Consulting students through social media instead of face-to-face

Do students want to engage with higher education management through social media? Many don't, but some do.

My team and I are in the midst of building a case that my institution should build a new residence. To raise awareness of our vision and to seek input from our students we elected to use social media as the primary medium to consult with students and the community. We set up a blog and are using the #newUWrez hashtag to organize the discussion on Twitter.

I've wrestled with the idea of how to engage with students on Twitter in earlier posts - Twitter, a new way to serve students and Tweet students or not?  In the current #newUWrez discussion I've been able to interact with 30 or so students. My staff have overheard students talking about our consultation efforts in our student centre. Furthermore, students have shared comments in a few other forums, like Facebook, despite the fact that we made the choice to not actively use other social media tools.

These efforts have allowed me to engage a small number of students but, perhaps more importantly, it has given me insight into a set of tactics that can improve how I use social media in my work. The principles of our approach would seem to be:

1. Identify an issue that is important to students (eg. residence design), 
2. Break the issue into a few different topic areas (eg. We developed a calendar), 
3. Provide content to frame the discussion and material for students to comment on (eg. Wepps' Housing Blog) and
4. Be active in the discussion on Twitter. I've tried to be on Twitter two or more times each day. 

We still have a few weeks of consultation planned so I still have more to learn. Have you seen an institution or someone in student affairs use social media effectively to engage with students? If so, please share examples here so we can learn together.

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It's time we learned how to sell campus housing

For decades colleges and universities in North Amercia were really the only players in the student housing market. Twenty years ago things started to change and today the student housing market is big business - a multi-billion dollar business.

My institution, uWaterloo, has witnessed the changes first hand over the past decade. The city of Waterloo is home to both uWaterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University, and our combined enrollment is approximately 50,000 students. This has proven to be a very attractive market for private investors interested in student housing. Rock Advisors have indicated that more than 9,000 off campus beds targeting students have been added in the past decade and more are coming.

To put this in perspective, there are about 9,000 purpose built beds targeting students in the rest of Canada combined! For students in the city of Waterloo this means they have more choice than students elsewhere in the country. For my team and I, more student choice means we must compete with other student housing providers.

Competition is not something we are accustomed to in our work as campus housing professionals. I suspect the trend will continue in Waterloo and elsewhere as more private investors look to enter the student housing market in the years to come.

In my role as Chief Housing Officer, I'm seeking to understand the implications of the changing market so I can provide effective direction to my team. One skill set I believe we'll need to develop is our ability to sell. Selling is something we are not accustomed to doing as campus housing professionals. Investors and property managers understand how to sell though so they can achieve their financial targets. To ensure our students understand what makes campus housing distinct from other types of student housing we will need to develop our ability to sell to continue serving our students well.      

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Interest in Canada's Student Housing Market Growing Rapidly

Only 16% of undergraduate students live in on-campus housing according to the 2011 Canadian University Survey Consortium (see Table 8). Twice that number live in rental housing off-campus. How would you describe the type of off-campus housing that undergrads live in? After my experience today at the Canadian Student Housing Symposium I can guarantee that a decade from now student housing off-campus will be described in a very different way.


The symposium was hosted by Derek Lobo and his company Rock Apartment Advisors.  In the morning we received insight into the Canadian rental market over the past half century, heard about how to finance student housing and heard from Campus Living Centres (CLC), American Campus Communities (ACC) and Domus Student Housing on management of student housing. The second half had us travel to three ACC properties at the University of Buffalo in Amherst, New York.

Student Housing has been changing over the past decade and in the next decade the change will become bigger and much more noticeable. Hot tubs, large game rooms, indoor basketball courts, model suites available year round to attract new residents, in-unit laundry, a bathroom inside each bedroom and walk-in closets are just some of the features now included. 

About 100 people attended today's symposium with the vast majority looking to or already investing in purpose built student housing properties. The days of student's renting basement apartments is about to become a thing of the past. For-profit student housing providers are learning, adjusting and offering impressive properties for reasonable rates.

How do you feel about these changes to the Canadian student housing market?



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The Animal House teachable moment

Earlier in my career I would hear references made to how living in residence was like the 1978 movie Animal House.These references faded over time until recently when I heard it again. Having never seen the movie I decided it was time I sat down and watched it. Turns out I will never get those two hours back!

