How to recruit College Students with Blogs
Check this out! I think its a sign of a growing trend. Your thoughts?
This fall a couple dozen students across the United States took up blogging for their alma maters. In occasional or weekly posts they offer slices of campus life that the Admissions office can share with prospective students and their parents. Because these are blogs and not recruiting brochures, the writers have a chance, it seems, to tell it like it is.
Prospective students visiting the admissions site for Ball State University (Ind.) can click on a photo in the “Brady Bunch” montage. Each headshot photo takes visitors to words, photos, and audio or video about what it’s like to be a Ball State student. University of Missouri, Columbia, meanwhile, offers admissions page visitors “18 Reasons to Choose Mizzou,” with detailed quotes from students about their campus life. The site draws energy from a large, fast-loading collection of campus life shots taken by a team of student photographers.
But for readers accustomed to the rough-and-ready informality of many blogs, these new websites are curious creations. Press releases have typically preceded the writers, and education reporters, at least briefly, followed them. Most new bloggers labor in obscurity, taking months to build their writing skills and attract an audience, but thanks to the links from the Admissions page, these sponsored sites had readers from the start.
The financial and editorial arrangements vary. Some bloggers receive a stipend for posting at least once a week, while others receive the computer, digital camera, or audiovisual equipment they need to create a high-tech blog site. No matter how they are compensated, bloggers are a peculiar kind of employee, practicing an individualist’s art on behalf of the school.
Press releases and admissions sites present their blogs as “authentic, firsthand accounts of student life.” They promise “an inside look” at “the real lives” of small groups of students who are carefully chosen to represent the diversity of the student body.
One blogger, for example, frequently reports on leaving campus to attend professional sporting events, while another graciously answers questions from prospective students. Another details the busy life of the student athlete, while still another publishes a dramatic picture of new bullet holes in his off-campus student apartment complex. Some posts are exciting or promising, and some even talk about ideas–but administrators are anxious about the risk.
Can student bloggers create an image attractive enough to engage and recruit new students? Should valuable space on the admissions website be turned over to self-expression? Administrators are watching cautiously to see how these young people represent the school.
READ: To Blog or Not To Blog
Nothing says "Thanks for posting this Jim!" like Starbucks Coffee. Click here to buy me a cup (or two).If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
[...] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerpt a stipend for posting at least once a week, while others receive the computer, digital camera [...]