The dramatic upswing in social media popularity means several things to schools.  One of the most important ramifications is the importance of blogging. If your school has an online presence, it should also have a supporting blog. Blogging is one of the most effective ways of reaching many people on a personal level.  They are typically less formal, more open, and more accessible to students.

Four Ways that Blogging Can Help Your School’s Online Presence

• Creating a Student Forum: It’s a fact that students are going to congregate online whether or not you, as a school administrator or student relations officer, know about it or not. By creating a blog, you can monitor their comments and be aware of the general sentiment they have for their classes, teachers, and college experience.  This can lead to invaluable clues as to how to improve student retention rates and where there are problems that must be fixed. Additionally, comments can be moderated before they are posted to avoid PR problems.
• Easy Information Syndication: A blog is a perfect place to post updates, white papers, monthly or weekly newsletters, event notifications and much more. Even though these materials may also be posted on the website, students are probably less likely to check the formal corporate website than visit the less imposing blog. The added bonus to using a blog for this purpose is that most of this type of material already exists in some form or another so it doesn’t have to be generated specifically for the blog.
• Additional SERP Real Estate: A blog, by it’s nature, garners inbound links from other websites far easier than a formal school website. This means that it is inordinately easy to optimize for the search engines. Schools are often surprised by the alacrity with which their blog shoots through the rankings for the schools name or location. The blog can be an ideal secondary or tertiary result in the search engine response pages, pushing competing domains further down the list.
• A forum for professors: Professors at post secondary schools and colleges are often quite active in their communities. The school blog can be a great forum for them to talk about their efforts in the community and classroom.  It makes the professors look good, and the school look great.

Good Examples of Blogs in the Education Industry:

Harvard:

Harvard has several blogs, but the one that caught my attention was their publicity blog. This site contains a wealth of interesting information that would be out of place on their website which is basically a student resource.

University Of Pittsburgh

What I liked most about the University of Pittsburgh’s Dean’s blog is that it presents information in a very non-formal, honest and approachable way. This attitude encourages perspective students as well as current students and makes a seemingly imposing professor more personable.

Penn State

Penn State, which just happens to be my Alma Mater, takes a very liberal view of blogging. They have created a platform for students and faculty to publish their own blogs about any facet of Penn State life they wish to. It’s a great way to get the brand out online across a broad range of searches, and allows students and faculty a structured forum to express their views about the school, campus life, etc.

The Pros and Cons of School and College Blogs

On one hand, blogs are a great way for students to express themselves. On the other hand, blogs are a great way for students to express themselves.

If every student was pleased with the quality of their education and their post secondary school experience, then everything would be fine. The fact is, however, that there is never a case where everyone will be pleased all the time.

Many schools fear giving students a formal outlet for their discontent. What they don’t realize is that those students are going to complain whether there is a place provided to do it or not.  Nothing is gained by hiding from the fact that things are not always perfect. It is far better to be aware of problems as they happen or possibly even before they happen.

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Yesterday, I had the pleasure of sitting in on Stephan Mack and Dave Moser’s presentation about the value of LinkedIn links at a Pittsburgh SEO meeting.  He and his colleagues at EDMC did a study on the value of adding keyword rich anchor text links to your public  LinkedIn account.

7 EDMC employees, randomly chosen, added a link with the anchor text Design School and pointed the links at the Pittsburgh Art Institute.  According to the results of the study, the Art Institute’s rankings for this keyword jumped pretty significantly as a result of their efforts. Further proof the efficacy were the resulting slump in rankings at the termination of their test when the employees remove d the links from their profiles.

It was a really interesting presentation. I was also presenting, so I couldn’t come up with any insightful questions or comments at the time, but the ideas and conclusions have had some time to marinate in my head for a while and I have some comments about linking from social media sites to share.

The Value of Links from Social Media Sites

There are many social media sites out there that, like LinkedIn, will transfer link juice out of their site such as Propeller, Digg, and Stumble Upon.  However, the only place they offer the do-follow links are in your personal profile pages.  These links are valuable in the sense that all do-follow inbound links are valuable, but don’t expect a link from a LinkedIn profile page or a Digg profile page to take care of all of your linking needs.

The domains as a whole are incredibly powerful, but the actual profile pages hardly have any demonstrable page rank. That means the link juice they pass on to you will be more like a dribble.  That is to say that link from your profile page on Digg will not carry nearly as much weight as a link from Digg’s home page (which, incidentally, are no follow.)

In other words, the homepage of Digg is like the Hawaii beachfront property of the internet.  It has huge value, but doesn’t pass that value along through do-follow links…which is how the page remains so powerful. The profile page is like the servant’s quarters that overlook the dumpsters.  They’re still technically on beachfront property, but it’s not as valuable as the big house… Now I’ll continue on before I trip over my own metaphors and kill myself.

