Prereqs for a Successful Student Blogger Program
by Kathryn Spruill, Stein | August 21st, 2008Contributed by: Kathryn Spruill
Account Executive, Stein Communications
Authenticity is so important in conveying the true student experience at your school. Exposing the real lives of real students through a blogging program can have a much bigger impact than listing dozens of student organizations and intramural sports. It’s a careful balance, because to get authentic student experiences, you have to give up control. The following tips will ease your mind and reduce the risks associated with a student blog program.
Which students, which staff
The most important consideration is who you will ask to get involved. Choose more than two students, but less than six. If you have too many choices, a prospective student will be overwhelmed and not read any! You obviously want prospective students to relate to the bloggers. Choose students representing a variety of academic interests, extracurricular involvements, and areas of the country. Freshmen can provide insight into the transition to college and seniors can write about their job search, so strive to enlist at least one of each.
If you have student tour guides or admission office interns who already understand the big picture of recruitment, this should be your first stop. You should be able to trust them to tell the right stories about their weekends, meaning fraternity service day and not fraternity party, and they will probably be used to the typical questions prospective students ask.
An admission counselor can be assigned the role of project and content manager. He or she should be reading over every entry, making sure bloggers are posting regularly and appropriately. This counselor could have his or her own blog, although it’s guaranteed that prospective students are less interested in what their admission counselor is doing on a Thursday afternoon than in what current students are doing.
How often, on what medium
The key to blogging is fresh content. This will engage prospective students with the student bloggers and keep them coming back to see how Trevor did on the test he had been studying for all week, or if Julie got into the Study Abroad program she applied for. Three to four posts a week is great!
Many third parties provide platforms for student bloggers. Talk to your marketing partner to see what solutions they may recommend. The advantage to this approach as opposed to having students sign up at blogger.com is having oversight on the blogs: the ability to edit students’ entries directly. Many platforms can be set to require an admission counselor’s approval before the content goes live. Hopefully you trust the students you’ve chosen, but it’s always wise to have checks in place.
Incentives
What you are asking of these students is no small time commitment. Their job description includes not only writing their entries but also responding to the comments and questions that prospective students leave on the blogs.
Compensate them with a small weekly stipend, or give them a digital camera that they can then use to upload pictures onto their blog or video content. If you aren’t giving students an incentive to stick to writing on their blog, other things will quickly become their priority. Many students will love the fame factor – having their name after the official school URL (stateuniversity.edu/admission/blog/danny) will be the best part of the deal for them. It shouldn’t be the only carrot you are dangling.
Promoting the blogs
If your student bloggers interact with prospective students face to face, make them a photo business card with the URL of their blog and their email address. They can pass them out to their tour groups and when they connect with a family, they can add them to their readership.
Your blogs should be prominently advertised on your admission home page, and you can certainly send out e-mail communications to your mailing list with short bios of each student and links to their blogs.
There are some great success stories out there with student blogging programs. But if you look at just one school’s, check out MIT (http://www.mitadmissions.org/blogs.shtml). They were on the forefront of the blogging phenomenon and built a great interface for their student bloggers.
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For more on authenticity in student blogs and the benefits of blogs from the perspective of a prospective student, please see our article “New Marketing Models.”
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Kathryn Spruill was responsible for running a student blogger program during her time in admission at Tulane University. Is your institution putting a program in place, or do you have any additions to make to Kathryn’s list? She’d love to hear from you at kspruill@steincommunications.com.
