Archive for ‘Social Media’

Abilene Christian University won eight awards, including three Grand Awards, in 2010 regional Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) competition. Awards were presented March 29 at CASE’s annual District IV conference in Austin, Texas.

University Marketing winners included Grand Awards in periodicals improvement (for “ACU Today magazine”), brochures/flyers/booklets (for “Introductory Viewbook”) and viewbooks (for “Academic Viewbook”); second place Excellence Awards in logo design (for “Study Abroad Logo”), publication design series (for “Live Up Campaign”) and color photography series (for “A Semester to Last a Lifetime” in ACU Today magazine’s Fall 2009 issue); a third place Achievement Award in viewbooks (for “Introductory Viewbook”); and a fourth-place Special Award in admissions, recruitment and promotional literature (for “Football Recruiting Guide).

CASE represents more than 3,000 institutions and 60,000 higher education professionals in alumni relations, communications, marketing, advancement services and development in 61 nations. District IV includes colleges, universities and schools of all sizes in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, New Mexico and Mexico.

ACU has won 97 regional awards and four international medals from CASE since 1985. Its winning Live Up and viewbook entries for 2010 were developed in concert with Stamats Communications and Corey Patterson, ACU’s director of enrollment marketing.

At the Austin conference, Ron Hadfield, assistant vice president for university communication, and Scott Kilmer, director of new media, presented a breakout session about ACU Today’s work to present its award-winning magazine to readers in multiple mediums, including print, Web and blog formats. Hadfield is editor of ACU Today, and Kilmer helped the magazine develop its Issuu.com site in 2009. Issuu hosts major Abilene Christian publications here.

Over the weekend, Facebook introduced a new way to entice your advertising audience: use their friends. Now, when you create an ad for a fan page or group on Facebook, you can select “Target users whose friends are connected to: _____.”

How is this helpful? Of course, the effects are yet to be seen, but the supposition is that targeting friends of fans will lead to better conversion and more effective use of advertising dollars. The key to this change is that when “Friends of connections” is added, the ad will appear to a prospective fan, followed by the name of their friend who is already a fan. The ad plus the friend’s name will encourage them to become a fan out of admiration or peer pressure from their core relationships. Here’s an example of how it works.

Over the weekend, the ACU fan page awareness ad was updated to target friends of connections to the ACU fan page. Now, the ad will be ACU alumni, but not already fans of ACU). They will see this ad:

Not only does the ad show the original message that I created, but it also attaches “Scott Kilmer is a fan,” which will obviously make all 53 people rush to their desks, laptops and phones to join this glorious community! The referral system is completely automated. The only difference is that now our ad is targeted to friends of the 8,446 fans.

The numbers for this new feature are a little troubling. When I activated this feature, Facebook estimated that only 980 people fit this category (alumni non-fans whose friends are fans of ACU), while there are close to 15,000 disconnected ACU alumni on Facebook. I hope this number will rise significantly as the new feature rolls out across Facebook’s servers.

Tomorrow, I will present to the American Assoc of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers Strategic Enrollment Management conference or AACRAO SEM for short.  I’ve been asked to join the panel on social media by Khori Whitaker of Inside Track, by recommendation of Brad Ward.  Joining Brad and I will be Billy Adams from OU and Andrew Meyers of Hope College (Holland, MI).

While Billy, Brad and Andrew talk about recruiting and admissions strategy, I am excited to share with the attendees something I believe is very unique to our efforts – retention.  Since early this semester I have been working with Hayley Webb, Director of Student Retention and Services, on how to use the data we gather from students (tweets, blog posts, pictures posted, links referenced) to identify if they are “at-risk” of leaving the university.  Let me be clear, my task here is not to make any judgment on the content that pours through the social networks, instead I see myself as a router of that information to the appropriate offices established on campus to handle these types of situations.

You@ACU! - YouTube

Other points to share will be the great success of the You@ACU! campaign that was created by Hayley and the student team.  Since the program launched in late August, we have had over 200 user generated content (UGC) posts of dorm life, campus activities, football games, alumni reunions and only a few were removed before being broadcast publicly on campus or at Shotwell stadium.  This is a great program and one that I hope to really focus on in coming months so that we can be better prepared for data collection and review in 2010-11.

Last, in the spring of 2010, I am planning a pet project to aggregate all social media onto a single microsite.  PutOnYourPurple.com is the domain I’ve chosen (available – pending purchase).  This site is planned to be more of the human interest or community-in-action side of New Media with content aggregated from social networks, submitted by our alumni, students, faculty and staff showing how they are changing the world.  A great example of this concept is Oregon State’s Powered by Orange.