I’ve posted a fair amount about the video content that we’ve been creating for prospective students from the Admissions office at Hope.  Along with creation, I’ve been trying to promote and syndicate like crazy.  In the process I inadvertently learned how to develop and submit a video podcast to iTunes.  Here’s my stress-free process for doing so: 1.  You’ll need to put together some content. Depending on your setup, this can be fairly easy to do.  I’ve outlined our process for putting together our monthly updates in a previous post.  What we end up with is a...

So our first video update was a big success, with about 480 views on Vimeo (and who knows how many on Facebook/YouTube).  This month we’re touching on life around Hope during the holiday season.  The biggest difference this month is that we are bringing in the students’ personal perspectives, which should make the video even more popular than the last. This month’s update also comes on the heels of both Facebook and YouTube integrating HD playback into their video embeds.  Facebook has also recently built video plays into their “insights” reporting mechanism.  Never...

The cost of utilizing social media in your admissions office is relative low in comparison to the travel budgets, publication materials, etc. that most typically incur.  So what’s the true barrier to entry for social media?  One aspect has to be staff education. Our office doesn’t happen to have a full-time person doing web development, graphic design, or e-comm.  We attempt to do as much of that as possible in-house, and then we look to IT for any additional support.  Our staff of 16 counselors has their plate full with all kinds of different non-social media programming, so to learn...

My first post on AD back in July was about Wufoo, a site that allows you to create embeddable forms fast. I haven’t spent a ton of time working with the site in the meantime (travel season, you know), although we did use it for registration for our East Coast Plane Trip.  In the last few weeks Wufoo has become of great use as we look ahead to our spring programming.  Once you start using the site your imagination will run wild, but I thought I would point out a few things that make Wufoo really shine: 1. It’s cheap. If you consider the time and resources needed to hard code forms like...