I started using Twitter a few months ago as a self-imposed research assignment, to try to get a handle on what someone would really get out of it. When I first heard folks talking about it, it sounded like a great tool if you were out and about a lot, trying to meet up with friends, letting friends know where you are and where you’re planning to go. But for those of us who don’t have many evening outings anymore (bar-hopping is quite a thing of the past for me, with 10 month old twins now the focus of my nights), it didn’t seem like something useful.

I confess, my view of Twitter was rather short sighted. Since joining, I’ve discovered that Twitter IS another way to remain connected, but not necessarily with just your friends and people you already know. Your list of who you are following and who’s following you seems to grow organically, as it does with other social media. But if it’s a dialogue, it’s a different kind of dialogue. It’s really an information exchange - real-time postings from an event you’re attending, news items, humorous observations, or just how you happen to be feeling at that moment or what mundane task you might be engaged in. It’s a wonderful mix of all of these things, and as you “follow” someone on Twitter, an image of them begins to take shape, pieced together from the many comments they’ve made and information they’ve shared. It’s pretty cool.

Now that I’ve become more familiar with how Twitter works, I’ve started reading up on how it applies to secondary and higher ed. In August, the blog .eduGuru offered up a smart take on how the higher education community should approach using Twitter. In her post, Karlyn Morissette, Web Producer for Dartmouth, suggested that rather than looking at how other schools might be using Twitter, instead look at how other industries are using it to communicate with their audiences. She references organizations running the gamut from Home Depot to NASA to the American Cancer Society. After you study how other varied industries are using Twitter, it’s pretty easy to begin seeing how it might be utilized by secondary and higher ed.  Athletics updates. Campus visit events. Application deadlines. Performance announcements. Alumni events. Links to audio or video of important lectures. Links to news items featuring your institution (think media momentum as mentioned in my last post). Appropriate audiences? Current students, prospective students, parents, alumni… anyone with a vested interest in learning about what’s going on at your institution.

With the number of Twitter apps exploding, and the number of individuals and organizations participating in the Twitter-verse growing by the minute, it looks like Twitter is here to stay, at least for a while. If you haven’t jumped in already, it’s time. If you already tweet, add Stein to your list.

Peter Schilling, Amherst College’s director of information technology, put together the numbers on the use of technology by this year’s incoming class of 438 students. Here are some of the stats:

• Percentage of first-year applicants who applied online in 2003: 33%
• Percentage of applicants who did last year: 89%
• By the end of August 2008 the total number of members and posts at the Amherst College Class of 2012 Facebook group: 432 members and 3,225 posts
• Students in the class of 2012 who registered computers, IPhones, game consoles, etc. on the campus networks: 370 students registered 443 devices.
• Number of students in the class of 2012 who brought desktop computers to campus: 14
• Number that brought iPhones/iTouches: 93
• Likelihood that a student with an iPhone/iTouch is in the class of 2012: approximately 1 in 2
• Total number of students on campus this year that have landline phone service: 5

Schilling wanted “to tell the story of the changes occurring here and now in the life of the College.” I’m sure a similar story is being repeated at colleges and universities across the country.

More: IT Index

The Global Language Monitor has ranked colleges and universities based on their appearance on the internet, the blogosphere, global print and electronic media. I read about it for the first time in a recent broadcast email from my alma mater’s Alumni Affairs office. They mentioned it because Vanderbilt topped the list in ‘media momentum’, meaning they demonstrated the largest positive change in number of citations across all media studied.

In the general university rankings, Harvard, not surprisingly, ranked the highest in the overall number of citations, rounding out the top five with Columbia, University of Michigan, University of California - Berkley, and Stanford. As for the college rankings, Colorado College scored the highest, with Williams, University of Richmond, Middlebury and Wellesley making the top five list.

As for universities with ‘media momentum’, after Vanderbilt, the top five included University of Virginia, Emory, Rice and University of Texas - Austin. The college top five included Hamilton, Pomona, Skidmore, Bard and Gettysburg. Our neighbors, University of the South - Sewanee and Furman, followed closely at #6 and #7. Interesting stuff.

