In my conversation with Paula David of Clark University, she talked about hiring a ‘Director of Wow’. Her idea is to create content that will draw some sense of shock or emotion from her target audience.
Seth Godin, marketing guru, constantly preaches the idea of creating at the fringes. Being safe is boring, those who push the envelope are the ones who draw attention and create remarkable content.
While visiting several admissions and marketing personnel this past week there seemed to be a common theme when talking about creating rich media… If we create rich media our target audience will undoubtedly want to watch it and will be enamored with it.
While this train of thought may have worked a few years ago I am of the mind that our target audience is no longer ooh’ed and ahh’ed simply by seeing a school’s rich media content. The fact of the matter is that we not only need to ooh and ahh our target audience, we now need them to talk about it with their friends.
So what does it take to create on the fringes? Here is a flow chart from Wired Magazine on our typical thought process when deciding whether or not to forward an e-mail. If you look at what it takes, just to get someone to forward an e-mail you will realize why creating rich media for the sake of having it on your school’s admissions website is a waste of your time.
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To find inspiration on what works, look at some of the most talked about shows on television, Family Guy, Colbert Report, Saturday Night Live. These shows might not be the most popular but they are definitely some of the most talked about. The material that these shows use is controversial, it isn’t safe and therefore we are more likely to remark about it.
Now you might disagree with some of the content but this is what it takes to get generation y to share with their friends. So be creative and find shocking ways to stimulate your target audience.
As if Obama can’t be seen through enough media outlets these days now Hulu is allowing anyone to embed their video player, which will stream Obama’s speech tonight live, through your website. Love it!
I have been on a bit of a TED talk kick lately and came across one presentation with the marketing guru Seth Godin that I thought could be applied to the international student recruiting community. Seth brings up a couple points that might spawn innovating thinking within your international student admissions office.
One major theme of his talk is to ask yourself, is your marketing remarkable? Remarkable doesn’t mean what you are saying or doing is ‘cool’, remarkable means your audience is inspired to ‘remark’ about your marketing efforts to others.
This is the essence of social media. We have many tools where for free we can distribute material to our audience and where our audience can easily share or remark about it to others. But the material must be remarkable!
Now I have no interest necessarily in Gonzaga but they have done enough to compel me to share their video with others. For me it was remarkable. And now that you are checking it out, you too might feel compelled to share it with someone. Gonzaga has developed an initiative that may start a large conversation being heard by an audience that is interested in what they are saying. You can’t buy that kind of undivided attention with mass media!
The other theme that I really liked in the presentation was the explanation of the term Otaku. Otaku describes the obsession one has with a particular product or service and their uncanny desire to do something as the result of that product or service. The example Seth uses is how people in Japan who are obsessed with Ramen Noodles. These people will drive half way across Tokyo just to try a new restaurant serving Ramen Noodle and because of thier obession with Ramen Noodles will remark about their experience to others.
This whole idea of Otaku made me think, who is the market truly obsessed with having an international education?
Is it the student who is obsessed and will talk about a great university that offers a lot of merit aid for foreign students to his friends? Is it the mother and father who will talk to other parents about the amount of money they can save by having their child go to a particular college in the US? Is it the alumnus who is really proud of something going on at their school that will tell others to check out a video, podcast or blog on their alma mader’s website?
I would love to hear how other school’s are engaging the different international education community members to attract international students.
Do you have campaigns geared specifically toward prospective international students’ parents as well as the prospective international students?
Who are the gatekeepers that you try to influence, the one’s who have the ability to open the floodgates for your school to get prospective international student inquiries? Agents? Web Services? Tour Companies? EducationUSA offices? Someone that I am failing to mention here?
But ultimately we must ask ourselves…
Do I believe that my school is effectively marketing to the prospective international student market’s Otaku?
Orkut, Google’s social networking service is where you can find loads and loads of Indian students.Why Orkut gained such great traction in India has to do with a combination of timing and the desire of Indians to be part of a social gathering on the Web.Facebook has over 600,000 users ages 13-24 in India but still has a lot of work to do to catch up with Orkut among Indian students!
