My colleague, Jennifer Bagley, brought a  New York Times article to my attention this morning about Unigo.com. Learning about Unigo.com reminded me of a quote by Marcus Aurelius I’ve always liked: “Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.”

Unigo.com is a brand new web site geared toward prospective college students and their families. Unigo is a free site with student-generated content and, in theory, serves the same purpose as the comprehensive college guidebooks published each year. The difference is, of course, the fact that the content is 100% student generated and completely free for the user. The good, the bad and the ugly are reported — along with all the positive, glowing impressions a student might have. The site is populated with content through a student-focused grass roots movement rather than enlisting the help of admissions and marketing professionals at colleges and universities it reviews.

Although the concept of student-generated content is not new, the approach and scope of Unigo could be ground-breaking. Unigo’s momentum is building, so if you haven’t encountered it yet, don’t be surprised if your current and prospective students begin talking about it soon…

Contributed by: Taylor Trussell
Strategic Consultant, Stein Communications

Many books dissect and analyze the Millennial generation, and the views expressed run the gamut from the starry-eyed boosterism of Strauss and Howe’s Millennials Rising to Huntley’s paradoxical conclusions in World According to Y to the sophomoric psychologizing of Generation Me by Twenge. It’s easy to find profiles of this generation, but divining how to translate these profiles into useful marketing strategies isn’t.

Then there’s Lisa Johnson’s Mind Your X’s and Y’s: Satisfying the 10 Cravings of a New Generation of Consumers. What makes this book so different is that it gives you a veritable road map for marketing to Millennials. (While the X in the title obviously refers to Generation X’ers, Johnson maintains that X’ers are more or less following the Millennials’ lead in terms of what’s hot.)

The ten fundamental cravings of this generation, according to Johnson, are:

• Personalization
• A sense of adventure
• Less formal, more focused communities
• Good design
• Ways to filter information
• Peer-to-peer recommendations
• Participation rather than mere consumption
• Brand experiences that create emotional connections
• A sense of spirituality
• Giving back with their time and abilities

All of these have clear applications to educational marketing, but in the interest of space, I’m going to focus on only those cravings most readily adaptable.

Personalization
At first glance, this one seems obvious. Everyone knows you have to personalize. But here’s the twist: Johnson’s point is that mass personalization — pulling names from a database — doesn’t cut it anymore. These kids are used to feeling like the center of attention and tapping into that sense requires personalization that clearly shows a living person was paying attention to them.

Now, of course, you don’t (and, realistically, you can’t) produce genuinely personalized materials for every prospect. Johnson suggests developing ways to personalize materials for “bull’s-eye customers.” How do you deliver a personalized message to bellwether students in new markets, for instance? Or, perhaps you target high school teachers with personalized messages.

A sense of adventure
“Adventure” here doesn’t mean learning to street luge. Rather, there is a craving for engagement that goes beyond everyday experience, and it comes from the fact that experience functions as social currency. Remember, this is a generation that notifies the world of their every move via Facebook and Twitter — uncommon experiences impart cachet, especially among undergraduates, who are really just stepping out into the larger world.

What is your school doing that takes kids out of their ordinary zone? And before you say internships or foreign study, keep in mind that every school can claim these in one way or another. These are requisite experiences, so unless they’re unusually prestigious or exotic, they’re not going to stand out. More importantly, how are you communicating these experiences?

Good design
Today, it’s all about design. Good design has become a competitive edge insofar as good design connotes the good life; it creates an emotional attachment. Just look at the iPod’s following. How many technology companies are churning out me-too products on the basis of Apple’s design?

You’re never going to have to design consumer products, but what Johnson is emphasizing is the high expectations this generation has when it comes to design. Strong and consistently designed communications are key to resonating with your audience. They build confidence in the very idea of your school.

Peer-to-peer recommendations
With so much marketing clamoring for our attention, the old push approaches are no longer as effective as they once were, especially among this generation of prospects who have been imbibing advertisements since birth. Instead, they’re sidestepping the usual channels and going straight to the source — their peers, your students. (Oh, and by “usual channels” I’m including the students blogging on your Web site.) They’re turning to Facebook and Flickr for an uncensored (in every sense) view of what it’s like to be a student. They’re using the recommendations on College Prowler and College Confidential to gauge how well they’ll fit in. And it’s not just your students — parents are also relying on Web forums to get an idea of what their child can expect.

This is a reversal from the traditional marketing formula of loud, often, and always positive. Now, the point is to recognize that there are conversations about you taking place, and if you’re not a part of them, you’re at the mercy of every ill-informed but opinionated joker with a Web connection. By joining in (or by having a work-study student join in) and offering a candid view of your school, you can build tremendously positive word of mouth.

Participation rather than mere consumption
With a reliance on peer recommendations comes the expectation that peer-generated content will flourish. Your audience has grown up using digital media to create and express themselves — whether they’re posting music videos to YouTube, blogging, or posting on friends’ Facebook walls. Organizations that embrace the participatory aspect of online communications engage their consumers and create trust. If I see that someone is so invested in her school that she’s shot a video herself and posted it on TheU.com, I’m going to feel a stronger pull toward that institution than I will from simply watching a Flash introduction on the same school’s Web site. Participation validates a sense of authenticity.

