Here’s what we were talking about this week:

April 23 – Berklee College of Music named a “YouTube Ambassador” for value-added recruitment video content.

Here’s a compilation of this week’s tweets:

April 17 – Community college trending as a path to a four-year degree.

April 18 – Group of top-tier universities offering massively open online courses (MOOCs) is growing.

April 19 – Paying off student loans taking priority over marriage and children.

Here’s what we were talking about this week:

April 5 – The online, for-profit Minerva Project positions itself as the next Ivy-league institution.

April 9 – Professional certificates (rather than degrees) becoming the next “cash cow” for U.S. universities.

Here’s a compilation of this week’s tweets:

April 3, 2012 – Growing number of Chinese applications to U.S. graduate schools.

April 3, 2012 – Student loan debt rises to more than $1 trillion — more than credit card and auto-loan debt — becoming increasingly difficult to pay off.

April 4, 2012 – A look at potential causes of skyrocketing student loan debt.

Here’s what we were talking about this week:

March 18, 2012 – Universities around Washington, DC, are increasing number of executive MBA programs.

March 22, 2012 – Colleges are changing to universities to gain prestige.

Professional and Continuing Education marketing efforts need an inquiry management makeover.

Today’s average marketer of adult learner programs is content to stay in the clouds of ‘awareness’ building. Marketers fail to build inquiry pools to sustain their programs, don’t manage the student decision process, and fail to measure digital metrics.

What are the four levels of inquiry management maturity and what five strategies can you use to immediately improve your efforts?

Download our presentation deck (Professional and Continuing Education Needs an Inquiry Makeover … Now!) from the 2011 UPCEA Marketing Seminar.

Why CIVIL? ‘Everybody’s doing it’ is not a good reason to start using social technologies in your enrollment marketing efforts. Simply opening another channel adds complexity to already stretched organizations. Shouting at students through another channel is what students tell us is what they want LESS of.

What’s needed is a more systematic approach to change your student relationships.

Consider C.I.V.I.L, our five step methodology to developing a higher education, social enrollment plan:

1. Choose objectives
2. Investigate participation
3. Validate strategies
4. Identify metrics
5. Look for social technologies

In this model, strategy drives technology.

Learn more by downloading our white paper on using Facebook for enrollment marketing, How to Lose Friends and Alienate Students. This paper contains primary research we conducted of college and university groups on Facebook. After speaking directly with the prospective students who joined these groups, we share eye-opening findings on how students want to be engaged on social networks and provide you with next steps for making the most of your presence on Facebook.

A few months ago while reading an article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution online, I ran across an ad for the Executive MBA (EMBA) program at Mercer University. Mercer happens to be my alma matter, so I was intrigued. I couldn’t resist the temptation to click to see how Mercer was using this ad to acquire inquiries.

The ad was linked directly to the University’s main page for the Stetson School of Business. Since things like inquiry acquisition for higher education is among the things we do on a daily basis at DemandEngine, I couldn’t help but notice several things about Mercer’s approach: Read more… »

The 2009 American Marketing Association (AMA) Symposium for Higher Education included an incredibly engaging keynote speaker, a bevy of college and university marketing professionals ready to share their experience and expertise, and a bounty of vendor-sponsored refreshment breaks (keeping us all well-fed and caffeinated).

The topics today ranged from social to direct marketing, Gandhi to Google, and high tech to high strategy. One of the overarching themes was a pleasant surprise – measurement.

It seems that in the mayhem of technologies amidst goals to increase enrollment and decrease budget there is a sudden awareness of the staying-power that measurement vision provides. Brand marketers are moving – sometimes uncomfortably – toward the quantitative realm. Read more… »