Can You Hear Me Now?

In his book Marketing to the Social Web, Internet pioneer Larry Weber describes three phases of the World Wide Web. What users today would recognize as the Internet began in the late 1980s with simple websites and chat rooms by America Online and others. Next came pop-up ads, clickthroughs, and search engines. Both phases pushed timely and rich content to users. Independent schools co-opted this new medium by developing attractive and searchable websites, e-mailing graphic-driven HTML newsletters, and producing viewbook videos that were available online or on DVD.

In the last few years, Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs (online journals), podcasts (online recordings), and more have transformed how the Internet is used. Users do not simply pull content down from websites, but also push content up, sharing text messages on Twitter, photos on Flickr, home (or cell phone) videos on YouTube, and their lives on Facebook, Linked­In, and other social networking sites. Today's web is the "social web," where young and old increasingly share their experiences. The volume of information exchanged every day has already reached the mind-boggling level.

The impact of all this on independent schools is profound. If a parent looks at the customer reviews at TripAdvisor or Amazon.com before reserving a hotel room or purchasing a vacuum cleaner, what makes selecting an independent school any different? The school's official message is growing less important in the face of an online, unofficial presence of which many school administrators are at best distrustful or, at worst, completely unaware.

For many schools, online alumni communities are the easiest points of entry into the social web with little of the safety concerns that arise with a school's underage current students.

Travis Warren, president/founder of web-services provider WhippleHill, recalls one independent school administrator's experience. A high school student from South Korea recently contacted the school and asked for a specific student ambassador to lead her on a campus tour. However, the requested student was not one of the admission office's official ambassadors, but had met the prospective student on Facebook. The current student's favorable, but unsanctioned, comments about her school had heavily influenced the prospective student's decision. The school readily agreed to the tour and, months later, the prospective student enrolled.

Clearly, alumni, students, and parents are talking about independent schools online. Go to YouTube, Facebook, or MySpace and search for mentions of your school. You may be surprised, perhaps delighted, perhaps concerned by what is there. Add in RateMyTeacher, PrivateSchoolReview, and others and the message gets more complex.

For the long-term viability of the school, alumni, admission, advancement, and communication staff must retool. Think beyond print — viewbooks, annual reports, and postcards — and beyond Web 1.0 home pages and HTML newsletters. As Weber notes, "They want a dialogue with your [school], want to know you are there and available 24/7. The idea of branding in the social web is the dialogue you have with your customer. The stronger the dialogue, the stronger your brand."

That's What Friends Are For
For many schools, online alumni communities are the easiest points of entry into the social web with little of the safety concerns that arise with a school's underage current students. After one school created a Facebook alumni page, as many as 400 alumni joined as fans in just a matter of weeks. Like many independent schools, White Mountain School (New Hampshire) uses its Facebook page to post announcements, e-mail alumni, share its blog's RSS feed, upload photo galleries, and facilitate conversations among alumni.

Fountain Valley School of Colorado encouraged alums to sign up by putting any new fans into a drawing for Starbuck's gift cards. For Laura Fawcett, the school's director of marketing and electronic communications, embracing Facebook did require a shift in thinking. "In my life as a web content administrator, the key was always 'drive traffic to the website.' That hasn't changed with social networking, but… now you are going where your audience already is. Then, when you begin interaction, you can entice them to visit your site for more goodies."

Facebook isn't the only option. In addition to establishing an alumni page at Facebook, Green Farms Academy (Connecticut) and Kimball Union Academy (New Hampshire) have established alumni pages at LinkedIn, a social community used primarily for business networking. The value of the LinkedIn presence is that the site is a good draw for alumni in their 40s and 50s.

“How do we leverage Facebook and yet provide really secure data?”

In the process of setting up sites, school officials often find that they are not the first to promote their schools on the social networking sites. In setting up its Facebook page, Friends Academy (New York), for instance, discovered that alumni had already formed their own unofficial group. When the school created its official Facebook presence in 2006, staff decided to collaborate with the unofficial group, sharing content and, ultimately, becoming the larger and more active Facebook presence. According to Alex Edwards-Bourdrez, Friends' assistant development director, Facebook has also replaced e-mail as the primary means to communicate with alumni, although the school takes care never to include a fund-raising "ask" in any Facebook communication.

Not all alumni offices depend entirely on web-based solutions like Facebook. The Urban School of San Francisco (California), chooses to use finalsite's alumni portal, part of the school's website, while Concord Academy (Massachusetts) developed its own in-house Facebook tool called Chameleon Connection to create more school-specific online communities. This allows both schools to mine data such as e-mail addresses and demographics, which are unavailable on Facebook.

Facebook not only prevents a school from seeing the profiles of its fans, but conversely prevents a fan from seeing who originated a page. The Academica Group, a higher education marketing consultant group, found over 400 higher education pages on Facebook in January 2008, but had difficulty distinguishing "official" vs. "student/alumni-generated" pages. Using a third-party or school-built social networking tool can overcome these issues.

However, many industry experts warn that third-party tools lose some of the genuine and un-corporate feel of Facebook. Facebook has opened its source code for development, so perhaps the answer instead lies in Facebook widgets and applications by third-party vendors. Angelo Otterbein, founder of web-services provider Silverpoint, notes, "We cannot replicate the functionality of Facebook, but we can do some things like pull in directory information for the alumni page. So, the question becomes: how do we leverage Facebook and yet provide really secure data?"

Tomorrow's Alumnus, Today's Prospective Student
While university and college admissions officers have reported huge successes with social networking, their independent school counterparts are just now testing the waters. Admissions staff can be uncomfortable allowing for a more realistic and sometimes gritty image of their school online. However, the risks of trying to slide in some spin with a "flog" (fake blog) are high. Finalsite founder Jon Moser warns that students today can see through a faked message and that they are more interested in what is real: what the food is like, the sports are like, how it is to live on campus, etc. Administrators, according to Moser, need to risk it and give students a chance to share their experiences.