An article in Science News describes how researchers at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon used high-dimensional geometry to analyze the results of US News & World Report’s college rankings. What they found wasn’t that the rankings are based on flawed criteria (they didn’t address that question) but that the rankings shift dramatically depending on how you prioritize the seven factors USNWR considers.

The researchers argue that the magazine has prioritized these factors arbitrarily, which biases its rankings. Their goal was to see what the rankings looked like if the data were analyzed in ways that took this inherent bias into account.

After reverse-engineering the USNWR data, the researchers mapped the schools onto a seven-dimensional space correlated to the seven criteria. (And that will be the last we speak of seven-dimensional space.) This kind of arrangement viewed all seven categories equally, so the researchers avoided any ranking bias.

Then they examined the schools, ranking the seven criteria in every possible combination. In other words, they modeled all of the possible priorities prospective students might have (and not just the set of priorities USNWR assumes they have, whatever that might be).

The results? They found that the top schools were unaffected—Harvard, Yale, Princeton still rate the highest since they score the highest in all criteria.

Schools that were a bit more uneven could vary wildly, though. Penn State, for example, was 48 according to the magazine’s criteria, but it could also be as high as 1 or as low as 59. That variability evolves because Penn State is the best at making sure students graduate, … but weaker in other aspects. UC Berkeley, on the other hand, was strong in most categories except for one: alumni giving. … As a result, although U.S. News rates UC Berkeley as 21, the university could go as high as 14 or as low as 36.

The researchers suggest that USNWR publish a variety of rankings that reflect representative sets of priorities to combat this bias.

I attended this morning’s presentation, Understanding the Impact of Social Media on College-Bound Youth, presented by David Peck from Azusa Pacific University and Pam Kiecker who heads up research at Royall & Company.  

While I don’t have specifics on the methodology used with the UrCompass panelists, here are some of the stats that I scribbled:

• 84% of high school students are on facebook or myspace. At colleges this number jumps to 94%.
• 16% of high school students have visited a school’s official page on one of these sites.
• 2.9% of high school students use social networking sites to get information on colleges.
• The top two things students are looking to gain from these pages are to check out current students and to get information from an official source at the school. 
• Most useful insider sites, respectively: College Confidential, ratemyprofessor.com, sparknotes.com 

Is this number small enough that schools can continue to stall on building their own official pages? The answer is no because students are building their own communities and relationships surrounding your institution. And if you aren’t part of that dialogue, you can’t influence the conversation.

Often times, admission offices and others in charge of outreach to prospective students worry that they are inundated with email and print publications, but the reality is that for students, MORE is BETTER. Information is power and students want as much as possible. This was found to be even more true with students from under-represented ethnic groups.

Will students perceive our efforts in social media to be forced? NO! They think it’s smart of schools to communicate through “their” media.

The most important conclusion from the session? Online interaction, however frequent and eye-opening, does not compare to face-to-face interaction. Use social media with the same goals as when institutions use viewbooks and email broadcast: Get them to campus! Visiting campus will reinforce and elevate relationships that might have started on social  networking sites.

Last week, AdAge ran an article about corporations rethinking the value of question-and-answer consumer surveys. While still spending lots and lots of money on survey-based research, major companies like Procter & Gamble and Unilever are starting to focus on “digital chatter,” the comments and insights provided on blogs and social networks, as better indicators of customer attitudes.

Why the shift?

“You can’t ask people what they want, because what they say and what they do are two different things,” said Artie Bulgrin, senior VP-research and sales for ESPN…. “We can actually improve our [initiative's] success rate if we just listen a bit more … on a passive basis.”

If what people say and do differ when it comes to something like laundry detergent and frozen foods, imagine the discrepancies when it comes to decisions they’re emotionally invested in, like choosing a school. And imagine the discrepancies when your respondents are seventeen years old. (Some schools are already engaging in this kind of digital listening and qualitative analysis for precisely these reasons.)

This article also reminded me of a terrific blog entry by John Bell on “digital listening” from August that’s well worth checking out (h/t Jenny): Digital PR Skills 2008: Deploy Live “Listening Posts”

The full AdAge article is here.