Brain Waves Blog

Word of Mouth Drives Both Information and Misinformation with Students

Today’s briefing analyzes publicly available online conversation about coronavirus and higher education from March 13–16. In this analysis of volume, topics, sentiment, and key audiences, we highlight the most popular topics, continued negative sentiment, concerns of parents and admitted students, and surprising trends of where students discussed the issue online.

March Madness May Be Gone, But Meme Madness Is Here

As campuses and their constituents grapple with the implications of closures, extended-spring breaks, and online instruction to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic, online conversation on the topic is ballooning. We wanted to see the amount of conversation, find patterns, and develop insights to help campuses with their communication strategy. Yesterday (March 10), we gathered all of the online conversation about the coronavirus, higher education, related closures, and transitions to online coursework. Today, we analyzed it. Here’s what we found.

Crises happen. The ripples are felt in-person and online. While talking to every person affected would be helpful, it is not realistic. Social listening, however, gives campuses instant access to online conversations about a particular crisis as they emerge on social sites, in forums, on blogs, in the news, and on other websites. Furthermore, social listening allows for unique views into trends within those conversations as the crisis unfolds in real time. All in all, social listening puts campuses in a better position to plan or adjust crisis communication strategies in the moment based on emerging insights. But this is only effective with human analysts teaming up with technology to write the perfect query and easily visualize the data. 

TL;DR

If we asked you to define authenticity, could you do it? When we tried this ourselves, we ended up settling on a definition that was something like, “content that is authentic.” Realizing that the word authentic is also subjective, we tried defining that, only to rely on the word original. But what is original? With each attempted definition, we went  deeper and deeper down a rabbit hole.

February is a month of valentines, galentines, and if you’re in admissions, yieldentines! Yield is the stretch of time between students receiving their admissions decisions and choosing where they will deposit and, ultimately, enroll. While decision day on May 1 once signaled the end of yield, at many institutions this is no longer the case. Some students will deposit at multiple schools, and summer melt with ongoing offers is a new reality for many admissions teams.