One theme that I see emerging again and again in the new information landscape is customer marketing — that is customers marketing the product for you. My classic examples, which I’ve published before, are conferences that grow dramatically from one year to the next, as attendees started blogging about their experiences there.
I saw it again, as Brenda forwarded me an Associated Press piece (College Recruiters Use Student Bloggers) that was published on WRAL.com, a local TV station’s web news site.
Colleges seeking a competitive edge are increasingly enlisting and sometimes paying student bloggers to chronicle their lives online.
The results run the gamut from insightful to boring, but the goal is the same: to find a new way to win the attention of the MySpace generation.
Further in the article…
Chris Smith, a sophomore at Ohio Dominican University, posts lively weekly descriptions of his life as a college baseball player. He gets $20 a posting and has been unafraid to hide his preference for playing ball over going to class or criticizing professors for assigning too much homework.
“Being in class is literally the last place you want to be at this time of the year,” he wrote on April 12.
How might this manifest itself in the pre-higher ed world.
David,
Interesting post. I have a friend who recently opened up a restaurant. A few weeks after he opened it he asked me to go to a website, I don’t remember which one, and post some nice comments about his establishment. I happily did so since I like eating there. Interestingly, my friend paid to have his restaurant listed on this site. I wish I could remember the site.
I saw this article and had the same thought–how could we apply this in pre-secondary education? Some ideas that come to mind for application in my own campuses:
–Reflective journal of the daily happenings at the alternative high school I serve. This is an amazing campus, but relatively few high school students at the regular campuses are aware of just how it operates and the programs that are available. It would be a useful recruiting tool, I believe, to share some students’ reflections and observations on what the campus is about.
–Freshman diary–diary of a new freshman getting to know his/her new environment, sharing struggles/suggestions, answering questions, etc. Would be an interesting read for 8th graders preparing for high school.
I meant pre-higher education, btw.