Like other social networking websites, Orkut allows users to maintain existing relationships and meet new friends.Users can share photos and videos, exchange messages and invite others to join the network. The most incredible part of Orkut that I have seen is how students use its ‘Communities’ which allow users to create and participate in forums, create polls and add events.
If you are an Indian student thinking about studying in the US it is likely that you are a member of at least one, if not many of Orkut’s user created Communities.There are thousands of these Communities under the School and Education category, some of which have tens of thousands of members.
The magical aspect of these communities is that students are extremely active in helping one another with test preparation, sharing tips, tricks, helpful links to external websites such as the GRE ghost blog and advice from their own personal experiences.
Applying for Top Universities is one Orkut community with nearly 17,000 members.In this community a forum is titled ‘Admissions to US Schools – What do u need’ and it has over 600 entries by students who are preparing to apply to the top schools in the US.In this community you can find students comparing GRE scores and information like application deadlines.
One group member said, “…Scores help in the preliminary elimination and in many ways they are not the yardstick to measure your success at application. It is more important to get in touch with the univ and email the profs who teach the subjects u r interested in”
Even with all of the competition from other social network giants such as Facebook and Myspace, Orkut is an undeniably valuable resource for many Indian students. It is difficult to imagine any of Google’s services being left behind, especially when you start to think about the possibilities for integratng exiting services like Gmail, Gchat and YouTube. If you do not yet have an Orkut account, signing up is really easy, especially if you use Gmail, so check it out for yourself (and no one is paying me to say this).
A recent article in Business Week highlighting H1-B visa fraud has caused quite the comment stir and frustration with Americans in this down economy (check out the comments on the article from both sides of the table, quite a lot of colorful commentary). Sarah Lacy, finance writer for Tech Crunch, argues how those Americans choosing to take a ‘xenophobic’ stance, especially in Silicon Valley, fail to recall how foreign born start-up founders led to years of economic prosperity, jobs and big time bonuses for many Americans.
Yes, American’s are losing jobs and yes, foreign born employees have still managed to keep their jobs but ask yourself who has been a valuable driving force of creating new jobs for Americans? In 2007 Duke and UC Berkley researches took a look at the impact foreign born founders of companies had on the US economy in their report titled: “America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs“
So while we like to complain that foreigners are stealing American jobs let’s highlight a couple of details from this report:
A couple leading foreign born founders of ‘American’ companies that you may heard of: Sergey Brin from Russia, who founded Google, Indian born Vinod Khosla who founded Sun Microsystems and Jerry Yang who co-founded Yahoo.
Looking at the Technology and Engineering US start-ups between 1995 and 2005, over 25% had a foreign born founder equating to the approximate creation of 7,283 US companies.
In 2005 alone, these start-up companies produced $25 billion in sales and employed over 450,000 workers.
That’s right foreigners in the US have generated $25 billion in sales and created 450,000 jobs alone in the Technology and Engineering sectors.
Relate all of this information to our field of international student recruiting.
Let’s face it, the UK, Australia and Canada are chewing away at the US’s allure of being the place to make one’s dreams come true. Prospective students are turning to the ‘more accepting’ countries who in turn are reaping the rewards of cultivating these students’ minds and then allowing them to stay in their country to innovate.
If the US higher education community loses the battle of attracting the most promising minds the world has to offer, we in turn lower our economic potential. Let’s start thinking of our jobs as international student recruiters as an influence to the US economic engine. Every student that studies at our educational institutions not only contributes to the$15.5 billion international students contribute to our US economy each year but has the potential to positively impact our US economy.
In my opinion the question right now should be how can we attract the best talent the world has to offer not how can we deport H1-B’s? Let’s figure out how we can influence this talent to come to America where our culture, our educational institutions and innovative companies can inspire these individuals to create new companies, ultimately leading to more American jobs and future economic prosperity.
