Colleges on MySpace... Edgewood College
A new frontier in recruitment communications is opening on MySpace.
In the October issue of Your Higher Education Marketing Newsletter I included an item on the MySpace website created by Harcum College at http://www.myspace.com/harcumcollege
Not long after that an email arrived from Nick Venturella, an admissions counselor at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin, with news that Edgewood has had a MySpace website operating since November 2005. Nick included a detailed account of early successes and future plans and agreed to let me share that with you here at the blog. Best for me to just present events in Nick's own words.
"I just wanted to comment to let you know that we too have had a MySpace presence since about last November (2005), and have found it to be a slow-growing, but a very useful tool to keep in touch with current students and prospective students at our school. What we're starting to see, that is wonderful (and we were hopeful would happen), is the current students are connecting with the prospective students with little or no help from Edgewood's faculty/staff linking the two.
I actually facilitate the MySpace page to allow any admissions questions to be answered, and I provide regular blogs about choosing a college, financial aid, and I will soon be starting another series about picking a major, and in the spring a blog series on dorm room essentials.
We have also used our MySpace page to garner feedback from current and prospective students to make improvements to our MySpace presence. For example, we were thinking about having current students facilitate our MySpace page to better connect with prospective students giving prospectives a genuine idea of what it's like to be an Edgewood College student...well, most of those who replied to our survey requested that we keep it facilitated by an Admissions Counselor, so questions about Edgewood College can be answered by someone who does, in fact, know the answer. We plan on using these sort of surveys coupled with on-campus in-person focus groups of students to get to the heart of effective recruitment and retention as both are always growing and changing."
Visit the Edgewood site at www.myspace.com/edgewoodcollege to see for yourself how social networking is starting to unfold in student recruitment.
Are you ready for MySpace? Are your competitors? One more item to track on a regular basis.
As I said in my newsletter, this isn't a communications tactic for the faint of heart. Spend some time at either the Harcum College or Edgewood College locations and you'll see much that has never appeared in a college video or print publication for student recruitment.
But MySpace is an example of the ongoing inability of colleges and universities to practice "message control" in viewbooks and on websites. You really should be thinking now about how you are going to enter the new frontier and shape it to your advantage.
And a special thanks to Nick for sharing. To talk to him directly about the MySpace experience, contact him at nventurella@edgewood.edu