In today’s world, many students have already come up with a short list of colleges well before that first email hits their inbox.  The schools who get their emails read are generally the ones that the student seeks out, not the ones that purchased their name.  

So what are you doing to make sure students are seeking you out and opting in?  Are you still relying on list purchases to spread your message?  Is it working?

“Shrinking CIO” seems to point out that one of the consequences (or is it a cause(?)) of the declining role of CIOs is that technology purchases are increasingly made in a decentralized way at a departmental level.   The issue of centralization versus decentralization is a well-chronicled one in higher education; and I’ve also observed some increasingly complex dynamics playing out on this front. 

On the one hand, my 12+ years of working with campus IT departments indicates to me that purchasing seems to be growing more centralized, not less so.  This seems logical enough – difficult economic times call for belt-tightening, which leads to pooling of resources in an effort to achieve economies of scale.  This is not only happening within individual campuses, but also across multi-campus institutions, state systems, and loosely bound institutional consortia.  The mandate is clear – expenses must be managed, and centralized buying moves the needle.

User Emergence?

On the other hand, it does seem that the departmental or “functional users” of any given system have an increasingly strong voice in technology selection and purchase – a trend I applaud.  But, this appears to be less driven by a decentralization of buying, and more by an ever-increasing appreciation that the people who are actually going to be using a software solution should have a strong say in selecting that system.   Additionally, this trend has been bolstered by the increasing availability of cloud computing solutions that do not require (as much) direct IT involvement to deploy.  In any case, IT appears to increasingly be playing a collaborative or supporting role in vendor evaluations; rather than being the lone or leading decision-maker. 

Like all things, this trend can go too far.  For instance, I recently observed a major technology evaluation in which one college selected a solution with the balanced input of both central IT and a committee of functional users.  By the time a recommendation was presented t o the president, the functional users had altered their position and engaged in an unproductive battle with IT.  In this type of adversarial circumstance, everyone loses.  Likewise, if a decision is made solely by functional users without IT’s sign-off at the outset, downstream integration of the solution into the university’s technology landscape can become unnecessarily challenging.    

Simply a PR Issue?

These items underscore a directly related issue: the perception of IT among other campus constituents.  As Laster points out in his “New Normal” interview, perceptions range from one of IT as an operational / commoditized “keeper of electronics” on campus, to one as a highly strategic, senior-level advisor that assists the provost or president to make far-seeing decisions.  The “keeper of electronics” perception is an unfortunate one, which can cast IT in the surprising role of being a gate-keeping impediment to progress.  In many cases, this is unfair and fails to acknowledge either (a) IT’s resource constraints (this department seems to be ground-zero for the “do more with less” mantra of recent times) and (b) the burdensome risk-management responsibilities which IT shoulders.  “Shrinking CIO” quotes Georgetown’s CIO, David Lambert on this point: “It’s easy to feel some days like I am not the CIO, but the risk-management officer for the institution, because every element of risk management gets comes back to IT.

On the other hand, these articles also hint at some of the factors that have contributed to the perception of IT as being non-strategic in the first place.  One such implication is that some in IT prefer gadgetry to problem-solving.  “Shrinking CIO” calls out an Educause report in which an unidentified CIO is quoted as saying, “What I used to love about being CIO was getting a chance to be directly involved in small, cool projects led by faculty; now I find myself spending most of my time talking with security auditors and those involved in regulatory compliance.”  This quote may to be taken out of context.  Still, it certainly doesn’t convey the seriousness of purpose one would expect of a senior business / campus executive. 

Most substantively, though, is the level of service that campus professionals expect versus what they believe they receive from their respective IT organizations.  Laster outlines a progressive model of IT as “professional services firm,” through which his organization strives to provide outstanding service to campus constituents.  And while I have also seen this approach succeed elsewhere, the practical reality is that such a model is challenging to implement and isn’t the typical model at a lot of schools today.  In fact, departmental administrators often express their belief that they can get more accomplished by going around IT than trying to work through it.  This observation is made worse by the juggling act IT needs to perform.  In addition to coping with (a) resource constraints and (b) demand for increased services, IT is also frequently expected to take a leading role in cutting costs.  Quite a challenge. 

Closing

All of this brings us full circle to the central theme across the three articles’ cited in my introduction: technology will continue to be an extremely important force among colleges and universities going forward; but the actual form, role, and responsibilities of IT are in constant evolution.  It is important that we seek to separate perceptions from reality in terms of where we are today and how we got here, in order to optimize the benefits of technology going forward.       

