Social media: just one aspect of a recruitment culture

This article recently made its rounds through our inboxes at Hope, and I couldn’t help but feel like it underminded some of the work that I had been doing with Facebook, Vimeo, and the like.  For quick reference, here are the results of the survey that Cappex did among 1000 high school seniors:

Cappex survey results

It makes a whole lot of sense that “a college’s website” is the number one item on the list.  However I would contend that this article suggests that you should shift your focus away from student blogging, Facebook, MySpace, et al.  (To be honest, I’m not sure how MySpace even made it on the list, as it has little if any utility in the arena of higher ed recruitment.)  I put this out on Twitter last week just to see what some of our peers would think about the article, and here’s a couple of responses that came back:

@andrewmeyers exactly. I always take stuff like that with a grain of salt too. No one tool is going to win. It’s the collection that does.  (from Brad Ward, tweet)

@andrewmeyers As usual I agree with @bradjward. I’ll continue to work with Cappex, Facebook, Zinch, and all the other tools in my tool box.  (from Gil Rogers, tweet)

@bradjward @andrewmeyers They say “If you recruit 1 kid from a college fair, it’s worth it.” So why diff rules with FB? And it’s cheaper. (from Adrienne Bartlett, tweet)

The real solution is to integrate social media into an overall recruitment culture.  That is to say this: every time a student interacts with your website, student blog, Facebook page, Twitter profile, etc., they are continually developing and modifying their expectations of what that experience should be.  Perhaps even more challenging is the fact that your competitors are only contributing to this evolution by the recruitment culture that they’ve created.

A truth that I think this article points to is that our offices simply can’t do everything.  There is a real danger here of overextending yourself to the point that the desired impact is lost amidst a sea of half-worked initiatives.  So how do you decide which piece fits where and how you should allocate time on task to each of these elements?  I think it suggests that a greater vision* be cast that will prioritize each objective and continually assess its value.

Look for a Part II later this week that will discuss prioritization of social media in the context of a greater recruitment culture.

by Matt Hamm on Flickr