One of the surprise successes of our WordPress initiative has been blogging by residence hall staff. In retrospect, it makes sense — there’s a whole bunch of information residence hall staff have to get out to their residents — this information was distributed through posters and newsletters — now much of that has been transferred to web.

I could go on and on about some really interesting aspects of these (and I will, in the comments, if prodded). But for now I’ll just give you links to Carle Hall’s blog, which is a great example of what these blogs do in terms of customer service for our residents, and how they serve as a vehicle to get information out to the people who need it:

Carle Hall Blog

And does it matter when it works so well?

So this is not a mindblowingly new idea, but we’ve started to provide press kit-like functionality to some of the releases on the Media Relations blog.

What do these releases look like? Well, they’re sort of like a normal physical world press kit. It’s focussed on a particular initiative, project, or person, and it brings together multiple resources useful to a reporter writing a story. So rather than Robin sending a reporter multiple links via email to background sources, she can send one link out to the online press kit, which nicely encapsulates resources for the story.

The Biodiesel kit, for example, combines the coverage we’ve received so far into an easy to scan format, and serves to highlight the great coverage we’ve already gotten on the biodiesel project: scanning down the coverage section you see that this is no small story. Additionally, some primary resources, like the 53 minute presentation the students gave on the project, are made available, as is the contact information for key people on the project. This two minute video describes how it’s structured (turn up your audio):

If you’ve spotted the fact that this is not that different from dialing up the web elements on a web-based press release, well, you’re sharp. It’s not. But it’s one more way we’re trying to reduce barriers to turning a great story we know about to a great story the world knows about.

I’m skipping the welcome post, and diving right in. In short, this blog will be what it ends up being. We here at Online Communications hope it will provide some insight into what we do, and why we do it.

Now, onward. Good article today forwarded to me by Jenny Darrow asking whether sites like keene.edu are becoming increasingly irrelevant as marketing tools.

The answer is obvious to anyone that’s ever looked at their Google Analytics: yes, absolutely. You can see this clearly in the statistics — students come in and do a couple things in very fast succession:

1. Check tuition cost
2. Check financial assistance information
3. Maybe, though hardly ever, check to see if we offer a specific degree. (They almost never look for information about the degree — the question is simply whether we have that degree).

Then it’s to a decision point — send me the application, apply online, or, in the case of Keene State — schedule a campus tour (the option we really push, since it seems to be the most beneficial to the student and to us).

Why this surprises people I have no idea. But it continues to surprise people, who wonder why we don’t put reams of material about program X or Y in between that student hitting the home page and the link to the campus tour.

The answer is that the student applying here has already made their decision before they hit the home page — or at least made enough of a decision to schedule a campus tour. Marketing information has to be done well on a site like keene.edu — but it’s in broad strokes — they’ve come in sold on taking that tour, assuming you handle that last five yards well.

[This isn't always the case with parents, who are often perusing the materials looking for the general "tone" of the college, but that's a post for another day].

So what is that decision based on? This decision to give you a chance that’s made before they even type “Keene State College” into Google?

It’s reputation. Word of mouth, the comments on Facebook or MySpace, Livejournal articles, what they saw on YouTube, what their high-school friends that came here last year told them. And maybe even importantly for this generation, it’s what their parents may have heard on NHPR, or seen in the Concord Monitor, Newsweek, or USA Today.

And eventually, if we let it, it’s through perusing the artifacts of the truly Visible University — YouTubes of recitals, videos of football games, discussion boards of classrooms, student projects posted online.

So in a world we we cannot control what prospective students (and donors) see about us, what’s left for us to do?

I believe the key is to engage those channels in an honest and helpful way, through embracing transparency and creating a culture of engagement. In a post .edu world, that’s where our message has to go.

More on how to do that later. But give the article a gander, it’s five paragraphs, and a good starting point.

We’re Online Communications, an office in Keene State College’s Advancement Division. We try to get Keene State’s story out and build a stong community of support and service through the use of neat online tools.

This blog is the story of how we’re going about that.