Stoffer's Soapbox

Stoffer's 2006 Awards: Best University Marketing Blogs

As a follow on to the 2006 Edublog awards, I am pleased to announce the winner of my own award for the best use of blogging on a University marketing site.

Before announcing a winner, I wanted to just note how surprised I was at how quickly universities have embraced blogging as a marketing tool. Of the top 25 schools in US News and World report, 9 use student blogs or diaries in their marketing sites!

Some of these schools have blogs hosted on their own domain while others link out to student blogs on Wordpress or another blogging platform.

Our WInner is MIT.

The winner is no surprise... it is MIT Admissions. The site offers blogs from current students and from staff critical to the enrollment process (e.g. Director of Financial Aid, Director of Minority Recruitment). And the blogs have not only great content updated at least weekly, but a huge amount of participation in the comments. Students are regularly getting 20+ comments on each blog entry, with admissions staff getting even more. In addition, blog entries are weaved throughout the admissions site - each post gets a category and those categorized, for example, under "Student Life", are on the MIT Admissions Student Life page.

What a wonderful site - and a model for other schools to follow.

The Runners-Up are below, but no one comes close to MIT!

Johns Hopkins hosts a whole series of blogs aimed at marketing the school via a Typepad-hosted platform including:

• 13 student blogs
• This Week in Hopkins blog featuring weekly events
• The JHU Fun Blog featuring a weekly look at "fun events" at Hopkins

Tufts Fletcher School has a nice marketing blog featuring student bloggers - it does a good job highlighting life at the school.

Finally, Norwich University also has very nice blogging sites aimed at marketing the school.

Blogging to Lower Lead Cost; Applying This to Universities

Scobleizer has a great post on how Microsoft uses its network of 500 active bloggers to better results on search engines. "Google counts links from blogs in its search engine. So, if Microsoft wants to get something higher on Google, all it would have to do is call upon its bloggers. It’s probably the best SEO network the world has ever seen (Microsoft has more than 3,000 bloggers, with at least 500 active ones)."

What if universities were to do likewise. What if UMAss Online gave all department chairs or faculty members the platform to blog. Then UMass Online sends emails to its network of bloggers when, for example, a new degree program in HR Management is introduced. If the bloggers write about this en masse - alas, anyone searching for "HR Management Degree" in Google would likely see UMass Online on the first couple of spots. What do you get with this strategy: more high quality "free" leads via natural search and less need to buy leads from vendors. In other words, SEO via blogging can lower overall marketing costs for online education providers.

Does anyone know any universities doing this?

My first trackback!

I started my blog barely over a week ago and the folks at eStara (the CRM company responsible for those Live Chat boxes on websites) found my post and linked back to it in a post of their own. It just goes to show how blogging, wikis and user generated content  have enabled a richer conversation amongst people with niche interests than was ever possible in the past. Ten years ago, the only way to interact with eStara as a non-customer might have been to be lucky enough to serendipitously sit besides them at lunch at a CRM conference. Now all you need to do is a blog posting, and users with similar interests will find you via  google alerts or a search engine like technorati and can begin a dialogue that will enrich the knowledge of both participants and observers of the conversation that ensues.

How do I Blog?

As I try to learn more about new media, I have begun to read a number of blogs each day. I read Fred Wilson’s “AVC”, Brad Feld’s “Feld Thoughts”, John Battelle’s Searchblog and Ray Schroeder’s Educational Technology blog .

I do this in the hope that several months from now I will be able to point you to blogs from across my company (which remains anonymous for now).

What I primarily want to accomplish through this effort is to increase conversions of our marketing leads through a focused blogging effort. What if casually interested potential students could subscribe to an RSS feed from our school’s existing students so they can learn the experience of an online student? What if they could subscribe to blogs from faculty members or the school president? What if potential students could get free podcasts of professor lectures each week in their area of interest? By pushing content that describes our school out to the casually interested potential student, we could differentiate ourselves from the competition and show these students exactly why our school is the right school for them.

All these ideas are great, but the first step is to learn more about blogging - for that, I just ordered from Amazon The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right (Hardcover). The author, Debbie Weil, seems to get some good reviews from readers.