Facebook made it incredibly simple to create targeted ads based on location, sex, age, keywords, political view, relationship status, education status, and workplace. These target ads, called flyers, are a great and cheap way to market your events. If you’ve never tired it, here’s a quick tutorial to get your started:

Step 1: Log into your Facebook account

Step 2: Scroll to the bottom of your profile page and click on "advertisers"

Step 3: Click on "Order Facebook Flyers"

Step 4: Click on "Flyers Pro"

Flyers Basic allows you to pay-per-flyer-impression which means that you will pay around $10 to have the flyer appear 5,000 times on Facebook. With Flyers Pro, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad instead of just appearing on their page. I think this is the more effective approach because you are only going to pay if someone is interested and if they don’t click through, you still get the flyer-impression on their page, but you don’t pay for it!

Step 5: Add the info you want to your flyer

Facebook will update your flyer in real time so you know exactly what it will look like when it’s live. You can add text, links, and photos to your flyer.

Step 6: Set a budget and the search criteria for who should see your flyer

This is where the power of the flyer gets impressive. You can narrow your listing down to only a select group of people if you want. Filter by location, sex, age, keywords, political view, relationship status, education status, and workplace. Only those people will see your flyer.

Step 7: See your results

Your flyer will appear on the side of a Facebook profile. And again you will only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

Step 8: Monitor your progress

Facebook allows you to monitor how well your flyer is doing. Click on either of these two tabs and you will see data for your flyer. You can also go back and adjust your flyer’s content or search criteria at any time.

In case you are not yet convinced that it’s beneficial for you to have an account on Facebook/Myspace, Art Esposito (who has authored on this blog before) recently published an article for the National ACademic ADvising Association titled, Saving Face(book): Engage Through Facebook and Retain Relevance.

Pulling from many different sources, the article begins to lay the foundation for a correlation between an advisor’s relevance to a student’s world, which includes Facebook, and a student’s increased engagement on campus, which ultimately leads to a more successful student.

Art also pulls from his own experience as an advisor with a Facebook profile:

As an advisor, I maintain a Facebook profile and an Advising Group with over 300 friends and 262 advisees in my Group. I engage them in conversation about responsible computing and help them understand reasonable behavior—primarily by modeling it for them. I use Facebook  to deliver informational advising, appointment reminders, and programming invitations and publicity. With 75% of my caseload on Facebook, I would be foolish to ignore this opportunity. But there is more to student engagement than this.

At VCU, we believe that advisors’ three main responsibilities are informing students, relating to them, and enriching their undergraduate experiences. It’s the middle component—relating to students—that is most important to engagement and where Facebook can be most beneficial in advising. I engage my students on personal and “friendly” levels that secure my role as an advisor/friend; this strengthens the trust-based relationship we share, assures my relevance, and increases their level of engagement (see Rawlins and Rawlins, 2005 for an understanding of “advising as friendship”).

The most important thing to observe concerning Facebook is that it does not represent “college” to our students—this is where they socialize. We are the outsiders—the visitors—and must appreciate that when we try to encourage reasonable and responsible behavior. We will gain nothing by policing these sites with an aim toward listing prohibited behavior. If we engage students on their terms, we can better affect the change in behavior we desire and strengthen their engagement. In the two years I have used Facebook, I have seen students change their behavior simply because they know I can access their profile. I have commented to some, confidentially, encouraging more reasonable and responsible choices in things they have posted. Response to these “interventions” has always been positive and followed by voluntary behavioral modification. I have over 300 student "friends" on Facebook and very few have blocked me from viewing their content.

A recent survey of my Facebook students revealed that 88% of them appreciate access to me on the network with only 18% feeling uncomfortable with my presence. Furthermore, when comparing my caseload on Facebook to VCU’s First-year population, my students showed a higher level of academic success with 86% achieving good academic standing at the end of their first term, versus the 81% overall average for the VCU class of 2010. By embracing Facebook appropriately and appreciating the possibilities, academic advisors can maintain relevance, increase student engagement and success, while affecting change through trust-based dialogue to better results than afforded by a punitive approach.

Admish is a new social website aimed at everyone involved in the college admissions process.

Student – The ability to search for information about different schools and connect with admissions officers, guidance counselors, and other students at member institutions.

