Morgan Davis is the Web Director at Warren Wilson, a small liberal arts college in North Carolina. He has a blog called erelevant which purports to be his “off-the-cuff blog about electronic marketing and working within higher education.” It seems to more or less fit that bill. I found it while snooping around on Technorati, and it has proved very interesting. On August 8th, Davis wrote a post titled Are Student Blogs Really A Good Idea? which is question which I answered earlier by saying “sorta depends, but yeah.”

Davis cites polls which have shown teens–namely prospective students–are not very hip to the blogging jive.

I continued my research and found similar results on a national poll. The National Research Center for Colleges and Universities (NRCCUA) conducted a survey of 1000 members of the high school class of 2006 from all over the US. Their survey found that 24% of students said they read blogs and 19% said they wrote them. They compared their results from statistics from the PEW Internet & American Life Project and commented that less teens in their survey read blogs than the PEW-reported adult readership of 27%. This seemed to suggest that blog interest was possibly more prevalent among adults, which made perfect sense if you made a clear separation between “blog” and “social network.” PEW’s numbers were much higher–38% of teens polled read blogs, but PEW also made no distinction in their questions between blogs and social networking sites, which could explain the disparity.

This got me thinking about my own peers, and how many of them were familiar with the blogosphere, how much of them read anything from it, etc. It’s completely true that we as young people are far more concerned with social networking (read: Facebook, MySpace) than with the blogs so highly touted in the 2004 election. I’m not entirely representative of my age group.

It pays to know and understand the difference between blogs and social networks. You can harness a blog for recruitment purposes, but it is much harder to do anything with the social networking sites.

Right you are sir. Then again, it’s certainly easier to find student-collegiate resources on Facebook when one can simply navigate to the “Friends” list, find some senior you knew last year who goes to whichever school you might be looking to find anything out about, and drop them a line. If student blogs were as easy to find and access as that, I’m sure they’d have better market penetration.

Here excerpted from that post are the two final paragraphs, discussing the end results of admissions-led marketing efforts through student blogging:

The end result for Admission/Recruitment marketers is that we are back again to the most effective and hardest to control message—word of mouth. A student blog on a college website may seem, within the euphoric world of the blog bandwagon, to provide access to that word-of-mouth world. The truth is that it rarely does, except when the “authenticity” is done very well.

High school students are very sensitive to authenticity and relevance within your marketing efforts. The response your student blogs receive will be one of students who understand that they’re not seeing a “real” journal. In the end, it doesn’t matter if you call it a blog or something else. When it comes down to forming hard opinions about your institution, the battle for mindshare will still happen in the comments section of a MySpace or LiveJournal entry. It will happen amidst prospects who know each other and are communicating within a familiar venue.

I commented on erelevant on these two paragraphs specifically; that comment here reproduced lightly edited:

Those last paragraphs really sum up my own experience as a rising senior with student blogs and their (limited) perception among my friends. More would read them if they knew about them (when I point a friend to a blog from a student / adcoms at a school they’re interested in, they tend to become frequent visitors) but at the same time, my friends and I are more inclined to trust the statements of bloggers who maintain a strict independence from the institution they are blogging about. They can still be joyous and excited about it, of course, and even overtly promoting–but so long as it’s perceived to have been completely student-driven, that’s just a metric which counts in the schools favor. “Kids are so happy here, they make websites to try to entice others to come.” Alternately, “Though X writer describes X university as a mixed bag, I feel my doubts have been smoothed over by his/her honesty.”

For the admissions-flavored blogs, we look at them–or at least, I look at them–and regard them as a different type of marketing. Something else to be looked at and considered when thinking about schools and admissions, but something which has to be looked at in the same sense that the viewbook or postcards that inundate our mailboxes are received.

All the same, I still wish more admissions officers would keep their own blogs (for those are particularly interesting) and also that they would facilitate student blogging, however questionable the motivation in doing so. As the volume of information increases, it can be hard to sift through the increasing noise–but at the same time, there’s more opportunity to find some very revealing gems.
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I hadn’t realized collegiate marketing had such a cadre of followers and so much writing on it–even better, that most of these writers are the same people involved in it. First hand knowledge is the best sort.

I will sample the student body at school on their knowledge of student blogs more thoroughly once we’re back in session; the people who tend to be net-connected in August are sometimes a little bit more savvy (with usually a lot more free time) than those who must be out in Ghana installing wells or on bike trips in France.