Common Myths About Social Media

One of the most common myths about links from social media profile pages is that the number of people who connect to your profile page will raise the amount of link juice that is passed through your link.  This is simply untrue.  The amount of value passed through a link on a profile page is just like the amount of value passed through any other link on the web: only the strength of the profile page is the only measure of the worth of the link. That means that unless the amount of connections you have somehow raises the page rank and strength of your page, there is no difference between a profile page with one connection and a profile page with 1000 connections.

That’s not to say that the link won’t provide more TRAFFIC if you have more connections.  However, traffic and link juice should not be confused.

Another common misconception is that the strength of the whole domain will be passed through your profile link.  As we discussed before, only the page rank of the profile page dictates the amount of actual link juice value the link will pass on.

Twitter

What about Twitter you might ask.  The number of followers that you have on twitter does directly affect the page rank of your profile page.  Unfortunately, Twitter has all that PR to pass around because it does not allow link juice to flow out of ANY link on it’s domain. No matter where you link to from Twitter, you’re not getting any PR value to the site that you pointed the link to.  Sad, but true.

The Networking Benefit of Links on Social Networks

All talk of PR passing aside, social media links are incredibly beneficial whether they’re do-follow or not.  There are many aspects such as branding, popularity, and raw traffic that you have to take into consideration.  LinkedIn might pass minimum PR, and it might not matter how many connections you have from a link juice-passing perspective, but the number of connections you have does directly affect how much referral traffic you get from the site.  Same with Digg and any other social media site.  They can be veritable goldmines of free traffic if you play your cards right.

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Ostriches don’t really stick their heads in the sand when they are threatened. If they did, they probably wouldn’t still be around to peck at our faces as we ogle at them in zoos. (Personal experience, don’t ask.) Similarly, businesses can not afford to run and hide from disgruntled customers either.

All too often, brick and mortar companies are unaware of or purposefully ignore online feedback. This unfortunate attitude often comes back to bite them because disgruntled customers don’t go away just because you ignore them. In fact, they typically become increasingly disgruntled and start stomping around loud enough for your happy customers or future customers to start thinking twice before they do repeat business with you.

Social Media Blunders and Success Stories

Take Dell for example. Yes, we all know what it rhymes with. The reason why we know is mostly because of Jeff Jarvis, a severely disillusioned and disgruntled customer who made his opinions widely known by starting a blogstorm that almost washed away any confidence in Dell’s brand, especially when Dell refused to even acknowledge the complaints, or the underlying customer service issues that caused them.

Just as Dell is the ultimate example of what NOT to do when trying to manage online brand reputation, they are also a perfect example of how to save your butt after things have gone horribly, horribly wrong. Under the enlightened leadership of Michael Dell, the company flip flopped and instead of ignoring and bashing bloggers, embraced and included themselves in their conversation. How did Dell accomplish such a quick turnaround?

By instituting a great social media campaign

Dell started a blog. They also reached way out and joined all manner of social media groups like Facebook and started talking to people. They quit hiding from complaints and started dealing with them proactively. It worked like a charm. They found out first hand that a previously disappointed customer who has had their problems fairly addressed is a far better brand champion than a pleased customer whose story will never be heard.

A good social media campaign can help you connect with your customers, current, past and prospective, and let them know in plain English why something went wrong, what you’re going to do to fix it and why it’ll never happen again. Any marketer will tell you that nothing can replace a personal relationship. The internet has given businesses an unparalleled chance to reach out and deal with their clients on an intimate and personal level while building their online presence and brand at the same time.

Building Your Brand with Social Media

Unlike PPC and Organic SEO, a social media campaign doesn’t have concrete metrics to ascertain your ROI. What many fail to realize is that, although social media does not convert directly into sales, it impacts people on a much more subconscious and broad level, much like a television commercial or radio spot. The biggest difference between the two mediums is that after 30 seconds, your television commercial is over, whereas a post to your blog or a comment from a customer or a reply to a tweeted complaint will be around forever, increasing the overall online visibility of your brand.

Quit Hiding and Start Interacting

By being able to see what your customers are saying about you, you can become part of the conversation and actively work to reverse any negative press you might receive. If you’re open minded enough, you might realize that you actually are doing something wrong and be able to streamline your business. But most importantly, through social media, you can monitor and directly affect your online reputation and brand recognition. Do like the ostriches…that is, fluff up your feathers when you’re threatened. Not the face pecking thing.

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Social Networking has become a hot topic lately. No matter where you look, there are blog posts and news articles touting social networking and listing the many and varied benefits of a well done campaign. Few of these articles go beyond the glow and fill you in on the logistics of actually creating a social networking campaign or fill you on in how you should approach social networking and measure its success. There are almost as many theories concerning social media as there are companies that sell the service. We can’t tell you how they do it, but we can tell you how we do.

Here at Eyeflow, our approach is to build a network around a client’s business using existing social networks. The reason we take this approach instead of creating a social network from scratch is because it’s better (read easier, quicker less expensive) to invest our time in attracting people from hubs they already frequent like Myspace, Facebook and Twitter than to try to build someone their own version. Not only is this technique better — it has a much higher ROI and quicker results.
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