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Social Networking
[Your College Here] Wants to Be Your 'Friend'
9/6/2007
Noel-Levitz, marketing solutions provider James Tower, and the National Research Center for College & University Admissions, 72 percent of those surveyed would like to interact with an admissions counselor or student admissions worker via IM. Officials at Mars Hill College (NC), a liberal arts institution, must have been paying attention to findings like this: They wanted to get closer to their current and prospective students, so they decided to do it by congregating where the kids actually congregate— online on social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, and LinkedIn."Attending college or university is already an important part of the young adult experience, but so are technology, friends, and socializing," says Andy Mrozkowski, webmaster of admissions and marketing at Mars Hill. "So, it seemed natural to have a spot for the college within the normal online experience of our students; their social network environments." Mrozkowski knows a good deal about reaching out to various constituencies: He came to Mars Hill directly from the corporate world, where he developed training systems for top-flight corporations, and became an expert in the use of streaming media for training and outreach.
He is now focused also on social networking, and explains that many schools are beginning to understand the benefit of this interactive type of outreach. With little to no investment involved in setting up a profile page on a social networking site, schools can "push" special campus activity announcements and other communications to their communities in a matter of minutes. Of course, there are always concerns about investing the time and effort to adopt this type of online outreach, and there is the fear that after the work is complete, the students or the general community may not respond or even find the page. But Mrozkowski has forged ahead and coordinated Mars Hill student interns to build the school's profile on MySpace, and populate the profile page with facts about the institution that could be attractive to a prospective student. The unnamed MySpace project quickly took off when schoolmates of the interns added the college MySpace page to their friends list. The school's intranet produces information in XML format which, in turn, is consumed by the social networking sites. "All that is required is to specify the RSS feed and then every time the RSS feed is updated, the social network page is updated also. We use feeds for events, public news releases, and now videos!" says Mrozkowski. Whenever a faculty member adds an event to the school's intranet, it is automatically added to the school's MySpace page.
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