This is a difficult leap for most schools to make, in large part because an architecture of participation requires self-governance and openness, and schools are most comfortable with clearly defined hierarchies. But without self-governance, there’s no ownership; and without ownership, the community lacks the self-monitoring and self-repairing nature that makes them so dynamic.

How can you create participatory communities? What areas can you open up to let your students participate in the content generation? How about a turning your student life pages into a wiki?

There is much more here than these brief summaries suggest. The book is a terrific analysis of the mindset of your market. Johnson explains each craving and offers reasons for why a craving is so prevalent. She also provides numerous case studies to illustrate her points, and to make the application of these points even clearer, she ends each chapter with a “Workbook” section devoted to questions you should be asking yourself. More than a broad analysis, Johnson provides an idea generator and critical tool that will help you orient and evaluate your marketing efforts.

Contributed 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.

Contributed by: Sherry Wade
Executive Web Producer, Stein Communications

Is your school twittering? If not, you may want to reserve your school’s name at twitter.com, just in case. More and more schools have begun to twitter. Think of it as a mini-blog — a simple, easy way to stay in touch with your constituencies. You have only 140 characters per post, so there’s no pressure to write eloquently. People who are pressed for time (and who isn’t) like Twitter because of that character limit — you can keep up with a person or an institution without being inundated with text.

Prospective students and alumni can choose to “follow” your school, receiving your “tweets” to their Twitter home page, their phone, their Facebook page, or their IM account. You can send out news items, admission reminders — whatever will fit in the character limit.

Most schools are using their Twitter accounts as a way to aggregate and distribute school news from a variety of sources. See http://twitter.com/valparaisolaw and http://twitter.com/calvincollege.

You can use twitterfeed.com to automatically post headlines delivered by reliable news outlets. For instance, you could search for your institution in Google News, and then share Google’s RSS feed with twitterfeed.com. A news feed may pick up some bad news, but using Twitter allows you to dispel rumors quickly or post a link to another viewpoint.

All you need to use Twitter is an internet connection or a mobile phone. To advertize your account, post a Twitter “badge” on your website. Set up your email preferences to notify you when you have a new follower, or click the “followers” link in the sidebar of your Twitter page.

Contributed by: Mark Miester
Tulane Freeman School of Business

Not long after he started the MBA program last year, Joel Yarmon realized the Freeman School — and New Orleans — had an image problem.

“My friends would say, ‘What’s it like down there? Is it still under water?’” Yarmon recalls. “Most people had a very different image in their mind’s eye of what it was like here, so I wanted to show them the real picture.”

Combining his love of technology with a desire to promote Tulane, Yarmon created TulaneMBA.org, a blog dedicated to MBA life at the Freeman School. About three times a week, Yarmon updates the site with pictures, videos, news stories, links and his running commentary on pursuing an MBA in general and pursuing an MBA at the Freeman School in particular.

“I try to keep an open mind when I’m going through school and life,” Yarmon says. “If something strikes me that I think would be important for people outside of New Orleans to know about, I make it a blog posting.”

In a typical week Yarmon might post the text of President Cowen’s Tulane Talk e-mail message, a podcast interview with finance professor Bill Reese, a video showing off the Freeman School’s Trading Room, a list of frequent questions MBAs get during job interviews and his thoughts on Fox’s new New Orleans police drama K-Ville. When a rare tornado touched down in Uptown New Orleans last February, Yarmon posted photos of Tulane’s campus the next morning to show viewers it was untouched.

“Everything moves so quickly today,” Yarmon says. “That’s why blogs are so important. I can put up information that nobody else vets. It doesn’t have to be politically correct. It doesn’t have to portray anybody in their best light. The important thing is that it’s real.”

Since launching the site in October 2006, Yarmon has posted more than 170 entries, and the site is averaging about 4,000 unique visitors per month, many of them prospective MBA students seeking the uncensored, unbiased viewpoint that blogs provide.

“Prospective students are very skeptical of the mainstream media and promotion in general,” says Bill Sandefer, director of graduate admissions at the Freeman School. “The blog has been a great resource. Prospective students get a lot of information from the admissions office, but I hope they use our current students to validate what we are telling them.”

While the blog has thus far been a labor of love on Yarmon’s part, he hopes to involve other students so that after he graduates the site can continue to provide readers with an insider’s perspective on Freeman and New Orleans.

“No matter what, it will remain student driven because I think that’s really what people appreciate about it,” Yarmon says. “Business school is a big commitment. I’m just trying to give prospective students another way to do due diligence on the decision to go to business school and, more importantly, the decision to attend the Freeman School.”

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Many thanks to the Tulane Freeman School of Business for allowing Stein Communications to reprint this article. We encourage you to visit their web site: www.freeman.tulane.edu.

News flash: Your site is important. It needs its own staffing.

Contributed by: Terry Hamrick
Director of Interactive Services, Stein Communications

Let me state what you and I already know: The web has become the first choice for researching a wide range of topics, from the best microwave to the best college or university. Word of mouth on the Internet and web users seeking reassurance about their choices and decisions — in social media such as blogs and online communities, among others — are powerful new trends that are reshaping marketing, public relations, and the way institutions, both private and public, interact with their audiences and constituents.

