How Social Media Saved My Niece From Sponge Bob

In recent memory, there have been several shows in the children's television milieu that have been very disturbing to me, Barney & the Teletubbies come to mind. Thankfully, our first child didn't come along until after these fads had passed out of popular consciousness. But my nine-year old niece, Rachel, had her sights set on convincing my now 18-month old son, Charlie, about the inherent value of Sponge Bob Square Pants. Somebody had to put a stop to this madness!

While you're thinking how on earth can you tie social media & Mr. SquarePants together, rest assured I'll get there. About two weeks ago, while on my commuter bus ride home, I read a story on one of my news apps on my iPhone about a study that proclaimed Watching Sponge Bob is Bad For Kids. This was the evidence I needed to make my move. That night, I posted the following on Facebook, and see how the conversation unfolded:

Obviously, my last comment was only half serious. But a short two weeks later my sister-in-law confided that after she shared my post with my niece, and the accompanying news story about the effects of SBSP on kids, Rachel decided to give up on SpongeBob. Why? As a nine-year old, she is beginning to come to grips with herself as a student, and is incredibly self-aware. She stepped back to think about some issues she was having in school, thought about what the study was saying about attention issues, and realized that she did not need to watch SpongeBob any more. What a relief! My son is safe, at least for the moment. So what does this all mean? Other than Rachel having to get rid of a lot of SBSP clothing and toys (Christmas is coming, I hear her saying), I must say I'm very proud of her for making such a life-altering decision. 

Moreover, this interaction demonstrates how social media can influence your intended audiences. As admissions reps know, guidance counselors and advisers say how important it is to have the "experts" speak to their students when we visit their schools and centers. In the end, we reinforce the messages that counselors/advisers have been hammering home for months, but, for whatever reason, our message has a greater impact because we're the "experts." 

In social media land, while I firmly believe there are very few true experts, and even fewer (if any, myself included) who are successfully using social media in international education, our goal is to achieve the same things we have done in print, in person, and email recruiting in the past, but with different, yet more immediately impactful tools. 

Other than this blog forum, I encourage you to join in a more regular conversation at Marty B on Social Media & Intl Ed Facebook page or if you prefer LinkedIn, a group of the same name.

                                     

EducationUSA Weekly Update: New & Improved!

EducationUSA PDF format

As we all come to grips with how to reach our intended student audiences overseas, as international educators, at EducationUSA we've taken a huge step forward. Those who know our network of 400 advising centers in 170 countries, may have heard of our Weekly Update before. This newsletter goes out every week to all centers, and up until the last three months was a simple email, PDF or word document that then got parsed out by centers, or simply posted to their center's student contact, put up on their websites or in their centers.

While there was certainly value in this approach, it didn't always meet students where they were. After surveying our advisers earlier this year we learned that we needed to provide them greater control and choices over how they receive and distribute Weekly Update content. For those not familiar with Weekly Update (WU), it contains typically announcements of scholarship & financial aid assistance available for international students, and a "Campus News" section highlighting new academic programs that might be attractive to international students, or major events that would be relevant for international students to know. We collect these stories from U.S. institutions that submit information through the higher ed section of our EducationUSA site. The online form (for those institution representatives who have been approved for login access to our site) allows for a substantial amount of information including institutional logo, website, all social media links, related video url/embed code for the post, as well as specifics on the award or news story.

The end result allows us to maximize the effectiveness of this higher ed institutional content for our student audiences abroad. In so doing, when we publish our WU each week, our EducationUSA Advisers have the ability to choose how they wish to receive these announcements (in html email, PDF, and/or in pre-packaged social media-ready posts, all versions replete with bit.ly url shorteners that allow us to track globally how and where these posts are read. Since we launched this program in June, our WU posts have increased from about 10,000 click-throughs to currently 14,000 each week. That number will only increase as the academic year kicks into gear.

More importantly for U.S. representatives (and for students) the content from both of these sections of the WU are also fed automatically into two RSS feeds on our site for financial aid and for news. In addition to the posts, and RSS feed content formats, we also for the scholarship/financial aid announcements create individual pages for your WU submission on our site that feed into a growing financial aid database, that will also soon include national scholarships from various countries around the world that students can access to study in the U.S.

So, I invite all my U.S. higher ed colleagues at accredited institutions to:

1. Request your U.S. higher ed login access to our site if you haven't already 
2. Submit your institution's scholarship & financial information for international students into our Weekly Update
3. Stay tuned for more developments on how the financial aid database will become a great resource for you as well.

Until we meet again...