Parent – Play a more active role in the college admissions process by helping their child shape their online profile and keeping in closer contact with their child’s guidance counselor.

Admissions Officer -  Get a better picture of the students applying to their school by letting them check out their profiles, blog entries, and communicating with them directly.

Educator – Connect with a community of peers to share resources to help guide students through the admissions process.

I think the idea of connecting all the pieces of the admission process together is a step in the right direction. What I don’t see a real paradigm shift in the way the process is being done. The profile pages just look like extended resumes. This is good because it gives the other players more data to work with, but it is annoying and counterproductive to have students fill out yet another profile online. I think more aggregation is the key.   

Students use Facebook for communication more than e-mail. Anecdotally, I hear about students deleting official institution e-mail all the time. They just don’t think it is relevant.

So what do you do to get a quick message out to all your incoming freshmen?

You could try to friend them all, but this would take forever . . .

At every school on our fall tour there has been a “Class of 2011″ group on Facebook.

Just like this one:

This particular freshmen group has 239 members (roughly 70% of the entire freshmen class – it’s a small school):

What do they talk about? Well, all kinds of stuff. Sure, there is party talk, but there are also bright spots, such as random peer tech support:

And students taking student activities organization into their own hands:

The activity on these groups, it’s possibilities and limitations, deserves its own post.

For the moment, I want to focus on this person:

Because of the way Facebook works, the creator of the group can message everyone in the group through Facebook. That means that this person, this one, random freshman who happened to start the “class of 2011″ group at their school first, is the only person who can message most of the freshmen through the medium they use most.

This one person has their finger on probably the most effective communication delivery mechanism currently available to schools.

This is hilarious.

In a non-scientific sampling, these folks are diverse. Sometimes they are geeks/ computerish folks. Sometimes they just got accepted early to the school and happened to be bored one night.

I think that you as an activities advisor should makes friends with this person.

Of course, you could perhaps talk them into spamming everyone for the school, but that wouldn’t do that kid any favors. Being a stooge is no good for anyone’s rep.

Some creativity is needed. Maybe that kid becomes the editor of the once a month freshmen news letter? And you as the activities department get a good shot at including your info . . .

Point is, if you use the student to spam the group he or she created, you will make everyone look bad.

If you can empower the student to see the power they have (most don’t realize it) and make positive use of it, then the student can be pulled into the student leadership position and everyone wins.

Either way, at every campus across the country, there is one person that can Facebook the majority of their class. This is a strange power lying dormant.

When Dave Leenhouts is not playing the role of Director for Student Life at Coastal Georgia Community College, he presents trainings on Learning Reconsidered for the Association for the Promotion of Campus Activities.

For those of you unfamiliar with Learning Reconsidered, it’s an "argument for the integrated use of all of higher education’s resources in the education and preparation of the whole student."

Click here to download (as a PDF) Leenhouts’ latest slides.

This day and age it seems like everyone has a cell phone, many schools are beginning to tap into that technology, and use text messaging to inform students when needed.

Since the Tragedy at Virginia Tech, many schools are trying to get an emergency contact system in place.  What better method than text messaging.  Individuals usually carry their cell phones around with them, and a text message can deliver an immediate detailed message.

Many companies offer features that allow organizations, and clubs on a college campus to sent out updates, announce meetings, or advertise upcoming events.

This comparison analysis will compare and contrast some of the top text messaging services.

The Services

E2Campus

Costs $1 per user per year, is a good deal for smaller
campuses, but can get pricey with a large population.

Offers unlimited groups. Which can include emergencies, events, sports teams, and can even
include different campuses of a college.

Allows for unlimited group admins

Access to the E2Campus application is available from your
PC, mobile phone, or a PDA

 
Informz

Has a one time setup fee of $300

Annual Licensing fee is $2,000

Text messages can be purchased in blocks, and range between
6 and 8 cents depending on how many blocks you purchase.

With all the setup fees this product can get pricey, It may
be efficient for a larger campus to afford this, but may be way out of the
budget of a smaller school.

Gives you the option to purchase a dedicated short code for
$14,000 a year, which means you will get your own 5 digit number to be
texted.

For $1200 a month you can purchase a custom vanity code, which
allows you to chose a short code so it is easier to remember.