Animal House was awful! Aside from being a comedy with little humour and no plot line the story has virtually no resemblance to what it is actually like to live in residence aside from the fact that accommodations were "provided" on a college campus. For instance, residence is not a frat house, alcohol consumption is greatly exaggerated (see social norms study) and accommodations are hardly a dump (see most beautiful residences).

Should you encounter someone who uses Animal House as an analogy for living in residence stop them immediately and counter them with points like these:

• “Powerful learning occurs in situations where people come to know each other as friends”  (Chickering & Reisser, p. 399). -- see Persuasion for more evidence
• Students who live on campus are more likely to persist in higher education
• You can start a company and make millions or billions

What poor analogies have you heard someone make about a student's experience or the supports in place to help students be successful?

Lifelong learning requires Lifelong learning advisors

The best sales people stay in contact with their clients long after the initial sale. In my experience, I rarely hear from a sales person again after I buy a product or service. If I do hear from a sales person it will typically be to sell me more of the same; never to follow up on the previous sale or simply to grow our relationship.

Sadly, colleges and universities are poor at sales. A significant amount of resources are put into marketing higher education to traditional students - those coming directly from high school. An excellent example of this is the Ontario University Affairs. Marketing and sales are not the same though. Marketing makes (potential) clients aware of a product or service whereas sales secures a commitment from clients to generate revenue.  

Any good problems present good opportunities and learning is no exception. Consider that
the amount of knowledge that exists is doubling as fast as every year and future job needs are nearly impossible to predict. This situation presents an infinite number of opportunities to "sell" learning. In other words, people will need to continually be learning to keep up with new knowledge and skills required to remain relevant and effective in the employment market.

As the need to learn continues increasing in importance the opportunities to guide learners how to learn efficiently and effectively will grow. This guidance will be supplied best from someone who knows you, your background and the previous knowledge you've gained. Who better to fill this role then colleges or universities. We have the expertise, data and relationships to be lifelong learning advisors to our students. All we need is the system to bring these factors into alignment. Career centres are well positioned to leverage this opportunity. A website like Linkedin or job listing sites like Workopolis or Monster could also fulfill this need. All that's left now is to see who will capitalize on this emerging opportunity.



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The Value of Campus Housing

The most popular topic to discuss further, by far, at both the Canadian Chief Housing Officer summit this past Novermber and the CAUBO student housing workshop in April was the value campus housing adds to post-secondary education.

At the CAUBO workshop Mike Porritt, McGill's ExecutiveDirector of Residences and Student Housing, did an excellent job of setting the stage to discuss the value added by campus housing by highlighting research as well as McGill data related to the residence life. With his permission here are the slides he used to kick start an hour long discussion:

More PowerPoint presentations from Glen

In broad terms Mike highlighted, on slide four, the biggest influence on retention rate shown by research comes from:

• Engagement with faculty
• Engagement with peers / residence life staff

More specifically, Mike highlighted, on slide five, that the retention rate for students at McGill is higher when they live in residence which his consistent with the broad research findings. At the most recent OACUHO conference Western University shared similar retention rate results and during my time at Ryerson we found similar retention rate results. With retention rate being one of the key performance indicators used to measure an institutions performance campus housing professionals have a prime opportunity to point these types of findings out to colleagues and decision makers.

What have you done to tell others about the value student housing adds to your institution?





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Tweet students or not?

 

"Stop marketing. Start engaging" is the tag line for Scott Stratten's Unmarketing book, blog, presentations and general philosophy. My first exposure to Scott came at the May 2011 PSEWeb conference where he as a keynote speaker. He has left quite an impression on me. Not only have I bought his book and audiobook but I track his blog through Google Reader and I have bought his audiobook for others.

While explaining his philosophy in his keynote he shared a number of tweets that people, typically students, shared about their university or college. He blocked any obvious content which would identify a particular school. One of his examples happened to be of a highly engaged student at my school where she posted a tweet about a major accomplishment. Scott was not shy in making the point that "this school" did not respond and, thus, missed an opportunity to engage this student by sending a simple congratulatory tweet.

From that moment on I have wrestled with whether I should use Twitter to only engage with my professional colleagues or to engage with students or both. Over the past few weeks I have made a concerted effort to increase my time on Twitter largely by making better use of how I use Hootsuite. In one of my feeds I track #uWaterloo tweets. Not surprisingly students will post comments and some relate specifically to residence or housing in general. On a few occasions I have decided to respond. 