•    “The Incredible Shrinking CIO” by Jeffrey Young in The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 9, 2010): A paradox is occurring:  one the one hand, the influence of technology on campus continues to rise and the responsibilities of the CIO are becoming ever more expansive.  On the other hand, the influence of the people in charge of technology seems to be seeping away.  This is substantiated by an observed pattern of downgrading of titles and removal of CIOs from presidential cabinets / councils and by a growing general perception on campus of IT departments being more “operational” and less “strategic.”
• “Not So Special” by James Garner Ptaszynski, Ph.D in Inside Higher Ed (May 12, 2010): Technology is a driving force in higher education, but education is – arguably – no longer the driving force in technology that it once was.  This has played out in the form of institutions having less sway with vendors and receiving less preferential treatment (or eye-popping discounts).  The article also explores how this happened (e.g. the battleground among technology providers for hearts and minds of young consumers now occurs during primary school, not during college years) and how campus technologists are responding (e.g. either pining for the past or forging a new future).
•  “Higher Education IT in the ‘New Normal’” by Mary Grush in Campus Technology (April 28, 2010):  This is an extensive and informative interview with Stephen Laster, CIO of Harvard Business School, in which he examines the sustainability of the cost basis in education.  In this case, the term “new normal” represents the concept that “even as the economy continues to recover, there will be pressure on higher education institutions to be more efficient with their financial and human resources.”  While it acknowledges the trends described above, I found this to be an optimistic piece in that it almost reads as a how-to guide for building that new future in which IT plays a strategic role in addressing challenges facing universities. 

As I sat down to write this post, I began to realize the deceptively deep and wide expanse of this topic.  As such, my “editor” (our very own Dan Obregon) encouraged me to take it in bite-sized chunks. 

Accordingly, I am going to try to tackle this in two parts:

• Part 1: Decentralization, User Emergence, or a PR Issue?
• Part 2: “Less Focus with More Dedication” and Other Paradoxes from .edu



Institutions and brands of all shapes and sizes took part in the virtual land grab that SL had to offer. They built it, often investing lots of money, and ultimately “they” did not come.  Today, many of the site’s once promising venues have a rather ghost-town feel to them.

One of my favorite bloggers, Tom Fishburne, found a great quote from Ted Simon which sums it up well:

“In this headlong rush of confusing a tactic with a strategy, organizations waste time, energy, resources chasing a “shiny new object.”

We’ve written about strategy vs. tactics here in the past.  However, I’m not saying that institutions shouldn’t experiment and try new things…despite all the duds there are certainly a few new toys out there that are worth keeping…but they should be careful about becoming obsessed with trying something new, especially if it distracts from your core focus.  

If that’s the case, then perhaps instead of asking yourself, “how can I use this?” you should be asking these questions instead: “should I use this?” and “will this help us meet our strategic objectives?” 

Or, as Chris Brogan puts it, “Pursue the goal not the method.”

Inevitably, what winds up happening is that institutions will get so worked up about missing the boat on the “next big thing” that they rush to “be there” without thinking things through.  As a result, you have many half-hearted attempts to build a massive online presence and oftentimes one or more of your communities becomes neglected.  This is certainly true with respect to the slew of social networking options that are out there, but it does not only apply to social networking.  

Perhaps it’s time for institutions to exercise the Unix Philosophy, which is (to paraphrase) to do one thing and do it well.  Once you’ve done that well, move on to something else and do that well.  

In short: Measure and optimize your existing efforts before opening up the box on that new shiny toy.  

Most of you probably noticed that Facebook prompted you to join pages based on your interests.  Why?  It seems like Facebook intends for Community Pages to be like a Wikipedia entry plus social media.  When I click on the page for American University, my alma mater, I’m linked to a page that hosts the Wikipedia entry for AU and a page that aggregates all mentions of AU in people’s statuses. 

Many of these posts are from the actual school, however I’m immediately struck by how many entries are irrelevant.  And by irrelevant, I mean, not even related to American University.  It’s not hard to imagine how many programs around the world contain the words “American” and “University.”  Just on the first page alone, the aggregator has pulled up the American University in Beirut, National American University (in Austin) and American University in the context of “I’m going to an American university.”  This instantly brings to mind the Skittles campaign I wrote about last year and how people would abuse the Skittles Twitter aggregator by using the Skittles hashtag with non-family friendly related posts.

The pages pose two problems: 1) now there are two pages for American- the community page hosted by Facebook and the page hosted by American, 2) the inevitable misuse of the page either intentional or accidentally.  Facebook says that once the pages reach a certain popularity level, the page will then belong to the community- much like a wiki.  This means colleges and universities will likely be the first to see their pages reach this point as most people have some sort of higher education affiliation.

It will be interesting to see if the Community Pages are something that will widely ignored (I confess that this is the first time I’ve looked at AU’s page) or if they’ll eventually become more important than the pages you “Like.”  It’s important for anyone in marketing or recruiting to watch this trend carefully.  Originally, Facebook fan pages were great because it allowed the college or university to oversee honest discussions and answer inquiries about the school outside of the more formal school website.  I worry that if the Community Page catches on, it will replace the fan page as the spot for open communication, giving marketers for the university less access to join the conversation and help dialog.

Oh, but Forrester adds, “…consumers don’t just multitask across different channels; they also do many different things on the PC at the same time.”  

This begs the question, what (else) are they doing when they’re reading that email from your college or filling out that online application?  What are the chances that your presence will stand out?  You better hope they’re supertaskers.