Brain Waves Blog

Getting social with students is more than sharing news and updates about the university via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. It’s about creating content that resonates with prospective and current students. That’s why we, as universities, need to turn to students to reach our target audience.

Hearing the word “research” may elicit a groan from people—some perceive it as over-thinking a topic or too time consuming. However, the right type and amount of research allows individuals and organizations to make decisions that can save money (by preventing investment in dead-end solutions) or increase revenue (by allocating resources to make the most impact).

This spring, Gus Johnson graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Stout. In addition to his degree in digital cinema production, he's embarking on his career with almost 450,000 YouTube subscribers, 90 million video views, 28,000 Twitter followers, and 10,000 Facebook followers. The combination should give him a pretty decent foundation to pursue a career in filmmaking and acting in Los Angeles. And he'll be doing that without student debt, since he used the earnings from his YouTube channel and associated revenue streams to fund his education.

There’s a new kind of crisis on campus—the social media crisis. You know the one, the email interaction that gets posted to reddit, the tweet-gone-awry from an official account, or the local news story that catches the eye of someone influential online. Before you know it, a snafu that might have slipped under the radar in the past has sparked a national conversation, and there are literally thousands of people talking about the campus every day.

We’re in the age of digital disruption—a time when social media newsfeeds are more competitive than the 2018 NBA Finals. A time when we should analyze our approach to content as rigorously as we select an engagement ring, well maybe not that rigorously but you get my point. All jokes aside, for whatever reason, so many entities today focus on producing the ‘what’ that they often forget to consider the ‘how’ in content creation.

The data gold rush is on in higher ed advancement, and institutions hope to hit pay dirt by leveraging this data bonanza—whether it’s identifying alumni career journeys to better match mentors to mentees or discovering alumni interests to better target communications and fundraising. But unless advancement offices have a strong strategy backed by defined and talented resources, they’ll be left with little but a server full of fool’s gold.