In one case I surprised, and perhaps creeped out, a couple of students by sending them a tweet because I had never engaged with them before. Despite this challenge I have decided to persevere through the awkwardness that comes from "breaking the ice" so that I can continue to engage with students. One of the costs of gaining responsibilities that comes with moving up the staff hierarchy is less contact with students. I see Twitter as one way I can counteract this trade-off. 

When observing other higher education professionals on Twitter it seems that the social networking tool is largely used to engage with peers. While perfectly acceptable I am wondering how my peers feel about engaging students through Twitter.  

Do you deliberately choose to engage with your students on Twitter? If so, any tips on how to engage with students effectively?   


Image Source: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/teaching/resources/twitter-best-practices-2012.html

Is it worth being linked in on LinkedIn?

You might think it would not be wise to take action that one of the top five most influential people in a field "doesn't get." I did it anyway. 

A few weeks ago Scott Stratten was invited to speak at Ryerson. Scott goes by @unmarketing on Twitter where he has nearly 120,000 followers, he has a best selling book and was recently identified as one of the top five most influential people in social media by Forbes. One comment he made in his talk was that he "didn't get" LinkedIn. It did not have have a simple and clear purpose in his mind whereas tools like Twitter or more recently Pinterest do. As a result, he felt LinkedIn will simply not be as successful and will not attract the rabid following of other tools.
 

Despite this anti-endorsement by an expert I decided my LinkedIn profile needed some attention (and had thought that for a while which won't surprise Scott). I had decided to put my name forward for staff representative of my institution's board and updating my LinkedIn profile was one way to convey my experience.
 

After less than an hour of internet searching I found a few suggestions (listed below) on how to improve my LinkedIn profile. Actions that I took which were not obvious to me before reading these tips included: making a powerful headline statement that was more than just my current job title, adding in as many specialties as well as skills and expertise to when others searching for qualified people and cleaning up the url that would direct others to my profile.
 

The basic LinkedIn stats show a significant increase in people viewing my profile over the past couple of weeks and some people outside of my network have discovered me as well. Furthermore, my profile has appeared in many more searches once the changes were made.
 

While it is too early to determine the overall effectiveness of these changes the initial feedback is encouraging. Take a look for yourself and let me know what you think.

Sources Used:

5 Personal Branding Errors You Can Fix in 5 Minutes

Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn 

HowTo LinkedIn #2: Write a killer headline

Use LinkedIn Effectively

Keep your head up smartphone users

Ever seen some, typing away on their smartphone, walk into a post? Have you ever done that? With the rapid growth of smartphones we are bound to see it happen more often.

After watching the first Shift Happens video three years ago I was a big fan. The videos were produced by a US high school teacher to show the impact that technology was having in the world now and in the future. You should find a few minutes to watch these videos if you have not seen them. Five different versions now exist.

Version 4.0, which was uploaded in 2009, was the first in the series to have a significant amount of content on smartphones and mobile technology. It now seems that everyone has a smartphone on their hip or in their hands. Its amazing how much influence these devices now have in our lives--and funny when we are so focused that we forget how to walk!

Not surprisingly, research from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) published recently indicates that the rapid growth of smartphone use will continue over the next few years. Key findings of the research shared by Marketing include:

• Canadian web traffic is set to quadruple from 2009 levels by 2014
• From 25.8 million people in 2010, mobile subscribers are projected to increase to nearly 30 million in 2014
• Mobile internet subscriptions are predicted to go from 5.5 million in 2011 to 14 million in 2015

You obviously use technology if you are reading my blog and my guess is that you will have some form of smartphone so personally you can appreciate the power of mobile technology.

How have you adapted professionally to smartphone use is the question that intrigues me. I would love to hear how smartphones are impacting your work in student affairs or more generally in higher education. Please share your comments and questions... but watch where you walking though ;-)

Technology Enables Sharing with those Nearby

A few months back as I was wrestling with ways to better inform students about services available to them when I had an idea. No plan for how to make it happen mind you, but the idea seemed pretty cool.

Different thoughts were converging as I recall: The rise of mobile (smart) phones, students walking by services as they moved around campus and images of Minority Report. The vision that resulted from these random thoughts converging was that of messages popping up on a student's mobile phone as they walked by an office designed to support students. It was somewhat like the futuristic stores in Minority Report welcoming customer's by name after scanning their eyes... but less intrusive ;-)

Eric Stoller highlights in his latest blog post that this vision could become reality through emerging technology called Near Field Communication (NFC). Stoller highlights that "Information is exchanged/retrieved when an NFC-enabled device is placed next to another NFC-enabled object." Thankfully, their is no mention of eye scans! Check out his blog to find out more about NFC including ways the technology will directly support student affairs.