If you have a lot of photos that you would like to present to prosepctive students in a unique way I would recommend checking out Animoto. Animoto is a free service where you can upload photos and the Animoto service automatically inserts cool tranistions, music, script, etc. So in essence you really don’t have to do much work to create a video that prospective students will love!
The best part is of it all is that you can upload the video automatically to YouTube, share it on Facebook or Myspace, embed it in your blog, etc. This is one of the easiest ways to create interesting videos from content you already have and share it with all of your prospective students…
Many schools possess the idea that if they have a mere presence on a social network like Facebook or an account on Twitter it means that they are truly employing the power of social media to help them recruit students. Unfortunately it isn’t that easy.
I always talk about this idea of the internet being a giant conversation. People are adding to the conversation in many ways whether it’s updating a Facebook status, commenting on a photo or blog, uploading a video to YouTube and so on. The trick to being successful in this medium is to listen to those whom you find informative and interesting while attracting your target audience to want to listen to you!
Let me provide an example of how participating in the conversation on the web can help you be heard by your target audience!
On goSwoop we provide colleges and universities as well as students profiles. These profiles however act very similarly to the typical College Board profile for schools or the common college application for students. So having a dynamic profile isn’t enough to reap the rewards from goSwoop. The answer is all of the other tools for conversation that colleges and universities can utilize to be heard by prospective international students.
Let’s look at this from the college and university standpoint. A school can update their profile on goSwoop to present all the information prospective international students need to know in order to get into their college, but how effective is that? A student has to sift through all the noise on goSwoop to find that information on the school’s profile and then take the time to read and review all the information provided by the school.
So the question is… What should schools be doing to break through the noise and be heard by all these prospective students starving for information on studying in the US? Voice your opinion in the conversation!
We have a section on goSwoop called the Q&A. Students can pose questions that anyone in the goSwoop community can answer. Schools have told me why would they bother answering questions on goSwoop’s Q&A when we are already answering students’ questions via e-mail?
The simple answer to this question is that the traditional ways in which schools are answering questions is in a one on one conversation and not in the more effective one to many conversation they could be having. By answering students in an environment such as goSwoop’s Q&A, it allows more students to listen to what the school is saying. Think of it this way…
When you are presenting a seminar to a group of 100 students and one student stands up to ask a question, yes, you are specifically answering that student’s question but everyone else in the room is also listening and learning the information you are providing. Now imagine you were one on one with that same student in your office and the student asks you the same question. By not being in that seminar answering the students question you miss out on having the other 99 students hearing the information you are providing.
Think of forums like goSwoop as seminars. Not only are many students listening to all of the answers you are providing when you participate in these ’small’ conversations but you are cutting through all the noise and making it easier for students to find you. For example, take a look at what it looks like when a school answers a question on goSwoop.
Every time a school answers a question on goSwoop, no matter how long or short the answer, students first see that (in this case) Roger Williams University and Saint Mary’s College of California are potential schools to study at in the US but they can click on the school’s name to be linked back to the school’s profile where they can learn more about the school.
By participating in the conversation, colleges and universities are creating more exposure for themselves and also generating more opportunities to drive student traffic to the pages that can ultimately create the most value for the school (your website).
So ask yourself… How well is my school being heard by prospective international students? Am I an active voice in the conversations of prospective international students?
If your not, don’t be shy, jump in, we would love to hear from you!
There are posts ranging from topics about college search to Getting in: The College Admissions process. Do check it out, I am sure there will be some contributors that you will find worth following!
I remember when I was applying for college and schools would send alums or current students to my high school to talk about their college experiences. I remember how mezmerizing their stories of the infamous college life were and in the end it enticed me to apply to some schools that weren’t even on my radar.
We all know how influential it can be for a prospective student to listen to current students or alums. While admissions recruiters do a great job conveying the facts of a school, the current students and alumni can talk about the actual experience, what the social life is like, academics, opportunities for internships and jobs, etc.
So then the question is, how can we exponentially increase the effectiveness of our current students when it comes to recruiting international students?
