the Sam Jackson College Experience

Special hello to my readers from Thunder Bay–what, didn’t think to cloak your IPs? Moving on.

Looks like that publicity stunt I wrote about earlier overlooked a large portion of its audience in targeting young people. What a perfect example of the risks of edgy marketing that Morgan Davis and others have been reminding me about in comments!

School knocked for mocking Yale grad Bush

Reuters: Mon Aug 28, 2006
Lynne Olver

“It was literally a tongue-in-cheek way of getting attention,” Frederick Gilbert, president and vice-chancellor of Lakehead University, said on Monday.

“The young people picked it up that way,” he added. “I must say that older generations, well even some of our students, have looked at it as not appropriate.”

Gilbert said there have been more than 7,000 hits on the Web site, and online comments were about 95 percent positive. But e-mail messages to him and the university’s communications staff are “running in the opposite direction” and that is a concern, he said.

Okay, 5% is no big deal, right? Depends which 5%. By the way, which “young people” picked it up “that way”? As mentioned in the above quote, that 5 percent includes some of Lakehead’s 7600 students.

Isabelle Poniatowski, president of the Lakehead University Student Union, called the marketing campaign low-brow and lacking in class.

“It still strikes me as being very repugnant,” Poniatowski said. “Lakehead has so many positive attributes that you could really sell to people that live down south.”

In a weekend editorial called “Jughead University,” the right-wing National Post newspaper wrote: “It is a serious mistake for Lakehead to try to inflate its own appeal by attacking other, far more prestigious institutions.”

I am not sure if “people that live down south” refers to America, but I think that’s a fair assumption. In any event, what will Lakehead do now?

Gilbert said Lakehead plans to ride out the public relations storm without removing the posters or taking down the Web site.

“You don’t undo the damage that has been done, if there’s damage, by simply retracting,” he said, adding the school will try to respond individually to people who expressed concerns.

I thought this whole promotion was quite cute until I realized that Lakehead is the same school which banned WiFi on the basis of its supposed health risks, without citing any scientific support for that ban. Decisions like that make even the most simian of politicians appear quite bright. I wouldn’t be very happy if I were a Lakehead alumnus right about now.

This is a follow up to a popular post I made few days ago, “Spend a Week inside my mailbox!” which offered readers the chance to see everything I got in the mail over the course of a week. There have been some budget cuts, and in this installment we can only offer one day of mail. Still an exciting opportunity, I think.

This is all the mail I got on Wednesday, August 30th. If I get anything today (the 31st) I will edit this post and add it, doubling your value for the same low, low price of zero dollars. Can’t beat that bargain.

University of Pittsburgh sent me and my parents letters along with a pamphlet. My parents and I both got letters telling us how awesome UPitt was and how much I could do there, specifically talking about the Honors College. I’ve seen plenty of letters addressed “To the Parents of Sam Jackson” and I guess that speaks to their power to influence children and the hopes of marketers that they themselves can be influenced. Perhas not influenced–just informed. I know they didn’t know much about UPitt before I shared all that these letters had taught me. Then there was a “Fall Saturdays at Pitt” visitation pamphlet which had a nice picture of the Cathedral of Learning on it. I think the Cathedral of Learning is quite cool. Sadly I don’t imagine having the time any saturday this fall to get out to Pittsburg, and even had UPitt been on my list months ago (it was not, sorry) I wouldn’t have had the chance to visit it in July (see: CMU, old post).

Georgetown College sent me another pamphlet of something. They want me to come visit them. Visiting Georgetown College is, I’m afraid, not a good enough reason for me to go to Kentucky, although they are near Lexington, KY which I always am glad to say hosts the world’s largest pendulum clock in its public library. That spectacle aside, I will not be visiting. I feel quite bad about Georgetown College, actually, that they’re sending me these things. You see, back in July when I was looking for the visiting hours of Georgetown University… all these webforms look more or less the same… and that’s why Cornell College in Iowa once called my house. Sorry, guys, my mistake.

George Mason University sent me a very cute little envelope with lovely gold embossing on it but inside there was one little page asking me to go online to express interest so they could send me more stuff. I felt bad about this one, too, because they’re contacting me so late in the game. George Mason, I don’t know anything about you!

and, the piece de resistance,

Brown University sent me their viewbook! The first thing I saw was, of course, the cover. I make note of the cover specifically in comparison to UPenn’s viewbook, received and reviewed so recently. Like UPenn, Brown’s cover was a showcase of their seal. UnlikeU not just the plain stone seal looking very cold and intimdiating. Instead, with a nice play o shadows and light, it was off to the side of the cover, with “BROWN” taking full center in a color nearly one golden retriever (what can I say, I’m a sucker for golden-orange). The tree leaning across the page delicately did the trick, too, though at first glance I was fearing it might have been ivy, which would have been a little tacky. Really what I liked about the cover was the fact that it let Brown’s sorta Richardsonian Romanesque architecure stand front and center to impress and display the seal, rather than leaving it naked in the center of the page. Good design choice. Inside it’s not a full follow-through, but still quite good. There was a lot of information in it and the effort to try to fit it all in clearly impacted ease of reading in some places, but not too much. I quite liked it.

That’s all for today, folks.

Let me begin this post by thanking Morgan Davis of Erelevant for a very insightful comment which has once again conjured a response from me which I am reappropriating for the front page. I love the discussions I have with readers, which is why I would encourage more of you to interact a little bit! You might learn something from each other, too. In the past three days, I’ve had visitors from 150+ colleges and universities across the USA and Canada: I see you! Embrace the new web and share your thoughts! I respond to everything.

Now, moving on to the content again… here is the comment Morgan made, excerpted from my recent post”Cornell Student Blogs Crashing and Burning.” The comment is on student blogging generally and why, despite my begging, the world won’t see too many truly honest student blogs blessed and promoted by colleges anytime soon.