Mobile Campus

Offers a free service, but will spam you with text message
advertisements which will burn out the medium very quickly, and may result in
negative effect on text message alerts from your students.

Jyngle

Offers two services.  The Standard "Free" service is designed for smaller groups.  The standard service does have a banner at the bottom of the text which says"Powered by Jyngle".  This banner is designed to spread the word of the service, but a representative
at Jyngle informs me that it may be used for ad space in the future.  Still for being free I would not complain about the tiny ad at the bottom of the message.

The second service Jyngle offers is the Enterprise service.  This is a pay per message service, and does not contain the banner at the bottom of the message.  The rates for this service are $0.03 per voice message and $0.06 per SMS.  Jyngle offers the Enterprise Service to schools for free for emergency use.

Pricing Comparison

This chart compares pricing of the four services.

This chart compares each service prices based on the size of a student population.  Note Informz block pricing is based upon 10 texts per student.

There are other services available which I was unable to acquire the pricing for.  Some of these include

Rave

clearTXT

PromoTXT

If you have any experiences dealing with any of the vendors mentioned, or any vendor not listed above please share them.

Recently it was requested that I do a quickie presentation on Online Environments for students.  Now I have a lot to say about online environments, so a quickie presentation was difficult for me.  My presentation was for 80-100 of our Student Services workers – Advisors, Counselors, Student Employment, Registrar, Dean of Student Services, Health Services, Registration, Financial Aide, Admissions, the VP of Student Services and the College President.  That’s a rough crowd! 

I started with the assumption that they know nothing about MySpace/Facebook/Second Life.  These were my main environments to discuss.  The handout was a one page simple bulleted handout so that they would spend my precious presentation time listening instead of reading.  Included were quick facts on all three of these environments – who, when, where, what, how.  Also a small section labeled "Don’t be a n00b – learn the language, learn the culture" with terms used on these sites and in everyday student language such as blog, bulletin, tag, text, friend & message.  The next bulleted section gave the pros and cons of advertising on Myspace/Facebook.  Paid advertising is official, someone handles it for us BUT it’s $$$ and really how many students click ads and banners?  Profiles/Groups are free, students WILL join, can get more input from students BUT someone has to be in charge of it.  Second Life was very briefly touched on as that’s (for my college) far in the future.  But I talked about how you can take college classes, PR events, learn design and scripting.  I did a quick poll to see how many have accounts on any of these environments and there were unsurprisingly very few.

To end the presentation I let them all know that Mott Community College does indeed have a group on MySpace and it has over 6,000 members.  Who runs it?  Someone named Sarah Suicide who claims to be a marketing major at MCC.  There is misinformation and all sorts of "stuff" going on in the group.  Some members are under the impression that it is run by the college.  The VP and President sat up a bit straighter and took notice at that fact!  Kevin Prentiss directed me to the fact that there are 1,300 of our students on Facebook.  My ending question was "Why aren’t we there with them?"

I’m hoping that this presentation, although very brief (less than 15 minutes) will help to open Administration’s eyes and move us forward to keep in touch with our students.

I spent four years at the State University of New York at Cobleskill in a village with less than 5000 people.  The college had around 2500 students of which approximately 500 are commuters. 

I know what it is like attending a small school in a small town.  In a small town you can have large turnouts to multiple events each week.  No you don’t have to reread that, I said we would get large turnouts and we would put on at least 2 events weekly.

Of course not all of our events turn out to be a hit, but you can’t let that get you down.  In a small campus environment with a minimal budget you have to learn to accept that some events aren’t going to draw the attendance you hoped for.

Now you might ask, how can I pack my schedule full of quality events without spending the entire clubs budget in the first month? 

Creativity and “homegrown” events have been the backbone of our activities board at SUNY Cobleskill.  Creating your own events such as game shows, and theme nights is a very affordable way to pack your schedule.  Put a lot of thought into your homegrown events, they won’t work if you throw them together at the last minute.

SUNY Cobleskill won a national award at the 2007 APCA Nationals in Atlanta Georgia for a homegrown event called “Big Man On Campus”.  This event was modeled after “The Apprentice”, and took many hours of just sitting down and talking out the details with other students, and our advisor.  I would say it was worth the time we put into it, we put on a quality event which won a national award, all for a fairly cheap price.