Let’s face it, we can’t send our current students or alums to all the regions of the world where we would like to recruit, but we can do it virtually.
Look at all the different technologies we can employ that would allow the message of our current students to reach undecideds. We could create videos with prospective students (if you are interested in this see a previous blog on creating inexpensive video for the web), we can have our students blog their experience, we can have digital conferences with high schools, we can podcast our students and so much more.
Because I preach the need to focus one’s social media initiatives, I am going to highlight podcasting in this post. I think podcasting offers one of the best opportunities to convey the experiences of your current students. The reason for this is that podcasts do not typically require as much bandwidth as videos. This allows prospective students who live in developing nations to have an easier time accessing the rich media.
Podcasts in my mind are also a step above blogs for two reasons. First, let’s face it, no one wants to read and second, if you are really set on having a student blog you can easily transcribe all of your podcasts which turn out be quite good blog entries (for an example check out the goSwoop transcriptions of our podcasts).
Podcasting is also much easier than you might think. If you have a PC and a microphone (either internal or external) you have all the tools you need. You can easily use Windows Movie Maker (located in your accessories folder) to record and edit audio or use Audacity, a free audio recording and editing tool on the web.
Once you have recorded your podcasts with students you can host your podcasts for free on the web. I use mypodcast.com but there are various other sites including podbean.com. With your free account you will be able to take the podcasts that you have recorded with your current students and post them on the web.
Now all you have to do is publicize your podcasts. To promote the podcasts we did with the USIEF Chennai office, they placed a link to the podcasts in their e-mail signatures. At goSwoop, we promote all of our podcasts through a weekley newsletter.
There are many options for publicizing your podcasts so get creative and share your current students’ experiences of studying at your school to every prospective student around the world!
At the “Technology and International Student Recruiting” meet-up this past month, George Comeau, the managing director at Suffolk University and an educational technology management consultant talked about how at Suffolk they had developed a listening strategy. I really liked the term listening strategy because listening is exactly what we need to do in order to effectively employ our social media initiatives.
One method in which you can begin to listen to fellow admissions offices and experts in the higher education industry is to read their blogs. There are many great blogs being written about the subject of employing social media and here is a way in which you can begin to listen more effectively.
Google Reader, I love it! Google Reader in a nutshell is an aggregator of blogs you subscribe to, listed in headline format so that you can easily pick and choose the ones you are interested in reading.
So for example I have a list of 15 blogs that I really enjoy to read. Every time I open my Google Reader account all the most recent headlines from each of those blogs is presented in a nice list so that I can see which blog entry I want to read.
The great part about Google Reader is I only have to go to one location to see all of the blog entries from my favorite bloggers. For example, today I found a very interesting entry on the GlobalHigherEd blog about the economic impact of ‘export education‘ as well as kept up on the latest from Chris Brogan and his thoughts on social media.
To get involved with Google Reader make sure you have a Google account. Don’t worry it’s free. If you don’t have an account simply go to http://www.google.com/reader and sign up.
RSS Feed Button
After you have your Google account go to your favorite blogs and click on the RSS feed button. You should be asked where you want the feed to be read. Click on the Google button and then choose, ‘add to Google Reader’ and voi la your Google Reader account has it’s first blog.
Now get out there and find blogs that you find informative about employing social media and add them to your Google Reader account.
I recently spoke to Amina Saigol. She is a senior at the Lahore American School who will be attending Brown University in the Fall. In this scoop Amina shares how she prepared for the US college and university application process.
In my conversation with Paula David of Clark University, she talked about hiring a ‘Director of Wow’. Her idea is to create content that will draw some sense of shock or emotion from her target audience.
As if Obama can’t be seen through enough media outlets these days now 
I have been on a bit of a 
to apply to the top schools in the US.
A recent 
Many schools possess the idea that if they have a mere presence on a social network like Facebook or an account on Twitter it means that they are truly employing the power of social media to help them recruit students. Unfortunately it isn’t that easy.
