Bloggers-R-Us

(This is one chapter out of a reference manual for the Weber State University Admissions Ambassadors)

When you hear the word ‘blog’ you may picture that website your aunt created in her spare time or something a young mom would throw out there so she can show off pictures of her super cute little baby. Blogs are typically thought of as some sort of personal diary that’s out on the Web for everyone to see your individual commentary on life.

But the truth is the world of blogging is more diverse than someone’s funny stories or a virtual photo album. Blogs can be a powerful tool in communicating the culture of an organization, or even to help in the branding process of potential customers.

Over the next four years as an ambassador you’re going to be working with a new breed of student – The Millennial Generation. This is an age group of people, to which you personally belong, who were born after 1981. By 2012, the number of millennial students is estimated to be 13.3 million, or 75% of all students in the United States (National Center for Education Statistics). These students have grown up in a fast paced world dominated by the presence of the Internet and have had instant access to whatever information they could think of. The Internet is one thing that has caused these students to become accustomed to personalization and immediacy in all aspects of their lives.

In order to recruit these students, we’re going to need to cater to this dependency on personalized attention and immediate access. According to Hossler (2000), there are two guiding principles in recruitment activities: personalization and timing. “The more personalized an admissions office can make the admission process, the more positive the response will be from students. By focusing on timing, institutions should strive to reach students when they are ready for information” (Hossler, 2000, p. 20).

From a marketing perspective, we need to adapt to how Millennials want to receive information about Weber State. In the past, traditional marketing efforts have been focused on finding customers. You all know what this type of marketing is, because you’ve lived through it; that annoying phone call you get in the middle of dinner, or the summer job you took walking around knocking on doors trying to convince someone to buy your alarm system. Burnes (2008) refers to this type of marketing as Outbound Marketing and points out that it is like trying to drive a message into a crowd using a sledgehammer. Instead, he suggests using a technique called Inbound Marketing which will flip outbound on its head.

Instead of interrupting people with television ads, they create videos that potential customers want to see. Instead of buying display ads in print publications, they create their own blog that people subscribe to and look forward to reading. Instead of cold calling, they create useful content and tools so that people call them looking for more information (Burnes, 2008).

The essence of inbound marketing is that you are being found by customers instead of wasting time and resources trying to find them. With this type of marketing, potential customers, or in our case potential students, chose to be involved in the marketing process. Not only are they involved in it, they must enjoy it. Burnes (2008) suggests that the most effective inbound marketing campaigns have three key components: content, search engine optimization (SEO) and social media. We’ll talk about these concepts more during some additional training but you can think of it as like this:

Content represents the substance of the marketing campaign. The information you bring to the table must be attractive to potential customers. Search Engine Optimization is a concept to make sure your website shows up when people are looking for related information. There are a lot of things to keep in mind when thinking about SEO, but it’s a cool concept we’ll teach you along the way. Social media is what really amplifies your marketing strategy and helps to create the feel of a personal relationship for those who find your site.

So, what’s the relationship between recruitment and blogging? Blogs are a perfect way to offer personalized attention that students can access whenever they are ready for it. Blogs from students like you are one of many tools Millennials are beginning to use to see what school is like from a “real student’s” point of view. Brumfield (2005) reported that university officials are discovering that student blogs offer a look inside college life in a way typical campus Websites cannot. Your views will be unedited, unfiltered, authentic opinions that these students can rely on when they’re in the decision making process. According to Rudolph (2009), student blogs on admission websites appear to be an ideal way to reach Millennials, a generation of students who embrace the type of personalization and insight blogs offer.

Under the direction of one of the professional recruiters, you will be asked to begin and maintain a blog throughout the year. While you’re not going to be told exactly what to write, the recruiter will be there to help coach the entire group and to make sure there are a wide variety of experiences being portrayed. The blogs will be individual in nature, but we want to create a community atmosphere by linking all of the blogs together. So it’s important that we all work together.

This may be a first for some of you, but don’t worry! We’re not going to throw you into the deep end of the pool without teaching you how to swim. We’ll hold “Blogging 101” workshops to make sure you have the basics down before you get too far into it. But remember, we want this as unfiltered and authentic as we can get. Prospective students can recognize when something is canned or comes from a “Non-Millennial”. This needs to be original, unique, and from your point of view as a crazy Wildcat. We want you to look at this as an opportunity to share your goals, insights and experiences, in order to help other kids who are about to embark on the journey you’re currently in. You will be the lens by which your readers will view Weber State.