Admissions staff at the Doris and Alex Weber Jewish Community High School (Georgia) recently asked student government officers to create a Facebook group where they invited prospective eighth-through-12th graders to attend an upcoming admission picnic. Attendance doubled from the previous year and the school reported a 30-percent response rate from both the Facebook page and the traditional print invitation. Weber staff also recruited three current students to film a "Life at Weber" video, which was uploaded to YouTube and received lots of buzz from students.

The American School of Bombay (ASB) in Mumbai, India, offered an even more hands-off approach to admissions-based social networking. Current students developed what they called the New Student Integration page on Facebook for new students and buddies to connect during the summer when many were out of town. School administrators are more than happy to let students take the lead with such initiatives. Shabbi Luthra, ASB's director of technology, notes, "The social media movement at our school has been led by our students…. There is no need for an official presence on these types of communications except when one needs to reach everyone to share and communicate." ASB 2008 alumnus Sunanda Vaidheesh agrees. "If students feel as if there is too much of 'school' in their personal online space, there might be an issue. These are our tools and while we like using them and encourage our teachers and administrators to get on board with using these 21st-century tools, we also don't want them monitoring us."

The ASB experience is shared by many international schools. David Willow, director of external relations at the International School of Brussels and a member of the Board of European Communications Directors, suggests that, because international school students may move every three to four years, they are even more involved in social media than their peers in the U.S. Says Willow, "Their roots are non-geographical and they therefore create a number of different kinds of support mechanisms for keeping in touch with friends and family around the world."

For international students at U.S. schools, the need to connect globally is the same, but the tool may differ. Stephen Campbell, EAL Coordinator at Lausanne Collegiate School (Tennessee), finds many of the school's Korean students communicating throughout the day on CyWorld, an online community out of South Korea. Admissions or alumni efforts with international students, therefore, may require additional research into online tools popular in a given culture or region.

Are all independent schools as ready to market to the social web? Perhaps not. Peter Shoemaker, chief operating officer for the communication consultant group Crane Brandwork, says that his company, not the school itself, is the first to bring up social media in any conversation. Reactions often vary by department, suggests Shoemaker. "IT folks are already so completely overwhelmed with always emerging new technologies that they're trying to be realists. Communications people are worried about loss of control. Admission is willing to do whatever it takes to get people to pay attention. Heads are worried about what they've heard about the MySpace/Facebook phenomenon: what level of risk does this open the school to and how do we manage this risk?"

The concerns are real, but the rewards may be worth the risk. Proctor Academy (New Hampshire) moved away from print marketing over a decade ago and eagerly embraced Web 2.0 years before most schools knew the term. Proctor's director of communications, Chuck Will, uploads hundreds of photos each week to the school's website and his "Chuck's Corner" blog chronicles the good, bad, and even ugly of school life. This commitment to authenticity and life as it really is may be paying off. Will reports that Proctor exceeded its recent capital campaign goal by 100 percent, admissions inquiries are exceptionally strong in a weakened local market, and school spirit by both students and parents is on the rise.

Heather Mansfield, owner of higher education consultant group Diosa Communications, agrees that schools worry too much about the risks. "In my experience of having received over 10,000 comments on MySpace and Facebook pages, I can count on one hand the number of comments that had to be deleted. I recently read a blog entitled, 'No one ever died from a blog comment' and that is a humorous way to sum up the situation."

Ready, Set, Go
How does an independent school get started marketing to the social web?

1. Trust your community. Parents pay big bucks to enroll their children in independent schools, so most of the time, they think the school is worth that investment. Besides, if parents, students, and alumni begin echoing online the same concerns about school life and operations, perhaps it's time to reflect on what the school is doing wrong, not on how to limit the honest conversation. Your constituents are your best focus groups.

2. Test the waters slowly. Have a staff member or two register on Facebook or LinkedIn for themselves and get used to the technology. Those in their 20s or 30s may be more apt to embrace these tools, but that's not always the case. Then, set up an alumni page in Facebook or use a third-party or school-created product and promote the site to your constituents.

3. Keep it fresh. Social network users visit their favorite pages every day, if only for a few minutes. Refresh your presence online constantly with event photos, updates on lost alums or links to new content on your school's website. This can take hours a week, so consider your current staff's workloads. Using young alum volunteers or adding new staff may be necessary.

4. Know the law. Facebook's policies are ever-changing. Until just recently, businesses and schools couldn't even officially be on the site, so those who sneaked in under the radar often found their pages and all the networks wiped out overnight with no chance of retrieval. Whatever social networking tool you choose, make sure you understand how it works and how best to promote your school ethically.

5. Create a digital vision. Internet pioneer Weber calls a company's long-term strategy for its online presence its "digital vision." An alumni or admissions Facebook page should be part of an overall plan that includes print, school website, and other, more traditional means of communication.

Looking ahead, the reality is that Facebook is dead — well almost. As older generations begin to adopt a technology and the corporate world usurps it for market gain, youth move on to the next big trend. What's next? Social media aggregators, where your Facebook, Linked­In, and other networks can be seen all on one site? Or, is everything going mobile, usable by cell phone from anywhere in the world? Web Internet TV stations? Perhaps all of these and perhaps none of these. What is certain is that constituents are talking about schools behind the schools' backs; whether independent school administrators ignore, control, or embrace that conversation will dictate that school's viability in the years to come.

Lorrie Jackson is the director of communications and marketing at Lausanne Collegiate School (Tennessee).