Before I go deeper into Social Networking, YouTube, podcasting and the like… I thought it would be a good idea to do a little preventative maintenance.
How to Promote
For a while now, I’ve been plugging our different avenues of communication in four ways
- email- it’s good for some things, granted a good percentage of students don’t do email. I’m also pretty cautious of how many times I email students about this stuff. The students who do care may start to delete my emails along with the continental sky points notices if I inundate their inbox with shenanigans. A great way to plug your stuff is to put a limited number of links in the signature of your email. So you’ll automatically notify students in a non-mass email sort of way.
- Phone Calls- So I’ll talk to a student about what’s going on on the web, but the trick is… telling someone where to find something is a pain if they’re not navigating on the web as you direct them. You can give them urls (pbablogs.com) or locations on a web page (click the blue letters below my left ear on the about me page) but mostly this is just you making yourself feel good about getting the word out. You won’t notice traffic increases this way. I’ll remedy this in the last paragraph.
- Cross Plugging- I should probably come up with a better term… maybe later. So if you’re running a student blog, have a student put a link in their post to a video on YouTube and then plug the PBA podcast at the same time. Niceeee. (That was nice with 4 Es… spell check can’t handle me) Maybe you get crazy hits on your admission site… Throw up some banners linking students to other content.
- Print Publication - Ok so this isn’t something that I’ve tried out, but I hear it works well. Even better, why don’t you print up something like a club flyer (uv coated glossy 3×5 card) plugging your site. While your at it… put your IM on your business card.
Resolution- Closing the Black Hole
For your print publications, your phone calls, even your emails… It’s a great idea to have a single site to direct students to and let them experience the fullness of your web presence. It smacks of simplicity, but it’s important that you take all the difficulty out of finding out about your school. Any friction and they’ll give up and miss the cool stuff you’ve been posting. You owe it to your students to make things easy.
What’s more, you could just have all of these resources out there and no one uses them like a library in a national park or something. And your central site could look a lot different than what I have in mind. It could be something as simple as a links page on your admission site, or a whole separate web site. Just put all your stuff in one place.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I was surprised to read on your site that many students don’t do email anymore. I guess that I was more surprised to recognize that I’m actually “old school” now. I must be still part of the web 1.0 crowd that checks and relies on email a lot. People will email me a message in facebook or myspace, and I won’t check it until like a week later. It kind of pisses me off, but I guess that’s where the web is going now.
Email needs to be where we are on the web. Instead, you open up a seperate program or go to a website specifically for email. Browsers like Opera are starting to check your email for you so you don’t have to waste time (the 5 secs it takes).
We are in the process of getting our business cards printed and one of our target audiences is college students. Thanks for the tip about adding your AIM name to the card. Great idea!
No problem, and thanks for the comment. Be sure to actually use IM. I work in an office where IMing people is like getting them to like PDAs.