“authenticity is more important for good PR than anything else”

Amen.

Authenticity is still really scary for a lot of Admission and PR folks. We don’t use blogs at my school precisely because we know they would have to be *real.* We go out and look at our students MySpace and LiveJournal writings and imagine them with the college logo blazoned across the top. More often than not, we come away scared.

Sure, there’s lots of good stuff too [on MySpace], and even the bad stuff is RELEVANT and AUTHENTIC, but I don’t think many institutions are ready to invite real-life, open discussion of the good and bad in campus culture to their official namespace. And, honestly, the reason is not to fool or deny prospective students at all–it’s parental, donor, administrator, and media opinions that drive these decisions (sad but true).

So the best bet for learning about colleges via blogging will probably remain third-party and personal sites. Officially sanctioned blogs are most likely going to read like viewbooks in first person and without the glossy photos.

I read this and was sad to realize how true it was. So, through my tears of naiveté, I typed up an e-mail response. Here’s that response, lightly edited:

Thanks for the inspiration! I started thinking again about the looming danger of too much of the wrong kind of information about a school. Certainly photos of bong collections and voyeur shots are in vogue when it comes to social networking, but would absolutely not do for a visible school-affiliated blog.

A polished admissions blog might pretend to target the same audience as these great unofficial ones (prospective students, others) but we’re not lambs to the PR slaughter here. High pageviews and visit counts will be a consequence of high profile links to the blogs; plaster them on the main site and all those applicants are going to look at them, whether they derive any value from them or not. If a school was seeking to fill its ranks with witless dupes, then these might be fantastic recruitment paths. To the best of my knowledge, they’re not.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is utterly bizarre to me, and whether it reflects a mistake on Technorati’s behalf or the oddities and eccentricities of those blogging about Yale, I have no idea. I found myself looking at the Technorati tag page for the tag “Yale” and found some really weird results. To see if it was a fluke, I looked at the pages for the other ivy league schools, and for “ivy league.” Brown was muddled by Brown of FEMA fame, but there were some obvious “related tags” there: “Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Ivy League.”

Perfectly sensible. Princeton and Dartmouth were the same, just linking to the other schools for their “related tags.” Those who bothered to write about Harvard were more concerned with other pursuits, like video games, music videos, and TV. No matter. Yet Yale…? These are the actual tags as of 8/31/06, go check for yourself: “Sex, Books, Sexblogs, Publishers, Novels, Erotica, Sexual Revolution, Lesbian, Bisexual, Publishing.”

Huh? This could be a case of a tiny sample size skewing results (relatively few blogs post about Yale and other things, perchance), I have no idea. It’s really strange. Just goes to show the sort of weird online presence you can get unofficially…

Remeber those Cornell admissions-sponsored blogs I wrote about a few days ago? The Cornell Student Blogs are crashing and burning in public opinion, and there are a fair share of people who are more than happy to start roasting marshmallows and dance around the corpse. Strong language, but I’m seeing some strong reactions to these blogs, too.

Our friend Ryan Kellett at Middleburry tipped me off to the displeasure of the Cornell community with these six offending blogs. I hadn’t seen anything come up at my present Cornell-blog-weapon-of-choice, the Unofficial Cornell Blog (of Elliotback?). I figured the Cornell blogosphere would be dominated by moving-in-getting-settled posts for at least another few days; not so. Part of this must have been the op-ed which ran in the Cornell Daily Sun today, which really toasted the administration for their blogging implementation.

I think this is a well-worded critique which should be read quite carefully, not just by Cornell admissions.

Flogging Blogs
Editorial Cornell Daily Sun Aug 30 2006

If the University is looking to better represent the undergraduate experience to prospective Cornellians, there may be a more effective way of accomplishing that goal. On Monday, Cornell added six student blogs to its website, each intended to give outsiders a glimpse into life on The Hill through weekly anecdotes. Lisa Cameron-Norfleet, program manager for developer relations at the Office of Web Communications, told The Sun that the blogging project was meant to spice up Cornell’s website.

Indeed, a blog would be a great way to spice up the website — if the students selected were likely to write anything spicy.

Instead, what we will see on the website will probably be bland, near-advertisements for the University. The criticism here is not of the writing ability of the students chosen or that we expect a lack of sincerity; rather, it is that the applicant pool was limited only to students who already promote the Big Red on a regular basis. Only those who serve as campus tour guides, members of the Cornell Tradition or Undergraduate Admissions employees were eligible for the job.

Tour guides go through a three-round competitive screening process to see who can spread the most Cornell cheer. And Undergraduate Admissions employees are redundant, since they act as liaisons to the very people these blogs are intended to attract. [...]

That op-ed wasn’t all, though. Christian Montoya wrote on his 9apart blog a very heated critique complementing this op-ed, which I again pretty much entirely agree with. This snippet focuses on the fact that all six bloggers already appear in promotional roles for the school.

I heard about the project via my fianceé who is a Cornell Tradition member, but she was never able to figure out why she was invited and I was not. I really wish I had known, because I applied for nothing. Obviously Cornell wasn’t looking for a broad perspective; they were looking for students who are already mouthpieces for Cornell.

Christian picked out one line from the Op-Ed which I am going to repeat, since I agree that it tells the whole story: “… in trying to maintain a positive face for the student body, they’ve chosen a group that does not truly represent the breadth of that body.”

This seeming failure to launch brings us back to what I keep saying and trying to stress to some of my institutional readers–authenticity is more important for good PR than anything else.

Late arrivals: The aforemention Cornell Blog finally said something about this whole sordid affair.

The short of it is that the Cornell University Student Blogging Project is just a watered down PR machine written by a gang of unfocused novice bloggers.

Blah.