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.

WWC’s MySpace page sounds like somewhere that future careers go to die, which brings me to my point here, about juggling authenticity with donor-savvy image. Now if bloggers were given free reign (sans criminally defamatory / libelous remarks, etc.) but were carefully instructed as to the high visibility of the blogs, the long half-life of internet content, and the potential pitfalls that derive from that combination… I think that in additional to a primary screening one could fairly recruit a worthy group of bloggers to write about their time at any school. Brown admissions wouldn’t want to provide free hosting for pictures of EMTs from SPG, obviously.

Now, it’s a big leap to say that bloggers would write favorable things about the school for fear of being “dooced” during their tenure at future jobs. I don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation. But I do think it’s fair to imagine a world in which non-scripted life can be posted about without admissions office apoplexy.

That is, assuming admissions doesn’t have “meaningless, bland, anti-inflammatory” as prerequisite category tags, which they sometimes seem to insist upon.

Really, I’m just wondering if someone, somewhere [important] could start to see blogs as something besides another venue for web marketing in the classic sense. If they were approached as something novel–as something more like guerrilla marketing–then I think schools would have a better chance of unleashing their students upon the web to do the work of selling the school for them. Throw the playbook away, or at least take a page from the successful yet hugely unofficial student blogs that exist today. Joe Gaylor, mentioned before on my site, does higher ed photography with a specific focus on REAL-ness and honesty, which I sincerely appreciate. Charmingly, he’s doing his best to work with the consumers of his product–juniors and seniors in high school–and I think everyone could do a little more of that sometimes.

Personally, and to the dismay of Higher Ed marketers, I react negatively at attempts to force feed me sanitized tour-guide babble. With me, you’re going to retain that flawless brand image for your donors but you’re going to lose some points in my book; I know most people don’t feel all that strongly about blundering, insincere attempts to pander. Now, when I take a tour, if I were to encounter something half as insincere as some of these student “blogs,” I would be more or less prepared for it. I’ve had good touring experiences, but if they glossed over some of the rougher details of a school (to a minor extent) so be it. “Selective recall” goes with that format and they add value with their knowledge anyways. But when I’m reading a blog that purports to be the real true honest life of a college student, I have little patience for marketing drivel. First, it feels misrepresentative. Secondly, it’s hugely patronizing to believe I’d be so gullible as to take it at face value. Most importantly, it doesn’t interest me.

In this recent furor over the Cornell blogs, one of the bloggers contended that the ideal readers–prospective students–”didn’t want” any insight she or the other tour guides (who are bloggers) might have about things important to them at the University and that it was more important that she just convey the general sense of student life at Cornell through inane posts about her daily routine, amputating anything salacious (read: interesting). I responded back with the obvious: WE CARE ABOUT ANY INSIGHT YOU HAVE. Were their bloggers brainwashed or do they just think poorly of their readers? Jenna writes on Christian Montoya’s 9rules blog: ” Yes, we are a PR tool. We are tour guides, not journalists.” At least she doesn’t pretend to be anything else.

If you’re not going to respect my intelligence, you’re not going to get much respect back. Remember the handy how-to I wrote on ways to keep me engaging with marketing? If you use student blogs bluntly as marketing PR, they generally fail on all three counts I mentioned. In this context I am consuming them not as a member of a mailing list but rather as a general all purpose “prospective student” and let me just say this: if schools think superficial college blogs are affecting that target audience, they are dead wrong. On the other hand, if they think they are looking for “parental, donor, administrator, and media” approval, good work. I’m still not biting.

I’m starting to sound like a broken record; n.b. any undue vitriol here might be from my frustration with the recent travesty that Cornell has been parading about as a wonderful new thing.

One last reminder: Most of this post was originally an e-mail based on a comment, not even a contact form inquiry. Do you see the inblox-flooding eagerness I have to communicate with readers? I recently added the ability to subscribe the comments. As always, I love to hear from readers. Join the party.