Tapping into the Social GRID How you can use the Facebook Platform to increase applications and admits!
Spring 2009
Internet Strategies Group Don Philabaum President/CEO
Tapping into the Social GRID How you can use the Facebook Platform to increase applications and admits!
Tapping into the Social GRID Social networking sites have been growing at unprecedented rates. Sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube are proving that the behaviors of consumers are changing. Savvy marketers are taking heed of these changes and are rapidly adopting strategies to market their products and services through these member sites. Enrollment management and admissions professionals have more opportunities than most to take advantage of these opportunities. For Facebook, this meteoric growth started in 2004 when Mark Zuckerburg, then a sophomore at Harvard University, created an online community called www.thefacebook.com to connect students on campus and to provide a calendar of events. Within two years, Facebook became “the� online community for nearly 90 percent of four year college students in the United States. In 2007, when college administrators were just becoming aware of Facebook, the company received 12.5 million dollars in venture capital money which was used to open the online community to high school students and shortly after that - to anyone who wanted to join. Facebook immediately began growing at unheard of rates. Its membership grew from 13 million college students in late 2006 to over 200 million at the time this report was produced. Facebook’s management expects they will reach 300 million users by the end of 2009!
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These numbers are so huge, it’s almost impossible to understand how significant they are. Let’s compare them to traditional media. • • •
In the newspaper world, The New York Times founded 168 years ago has a little over 1,000,000 subscribers. On TV, a good night for American Idol will attract 30 million viewers. In the magazine world one of the more successful magazines, Newsweek, is able to boast about its 3 million subscribers.
In the old model, you created an ad and paid the marketing channel (newspaper, radio, TV, billboards) to push your ad through their networks. One of the primary problems with the old model is accurately quantifying exposure. Sure, newspapers and magazines may be able to give you circulation numbers. Billboards can give you approximate “eyeball” exposure based on estimated traffic patterns. TV & Radio can give you approximate audience numbers based on data extrapolated from a “sample” population. All of that is about as effective as throwing darts with a blindfold on after being spun around 10 times. You are never quite sure if you are on target. They can’t tell you who is actually interested in what you are offering or even who, in any form of definitive statistic, even looked at or heard your “ad”. This new model is different and with it, you are constantly aware of your audience. THEY are in charge of allowing you in or not allowing you in. This isn’t “push” or “pull” marketing – THIS is SOCIAL DISTRIBUTION. You will always know who you’re targeting because of your “fan” or “member” base. The huge advantage, albeit unknown, is the added benefit of unfathomable potential success due to the reach of that “fan” base. Although you may not know who the friends or your “fans” are due to layers and layers of connections, understand that the depth of the exposure is massive. We’re going to share with you how to successfully use these networks to increase applications and admits. But where to you get started? Do you create your admissions Internet strategy around YouTube, MySpace or Facebook? Our suggestion is Facebook. Primarily because research is showing that the type of student who plans to attend a four year college prefers Facebook over MySpace. According to a paper by danah boyd (uses lower case letters), “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace.” MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.
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With the average teen now spending an average of 46-60 hours online per month with a growing proportion of that on Facebook, it only makes sense to begin to build your Internet strategy around the marketing channel that will give you the best return for your time and investment. Start with a Public Profile page for your admissions office One strategy we are seeing more and more is admissions offices adopting Facebook Public Profile pages to connect with prospective students. Many set them up around each incoming class and name them based on their anticipated graduation year. A common name might be collegenameclassof2014. Facebook Public Profile pages enable prospective students to friend your organization and write comments on your Wall™. While adopting a Facebook page for your admissions office is simple to do - its long term effectiveness is limited. Think about it, after the student friends the admission page, why would they come back frequently? In addition, it provides a limited opportunity to gather data, communicate with prospective students and engage them. Use the Facebook Platform to create a Facebook API First introduced in 2007, the Facebook Platform provides organizations like yours the ability to use any of the data their members update on their profile page to acquire leads, retain, communicate or engage customers. This data includes, but is not limited to:
- Wikipedia An application programming interface (API) is a set of routines, data structures, object classes and/or protocols provided by libraries and/or operating system services in order to support the building of applications.