I would have to say one of our biggest budget saviors would have to be APCA, The Association for the Promotion of Campus Activities.  We get Most if not all of our stage shows from APCA.  For those of you who do not already know what APCA is, it is an organization that promotes quality yet affordable programming for campuses.

Don’t expect your numbers to jump up instantly, your activities board needs to build a reputation among your students.  Cheap promotion is another hurdle you may have to overcome before you have a successful calendar of events. 

With your budget you can’t exactly have sky writers promote your campuses events, so you have to come up with creative ways to get your name out there.  There are plenty of blogs out there that you can get cheap promotion ideas from

http://swiftkick.typepad.com/activities_affairs/marketing/index.html

It is not impossible to pack your house with whatever budget you have, you may just have to be a little more creative with the way you plan your events.

Like Joseph Campbell’s famous Hero’s Journey philosophy, we like to divide college students into 5 different stages of engagement based on the Engagement Pyramid below…

Each stage is defined by a different set of characteristics of an individual. Fully engaged individuals display a different set of characteristics than apathetic/uninvolved individuals. Thus, the way we interact with individuals in each stage should be different. A “5″ doesn’t want to be treated like a “Neutral.” And treating a “Neutral” like a “5″ might be too much too soon and thus demotivating.

Once we’ve recognized an individual’s stage, then the next step is to move them gradually up the Engagement Pyramid step-by-step. In our Dance Floor Theory program, we call this X+1. “X” being the stage an individual currently is in and “+1″ being the next step that is challenging enough for that indivdual, but not too challenging (e.g. +3) which might be demotivating. If you think of it like a video game, video games do an amazing job of knowing your current level and knowing what the next motivating challenge is for you. That’s the same thing as X+1.

The hardest step on the Engagement Pyramid is moving someone from a “Neutral” to a “1.” Where a Neutral is someone who doesn’t care and is indifferent to anything you do and a “1″ is someone who actually pays attention and is curious. Once someone is a “1,” it’s much easier to continue to move them towards a “5.”

Ask most educators and they will tell you student apathy is huge on college campuses. Campuses are filled with “Neutrals,” however most of the activities we do on campuses are geared towards “1″ through “5″ people because they are the ones who will pay attention to our flyers, emails, and Facebook invites and take the extra effort to actually show up to an event. But what about the larger percentage of our campus that are “Neutrals?” What can we do to engagement them? To give them their X+1 moment? To move them from a “Neutral” to a “1?”

Enter Free Hugs…

Well actually, Free Hugs is just one example of thousands of examples of events we call Blender Events. Blender Events serve two purposes…

1. Cause people to have a pattern interrupt throughout their day. Or as we say in Dance Floor Theory, get people to go from “Meh” to “Hmmm.”
2. Build peer-to-peer relationships by mixing people together with near-peers. Near-peers are people who are models of success that are just a stage or two ahead. In the Engagement Pyramid, a near-peer to an “X” would be a “1.”

Every time we host a Blender Event on campus and cause a “Neutral” to have a pattern interrupt in their day, or get them to go  from “Meh” to “hmmm,” or connect them with a “1,” then we are supplying them with an X+1 Moment. The more X+1 Moments they have, the harder it will be for them to stay a “Neutral” as they will start to display characteristics of a “1″ whether they want to or not. And once they are a “1,” then we can work on getting them to become a “2.”

So there you have it, That’s the ‘why’ behind Free Hugs. As you may have noticed, it has very little to do with the actual Free Hugs event and more to do with the introductions/connections/relationships that happen from the Free Hugs event.

I promised everyone that I would put the slides up from the Dance Floor Theory Ed Session in Orlando.

You can download them as a .pdf here. (It’s a 7.5 MB file, so it will take a bit.)

Hope it serves for:

A few things to keep in mind – DFT is a much longer program, this is just a slice.

This was delivered to advisors, with the intent of illustrating some of the educational principles that are embedded within the design of the DFT curriculum.

So slides 44-48 are not usually present in DFT, but were added to give a few primers for developing your own curriculum on whatever you would like to teach.

All 4 serve as important reminders for any leadership training. No better way to learn than by doing : )