Here’s the run-down of what we anticipate happening. Each blogger will submit at least one post a week with a minimum word count of 100. Topics are pretty wide open. But to make sure we cover events on campus you will be assigned a topic one week out of the month. The other three weeks you can write as much as you would like and about whatever you would like. You will have an assigned day and time to post. Posting times are most effective during normal break times for people. That is when readership is most active. For our readers that time is most likely right after school. You will get more traffic if you post between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. No other ambassadors can post during another’s posting time. If you want to have additional posts besides your weekly assignment, that is great, but we’ll ask you to post at a separate time so we can showcase the assigned ambassador’s post.

We’ll all be using WordPress.com for our blogs. We’ll link to each other’s blogs and form a community. By using the same blog service, we’ll more effectively create that community feel and more easily create a following for the entire community. WordPress also offers more flexibility than some of the other services. This flexibility will come in handy, especially when you’re trying to schedule your individual posting time.

There are a ton of things to remember when writing a blog, but we don’t want you to get overwhelmed with this. Here are a few quick reference tips you can keep in mind that will get you on you way to publishing a successful blog:

1. Be yourself. This is the best piece of advice we can offer. Don’t be afraid to show your personality and let your hair down. Readers want to read genuine thoughts and ideas and will be drawn to your blog based on your personality alone. They can also see right through fake bloggers.

2. Use catchy blog post titles. When people are surfing the Internet, they don’t look at every site they come across. Give them a reason to want to look at your blog. Ask yourself if your title would make you want to check it out.

3. Be consistent in your posting. Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. Slow and steady wins this race. Decide on how often you want to post and then do it. If you can’t post everyday, that is fine. Just stick to a schedule and maintain it. Your readers will come to expect and anticipate when you’re going to post.

4. Aim to be helpful. You want those who read your blog to come away with solutions. They may not have even known they needed help with a specific topic, but try to offer help within your post.

5. Use spell check and proof readers. Credibility is a must in blogging. Nothing will destroy your credibility faster than a blog filled with poor grammar. Don’t be afraid to have someone read your stuff before posting it.

6. Use images. A picture truly is worth a thousand words. You can add so much to your blog by simply posting an appropriate amount of photos. People want to see what you’re doing just as much as they want to read about it.

7. Structure your blog for easy scanning. Readers can get easily distracted by long cumbersome paragraphs. Try using smaller paragraphs. Also, people love lists! If you can put it in list format, do it.

8. Comment on other blogs. Blogging is a social affair, so be social. Being interactive will increase traffic to your blog. Spend just as much time reading and commenting on other blogs as you spend on writing for your own.

9. Provide RSS-to-email option. You can encourage readership by making it easy for people to read your blog. Allow people to subscribe to your blog so they receive your recent posts without having to use the RSS feed.

10. Ask open ended questions. Successful blogs are interactive. Millennials want to be able to interact and have a reason to return to your blog.

Some of these ideas were found in The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools and Strategies for Business Success by Safko and Brake. They have a much more extensive list of 50 rapid fire tips for blogging. We have this book in the recruitment office and you’re welcome to use it any time you would like.

The last thing we want to say about blogging is have fun with it! If you’re not having fun writing your blog, no one is going to have fun reading it. This whole experience is meant to provide prospective students with an easily accessible way to find info about Weber State from a student’s perspective. Just remember, when you’re blogging you’re also representing Weber State. You’re going to do awesome with this and we’re excited to read what you have to say.

References

Brumfield, R. (2005). Student blogs offer new recruiting tool. eSchool News, Retrieved June 14, 2011, from http://www.eschoolnews.com/2005/08/25/student-blogs-offer-new-recruiting-tool.

Burnes, R. (2008). Inbound marketing and the next phase of marketing on the web. HubSpot Blog, Retrieved June 22, 2011, from http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4416.

Hossler, D. (2000). Effective admissions recruitment. In G. Gaither (Ed.), Promising practices in recruitment remediation, & retention (pp. 15-30). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, Publishers.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2002). Digest of Education Statistics. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved June 20, 2011, from http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/digest02/index.asp.

Rudolph, K. R., & Sweetser, K. D. (2009). University blogs and organizational image. Journal of New Communications Research, 4(2), 15-35.

Safko, L., & Brake, D. K. (2009). The social media bible: Tactics, tools and strategies for business success. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.