your name • your profile picture • your gender • your birthday • your hometown location (city/state/country) • your current location (city/state/country) • your political view • your activities • your interests • your musical preferences • television shows in which you are interested • movies in which you are interested • books in which you are interested • your favorite quotes • the text of your "About Me" section • your relationship status • your dating interests • your relationship interests • your summer plans • your Facebook user network affiliations • your education history • your work history • your course information • copies of photos in your Facebook Site photo albums • metadata associated with your Facebook Site photo albums (e.g., time of upload, album name, comments on your photos, etc.) • the total number of messages sent and/or received by you • the total number of unread messages in your Facebook in-box • the total number of "pokes" you have sent and/or received • the total number of Wall™ posts on your Wall™ • a list of user IDs mapped to your Facebook friends • your social timeline • and events associated with your Facebook profile.
Using the Facebook Platform, either your IT department or a third party firm can create a program (API) or series of programs allowing you to tap into the above data and actually do something it. You might want to send an auto birthday card to each prospective student or send
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a message to their Wall™ to thank them for applying to the college, or you might want to give them the ability to click on a photograph and connect with an alum who lives near and is willing to answer questions about the college, the clubs and their experience at the college. (We’ll provide 14 ideas on page seven) Your API can even capture new data from your prospective students. For example: •
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You may want to ask them if your college is their first or second choice, or what clubs and organizations they are interested in. Armed with that information, your admissions counselors can be alerted when academically excellent students change your college ranking. Knowing what clubs and organizations they are interested in will enable the program to automatically alert club presidents who can leave comments on the Wall™ of the prospective students and extol the virtues of their club or organization.
The Facebook Platform literally opens the recruitment process up and gives everyone; faculty, students, and alumni the right tools to effortlessly help recruit students. Your Admissions Staff just went GLOBAL! This is a game changer for admissions! Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and other sites are changing the way we communicate. What these companies are accomplishing today is revolutionizing the world of communication, social interaction and connectedness just as the telephone did in 1876. We like to think of these sites as the world’s biggest phone books and you have been given free access to their listings. Not only are they giving you the ability to advertise on their site for free (in effect), but you can call or contact anyone, at any time, as often as you want. What’s even more incredible is that they will allow you to use their infrastructure to create your own social distribution marketing channel. Think of it this way. What they are offering today, would be like, if 15 years ago, your local newspaper, phone company or even radio/TV station give you ads to reach their customers at no cost. Today the Facebook takes this one step further. Social Distribution More importantly, the tools and techniques they have developed will help your organization virally spread your brand, offer information, and broadcast news through networks of friends. Social media today allows savvy marketers to take word of mouth and amplify it hundreds of times.
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Here’s how Social Distribution will work in your Facebook API. Let’s say that Howard Beal submits his application to your college. Upon completing the application, a screen pops up and suggests Howard add the college API so he can be updated on the things that are happening around the college, plus connect with others who are considering going to the college. Howard takes the bait and adds the API. Immediately Howards’ friends get a comment posted on their Wall™, “Howard Beale just finished his application for (Your College Name Here)”. Check out (Your College Name Here) student photo contest. The idea is to use their network of potential students to expand your brand with little or no effort. Later the next day, Howard receives a notice on his Wall™ that suggests he look at others he may know that have either applied to the college or showed interest. Howard clicks on the link and the API opens to show that a guy on his football team, the cute girl from his French class and a couple others he wasn’t aware of are considering going to the same college he submitted an application to the previous day!. He decides to leave comments on their Wall™. Then the next day, Howard receives a comment on his Wall™ from the President of the Lacrosse club who suggested he join an online Webinar in two weeks where he’ll be answering questions about the club. Howard registers using the automated registration tool, which then sends a comment through to his Wall™ thereby sending a comment to Wall™ of all his friends, “Howard Beale is checking out the (Your College Name Here) Lacrosse Club – Join Webinar for Details.” A couple days later, Howard receives a comment on his Wall™ in response to his indicating in the API that he was interested in entering the business school. On this day, Howard received a Wall™ comment that said, “Howard, check out the curriculum you’ll be taking in our business school.” Howard takes