Use Twitter? Connect with me via @Wepps

Are You Using Your Whuffie?

Was watching an episode of TVO's The Agenda a couple months back titled Wired 24/7 and one of the panelists was a Saskatchewan-born Marketing Consultant & author Tara Hunt. I had never heard of her before, but I was impressed with some of the things she had to say and I discovered that she had recently published a book. Curious to find out more I ordered her book which is called The Whuffie Factor.

After completing the first chapter I thought I'd share a few of my observations and thoughts on how I believe it can be applied to the work of student affairs professionals. Hunt has clearly written the book for business, especially those in marketing, but the concepts can easily be applied to higher ed.

She talks about using many Web 2.0 tools, such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr etc. At first I thought she was not going to introduce many new concepts or ideas, but she started to share the little things people are doing to leverage the power of these tools. To many people these subtle changes in approach would not mean much, but its becoming clear to me that they can be quite powerful. For example, Hunt used her online network of people to help design the cover of her book. At first this may not seem like any great feat, but her approach increased her confidence in the message she was trying to convey, allowed her to leverage the expertise of others and she increased the sense of ownership others felt for her project. Outcomes many of us look for in our work.

She outlines whuffie as follows, "Relationships and connections over time lead to trust, which is the key to capital formation. The capital I'm talking about, though, is not of the monetary variety. It is social capital, aka whuffie, and a social capitalist is one who builds and nurtures a community, thereby increasing whuffie." This explanation seems pretty straight forward, but if we examine our approach to increasing whuffie in higher ed using Web 2.0 I think we would realize its not as easy as it may seem at first.

Let me wrap up this post by sharing one realization I've had about student affairs professionals using Web 2.0 to increase whuffie. One of the primary roles of a student affairs professional is to develop community at their school. In general this is accomplished by getting students and other community members together in a face-to-face environment. When it comes to using Web 2.0 we use it to support our traditional approach of bringing people together face-to-face. This is all fine and good, but Web 2.0 tools have a ton of potential to do more and create community in other ways. If you look at student affairs job postings today versus a few years back you likely would not see any substantial changes. Perhaps a phrase or duty has been added about using Web 2.0 tools, but no jobs have been posted with the purpose of creating a digital community. The unfortunate part is that their are thriving digital communities all over the internet, on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace etc, but Student Affairs professionals have tended to join these communities rather than create them.

For those of you following along on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn you can also read other posts at http://wepps.blogspot.com/

Adapting to a New Network

How Much Are You Worth to Facebook? is an article by Adam L. Penenberg in the October 2009 issue of Fast Company. Penenberg adapted the article from his book Viral Loop where he explores how people will spread a message, usually on behalf of someone else, to their friends, family and colleagues because of their strong interest in the service/product/idea.

The article highlights how marketers use a few key pieces of information about people, such as age, gender and postal/zip code, that can found on a social network and direct a message at them. A few examples are used to highlight how effective this approach can be in spreading a message. Mark Zuckerberg, one of the founders of Facebook and its current CEO, is quoted to strengthen this point, "The message you get, in a lot of ways, is less important than whom you get it from."

While reading the aricle I tried to adapt it to the higher education environment, especially to the work that is done outside the classroom. We have a tremendous amount of information on students yet we study it very little, especially in Canada, and I'm not familar with anyone taking advantage of viral loops on a social networking site to share a message or advertise an event. This presents opportunities for those who hope to reach students in new and deeper ways. Student Life staff have a ton of experience spreading messages through networks at a peer level so it may not take much to adapt.

Beware of Social Networking?

This Inside Higher Ed article titled Frenemies on Facebook highlights a few issues for students and schools that need solutions. Basically, a marketing company created Facebook groups that targetted students. Seems reasonable. Problem was that the company acted as if they were a school and failed to mention that they were a marketing company. Fortunately, the hoax was uncovered and the company admitted that they "crossed the line."

This story points out that students (& parents) must be aware of where they get their information and schools must find ways to share their message in the Web 2.0 environment. With our communications methods changing so rapidly and with everyone, from schools to students to outside companies, having access to the same tools to share information widely it will not be easy to find solutions. In my work I'm trying to understand how we can use social networking to enhance the sense of community at our school. Any suggestions?