From the growing pile of studies showing the importance of the web in the college search process, let’s take a quick review of results from a recent study released by The Princeton Review.

First choice for researching colleges
The 2006 National Survey of Website Usage in Undergraduate and Graduate School Search (.doc) (6,885 undergraduate surveys; 2,184 graduate) shows that undergraduate school-bound students spend 80.5 percent of their total school search and research time using the web. Graduate school-bound students spend 81.7 percent of their total search and research time on the web.

Furthermore, according to the study, school-bound students rate as their five most valuable search aids/tools (in terms of percentage reporting valuable and very valuable):

Undergraduate school-bound

• Institutional web sites, 82 percent
• Print materials, 77 percent
• The school visit, 66 percent
• Higher education research websites, 65 percent
• Guide books, 60 percent

Graduate school-bound

• Institutional web sites, 76 percent
• Graduate school admissions staff, 57 percent
• Higher education research web sites, 55 percent
• Print materials, 52 percent
• Graduate school rankings, 51 percent

With these kinds of numbers and trends in mind, the issue is no longer if the web should be considered a critical facet of institutional communications and marketing, but when, and by how much, it should be funded and staffed as an essential communications and outreach function of the college or university.

We are beyond the question of traditional channels (viewbooks, ads, PR, news releases, etc.) versus the Internet channel (and all its facets). Today, it has to be both.

Your brand face to the world
Your web site is your brand face to the world. Its visibility can be tens to hundreds of thousands of views a month, available 24/7, and its reach is potentially every computer user on the globe.

Now, you’re not going to be visited by every computer user on the globe, but the actual and potential visibility of your institution’s web site underscores the need for it to be top-of-mind in any strategy planning involving the institution’s branding, messaging, communications, and — not to be overlooked — improved customer service initiatives. Nothing has the potential to telegraph an institution’s organizational discord, inefficient processes, and lack of mission focus more quickly than its web site.

And while the web makes it easy to publish lots of content — and academic institutions certainly have no lack of content — the uncoordinated publishing of that content can be highly counterproductive. It’s important to move beyond the “because we can, we should” publish-it-on-the-web thinking of the last century. We all know how busy and information-overloaded everybody is in this century. Your site visitors are no exception. They are looking to use their time efficiently on your site. After all, they also have to check their MySpace page, answer waiting IMs, and text the gang.

You need to provide key site visitors with content and web services better focused on their specific needs and the tasks they want to accomplish online. This may entail difficult, but necessary, decisions on site audiences, approach, and focus. And it will require dedicated and continuing attention to the details.

Dedicated staff and funding
With that in mind, oversight of this critical communications channel should have dedicated staff and funding. This seems obvious, but I still encounter a surprising number of institutions where site management is unfocused and scattered, with those trying to do the job working in a vacuum of limited support from the top.

As a beginning, an institution should look at adding, or identifying from current staff, at least one full-time staff member whose duties are solely based on the communications, messaging, and content aspects of the web site. I’ll call this person the Web Content Manager — but it could be Web Editor, Web Communications Director, pick your title — with the intention that this position is oriented towards content, user experience, and site management; and is not a webmaster, developer, or other technical position. (You need the techies too.)

I see the Web Content Manager (WCM) as a bridge person who works with both the campus community and the IT side to ensure that an institution’s web experience is of the highest possible quality and on target. For example, the WCM:

• Makes sure marketing, branding, and style standards are applied site-wide.
• Ensures consistency of content and message and cheerleads content contributors across campus.
• Champions the user experience of site visitors and works with IT and administration to ensure that technical decisions and site features are always pro-site visitor.
• Works as an evangelist for web communications and technologies in institutional funding and policy decisions.

Needless to say, depending on the size of your institution and site, the WCM may be just the starting point for a more expansive and dedicated web management staff, perhaps with a mix of additional full-time, part-time/student intern, and external contract/as-needed staffing.

What happens after launch?
When an institution undergoes a web redesign project, an important (and unfortunately often inadequately addressed) question for the college or university becomes: What happens after launch?

It should be remembered that your new, attractively designed and appropriately branded pages are meant first and foremost to be found and read. The launch of a new site without an ongoing maintenance plan or staffing and budgeting in place to manage the content, navigation continuity, and design of the new site going forward will only result, in fairly short order, in a new site with the same old familiar problems.

Lack of post-launch attention is not the way to ensure the best return on your institution’s considerable investment of the time and money involved in a site redesign. Furthermore, for those thinking along the lines of a content management system “magic bullet,” the installation of a CMS will not solve issues of content relevance and maintenance. While the CMS can provide a consistently structured and accessible presentation of your site; there is, as far as I know, no CMS to date that can write, edit copy, recruit content contributors, or take attractive photos.

Plan for your web site to succeed. Dedicate the resources — both staffing and funding — to allow your web site to flourish and serve as a beneficial resource to your key constituents, particularly prospective students. They’ll appreciate your effort, and you’re sure to see positive results.