the link and is directed back to the college site to read the information. The process described above is referred to as “drip marketing” and the strategy is designed to deliver something to the Wall™ every third day. Expertly done, your API will deliver more information in a more controlled manner to make sure your prospective students and their parents have all the information they need to make an intelligent decision with an added bonus of developing a sense of community, connectedness and belonging before the prospective student even arrives on campus. Proven methodology helps you create you’re your Facebook API To take advantage of this opportunity, we’ve developed a proven methodology to help admissions offices (and others on campus) identify how they want to use Facebook. The program called, Tapping into the Social GRID, will help your admissions office find ways to use social media, online communities and mobile technology to: •
Increase out of state and international admits
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• •
Reach and engage academically excellent students Reduce the summer melt
The goal of the Tapping into the Social GRID project for the admissions office will be to determine how social media, online communities and mobile technology can help recruit students and communicate with parents. Upon implementation, your admissions office can also expect to: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Reduce the cost to recruit students Increase the college brand and reputation Increase inquiries, applications and admits Increase admission counselors contact with prospective students and parents Provide an automated drip marketing technique
While creating the API is a relatively easy process, knowing what you want to achieve is much more difficult. That’s because there are so many opportunities. With our team of experienced social media, Facebook, and Open Social experts we’ll help you design the right strategy for your organization in less time and with less effort. It’s too important of a strategy to make mistakes or come out of the gate late. For example, our brainstorm sessions with administrators have produced hundreds of different ways to use a Facebook API. Here are just a few: 1. Provide unique communication and engagement strategies for “desired” students. (minority, A+, athletes, out of state, foreign) 2. Automatically deliver admission news and information, plus provide birthday and seasonal eCards to BOTH prospective students and parents 3. Give students the ability to identify information they are interested in and deliver it to their social networking profile pages 4. Gather parents information and automatically deliver news, information, and/or act as a resource to parents 5. Develop a strategy to integrate the admissions office YouTube channel with video content alumni, student and faculty share
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- TEN Facebook Facts 1) Growing by 600,000 per day 2) Ave. 15 minutes per session 3) Nearly 90% college student use FB 4) 40,000 API’s in use 5) 6,000,000 13-17 YR Olds 6) Parents in 35-54 fastest growing age bracket (276.4%) 7) HS students represent 13% of users 8) HS bracket grew 18 percent in 12 mo 9) Rumors of $50 Billion purchase by Microsoft 10) NY, LA,MIA,WASH,SF growing by 50%
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6. Identify techniques to get current students, alumni and faculty to become “ambassadors” for ”Your institutions NAME here” and make themselves available to prospective students to answer their questions via their profile “Walls” and with the use of e-communication video capture tools, text and audio testimonials of faculty, alumni, students, offer them to prospective students and parents via RSS, API and email 7. Discuss existing e-communication technologies that could deliver a more cost effective, personalized communication (advanced email marketing tools, Twitter, etc.) 8. Identify techniques to make it easier for admission counselors to communicate and share information and content with students assigned to them. Plus automatically deliver reports to management 9. Develop ideas on how the college can deliver news and information to “feeder” high schools by giving RSS feeds, Widgets or using the Open Social/Facebook Platform 10. Design online advertising opportunities in social networking sites to attract students from geographic areas you want to expand into 11. Discuss the development of weekly live “Webcast” featuring communication students offering application updates, stories about successful alumni, recap of that week’s student activities, faculty research, and awards. 12. Identify virtual gifts to help build brand, like student (business) networking cards 13. Develop a mobile phone strategy that delivers content to prospective students’ phones and allows them to interact with it. 14. Explore social media marketing techniques including article marketing, SEM, SEO, podcasts, expanded use of blogs, micro blogging That’s just the beginning. Your Facebook strategy is only part of your overall Internet strategy, albeit in our opinion, your most important one. (Yes, more important than your email strategy.) In addition to your Facebook strategy you should also begin thinking about a mobile, YouTube, and Twitter strategy. Your Facebook strategy will need to include a mobile phone component. Today 60% (4.1 billion) of the world’s population uses mobile phones according to a United Nations survey. (Up from 1 billion in 2002). Text messaging is the hottest form of communication among your prospective students. According to Justin Siegel, co-founder of MocoSpace; “We’re talking about a younger generation for whom the mobile phone is an appendage and so it’s no surprise that mobile phones are pivotal to people’s social lives and that sites like MocoSpace are growing so quickly in popularity.”
