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Social Media

NACAC08 was a great experience. I have been following many people in higher education through various social mediums as well as working with institutions across many states. Meeting these great folks in person has made my relationship with them on social media even stronger!

Does your institution have a Twitter account? Does it identify the author of those tweets? Do you give your admissions counselors a presence on social media? If the answer is no, you may want to talk to us and rethink your strategy.

If your counselors are out traveling, like many this time of year, social media should be central to your overall strategy.  Your counselors should have established relationships with various students via social media which can now be reinforced with a face-to-face meeting.  On the flip side, as you meet new students and gather their information, you should immediately begin engaging them through social media channels upon your return to your institution.

This combination of social media and real social interaction builds a powerful relationship between high school student and counselor. Seeing where a college representative went to school and identifying similarities between counselor and student create opportunities for connecting that would not otherwise exist.  The miracle of social media is that it creates the opportunity for conversations to take place after college fairs and high school visits by being accessible beyond phone and email. Furthermore, this form of interaction is already familiar to most high school students. Social media is ultimately a relationship medium… use it to build those personal relationships!

In addition, I see that The University of Toledo has also found the value in this thought. I wish them luck, and I thank D.W. for pointing me to this information in her blog! Are their any other admissions counselors maintaining blogs?  I’d love to hear from you!

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Did you stop by the InnoGage booth at NACAC this year? NO??? That’s funny…me neither.

The InnoGage team decided to get a little nuts at NACAC this year. Instead of putting up a booth and waiting for people to walk by, we decided to be the eyes and ears of hundreds of people both at the conference and across the country. The InnoGage crew split up and attended sessions that covered Social Media, Recruiting strategy and other valuable Web2.0-ish information. We listened intently and pushed out bits of valuable information through our mobile devices utilizing twitter. If you’re confused, let me break it down for you.

I walk into a session about “social media in higher ed” and sit down. The Panel begins talking and I begin typing bits of interesting information into my blackberry via the application twitterberry, which links up to the InnoGage twitter account. With a character limit of 140 characters per “tweet”, I must be succinct. When I press “send”, my update hits the twitter accounts of potentially hundreds of people who are “following” InnoGage on twitter.

The end result is information being spoken in a conference room and reaching hundreds or thousands of people around the world in a matter of SECONDS. Does this make your head spin? It should.

Below are the main channels from which the InnoGage team pushed out valuable information to our friends and clients during NACAC 2008.

Twitter

Blog

Flickr

Facebook

YouTube

So I apologize that you did not get your InnoGage pen or flashlight this year, but hopefully you got a lot of great information… which although it doesn’t light up or let you draw happy faces, is probably a bit more useful.

p.s. watch for us November 16th – 19th at the AMA Symposium on Higher Education. Can’t make it? No problem…just follow and converse with the InnoGage team. We’ll be your eyes and ears.

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