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Flash back just 10 years and you’ll find the average teenager spending hours on the family line talking to friends. Today the average teen is found sending short messages to multiple friends simultaneously. According to Facebook, 13 percent of the visits to their website come from mobile phones. Phone companies like Nokia, Apple Inc., and BlackBerry maker, Research In Motion, are in talks with Facebook to integrate their network into the next generation of mobile phones. This would result in parts of the social network embedded in their phones. Your admissions Internet strategy needs to include a YouTube component YouTube is also offering you an opportunity to post an unlimited number of videos on their site so your prospective students and their parents can consume them. With the average user spending 10 minutes per session on YouTube, it only makes sense to have your college represented in this arena. To be fully effective, integrate this strategy into your overall social media strategy by plugging those videos into your Facebook page, blog and website. Your admissions Internet strategy needs to include a Twitter component As we continue to study emerging trends, we may recommend that you incorporate a Twitter strategy. According to the Pew Internet and American Life study called, “Twitter and status updating” as of the end of 2008, 19 percent of online adults 18-24 had used Twitter. Your Internet strategy will need to be flexible and capable of adapting to the changing needs and expectations of your prospective students and their families. These open even more opportunities to increase leads & admits! So if adopting our Tapping into the Social GRID strategy provides you the benefits we’ve shared with virtually no cost, what are you waiting for? Today you have to market to your customers in the marketing channels they spend their most time on. That’s where we can help!
Internet Strategies Group
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Summary
Your prospective students do not read the newspaper, are watching less TV, don’t subscribe to magazines, are not listening to radio and worse – are paying less attention to email! They live in a digital world, spent in front of the computer monitor and increasingly with their trusty phone. The Internet, iPod, social media, social networking sites, and online communities have changed their behavior. They consume their information differently. But that’s OK, because you now have opportunities to reach them through new marketing channels where they spend their time. The most important marketing channel? Facebook! If we told you just 3 years ago that you could advertise on radio, TV, send direct mail and gain the benefit of having your prospective students use a megaphone to share your information with their friends…all for free, you would not have believed me. But that is exactly what the Facebook Platform offers you. You have to begin asking yourself if it makes sense to continue to throw the same amount of money into traditional advertising when your target audience no longer pays attention to those channels. Or should you begin diverting some of those marketing efforts and resources to where your prospective really students are? In a white paper I published in the fall of 2005, Facing up to the Facebook/MySpace Generation, I suggested colleges look at ways they could use social media and online community techniques to recruit students. Back then Facebook had less than 10 million users. Imagine what you can accomplish today by tapping into an online database with 300 million members!
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Resources
1) danah boyd, paper “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace.” http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html 2) Strategy Labs Facebook demographics
http://tinyurl.com/atwkjm
3) Allfacebook.com Facebook stats
http://tinyurl.com/d9hr75
4) Pew Internet and American Life “Generations online” http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/Generations-Online-in-2009.aspx 5) Facebook plans more services for cell phones http://tinyurl.com/cnqtkx 6) FacingUP to the Facebook/MySpace Generation http://issuu.com/dphilabaum/docs/facebook 7) Teens watch 107 hours of TV per month http://tinyurl.com/d5rdd7 8) 13-17 year olds spend 46 – 60 hours online per month http://tinyurl.com/cmgw8k
Tapping into the Social GRID - Complimentary Webinar Join us for a free monthly Webinar where we will explore the opportunities and challenges of Tapping into the Social Grid. In order to make these interactive and provide plenty of time for answers we have limited participation. To register visit: http://www.internetstrategiesgroup.com/tabid/1619/Default.aspx
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About Internet Strategies Group Internet Strategies Group helps organizations worldwide to create comprehensive Internet strategies using social media, online community, mobile phones and emerging Internet strategies. Expert implementation consultants of the Facebook and Open Social Platforms
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