Student Loan Blog : FaceBook

College Admissions Offices Using Facebook as Recruiting Tool

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 21:39:00 GMT

A growing number of graduate school admissions and college officers are turning to Facebook for recruiting, communicating with potential students and providing up-to-date news on the school through the social networking site, instead of relying on more traditional recruiting methods like mass mailings or emails, according to an article in Business Week (“The Admissions Office Finds Facebook,” Sept. 28, 2008).

A recent study indicated that a full 29 percent of university admissions departments surveyed now use social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, to recruit new students. To date, about 60 institutions have gone so far as to establish official pages for their school on Facebook, according to Nora Barnes, director for the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth.

“If you're an undergraduate or graduate institution and you’re looking to attract people 35 and under, then I think you have to go to Facebook because that’s where your opportunity is,” Barnes said.

Admissions Officers Use Ads, Fan Pages, Chats to Attract Students

While some schools have leveraged Facebook as a marketing tool, purchasing ads to target students based upon their age and where they live, other institutions have focused on maintaining their Facebook fan pages, uploading pictures, news pieces, and videos detailing recent campus events.

San Diego State University’s Facebook page, for instance, features video footage of the school’s involvement with the U.S. Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach and its students’ visit to the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista.

Scott Minto, the director of the admissions office for the school’s Sports Business Management MBA Program, uses Facebook to invite students to college admissions open house events in different cities around the country. He says that the school’s Facebook community has become so active that he now uses it as his sole means of communication with many students.

The University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management put up a Facebook admissions page just a year ago in response to increased student demand and has experienced phenomenal success, said Richard Powers, assistant dean and director of MBA programs. Cheryl Millington, the school’s director of admissions, holds Q&A sessions with students that have drawn about 100 students each time.

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Wilkes University Puts Freshman Recruits Front and Center and Billboard-Size

Student Loan Girl — Sun, 04 May 2008 22:56:00 GMT

Wilkes University, a small, private school in northeastern Pennsylvania, is using a quirky new in-your-face $120,000 ad campaign to get the attention of today’s media- and marketing-savvy students.

The university is plastering personalized messages on billboards, pizza boxes, gas pumps, and even on MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central to students it wants to make a part of its freshman class, reports Michael Rubinkam in a story by The Associated Press (“Pennsylvania College Woos Students by Putting Them in Ads,” April 30, 2008).

The “trendsetting and forward-thinking” marketing campaign appeals to the “look-at-me generation,” teens comfortable sharing all-things-personal on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, says Nancy Costopulos, chief marketing officer of the American Marketing Association.

The Message: Personalized and Not for the Shy

Wilkes features applicants in its ads who have a “mix of talents and determination” and who live in markets where the university wants to promote itself, says Jack Chielli, the school’s director of marketing. Students must also consent to having their names used.

The ads, writes Rubinkam, are meant “to convey the message that the school gets to know its students personally and pays close attention to their needs.”

To get messages with the right personal touch, 160over90, the Philadelphia marketing firm contracted by Wilkes, interviews participating students and their friends and families, uncovering likes, dislikes, hobbies, nicknames.

The agency uses the information it gleans from these in-depth interviews to design the highly personalized ads that have turned some college-bound seniors into quasi-celebrities in their high schools and communities:

“Lake Lehman senior Greg Heindel: You give your time at the soup kitchen, the firehouse, and your church summer camp. Wilkes University would like to give you something — a top-quality education.”
“Hey Kristen Pecka. Only your closest friends at Central Catholic call you Pecka-lecka-lecka. Choose Wilkes University and add 2,362 more people to that list.”
“Scranton High senior Nicole Pollock: Our goal at Wilkes University is to be as much a mentor as your mother has been. (Now, if we could only make her ravioli.)”

Each ad includes an invitation to “call a Colonel” (the school’s mascot) and provides a phone number that plays a recorded message from a current Wilkes student.

It’s the Thought That Counts

Even if targeted recruits end up choosing another school, says Chielli, he considers the ads successful as long as they continue to grab attention and get other students to think about Wilkes.

But besides drawing more students to apply, the school wants to help make it possible for them to actually attend: Nearly all students receive some form of financial aid apart from student loans to help cover the $25,000 price tag. Wilkes awards $22 million in financial aid each year.

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Can’t Find Your Friends? Check the Library

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 08:26:00 GMT

Libraries aren’t what they used to be.

No more stuffy, hair-bun-bearing librarians, no more thumbing through cumbersome card catalogs, and no more getting lost in aisles of endless Encyclopedia Britannicas.

Libraries are now high-tech, high-speed information portals that offer a wealth of resources: free, online and easy to access.

Sure, libraries still have books too … tons and tons of books. But it’s not the stacks that are drawing the visitors. It’s the Internet.

And who are these visitors?

Generation Y. The 18-to-29-year-old crowd has become, almost counterintuitively, the age group that most commonly frequents public libraries, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Libraries Change Face to Save Face

Whether they’re updating their Facebook accounts, Stumbling their favorite websites, doing research for a term paper, or just socializing online with their friends, the young adults of Gen Y are increasingly making a trip to the library to tune in to the Internet, particularly when their own Internet connections are slow or limited.

Libraries across the country have received virtual facelifts over the past few years in an effort to appeal to a younger crowd and to offer services the public craves. Local municipalities and non-profit organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have devoted resources and millions of dollars to technological renovations at libraries.

The result? 62 percent of Gen Y respondents in the Pew survey reported having visited public libraries within the past year. And out of 53 percent of total respondents who spent time in libraries last year, 65 percent of them said they used the Internet while they were there.

Bookworms Make Way for Surfers

Considering that over ten years ago, a survey by the Benton Foundation showed that this same age group felt libraries would eventually become less relevant, Julie Vorman of Reuters reports that the Pew survey results are surprising and exciting (“Generation Y Biggest User of U.S. Libraries, Survey Finds,” Dec. 30, 2007).

“Internet use seems to create an information hunger, and it is information-savvy young people who are most likely to visit libraries,” says Leigh Estabrook, co-author of the Pew report, in Vorman’s article.

That hunger for information is being quenched — 99 percent of libraries now have Internet access for their Web-surfing patrons, according to a USA Today piece by Anick Jesdanun (“Young Use Library Most Despite the Net,” Jan. 1, 2008).

But high-tech advancements at libraries are not the only draw for frequenting teens and young adults. As rows of shelves give way to computer desks, libraries now act as social gathering sites, offering virtual homework help, gaming software programs, and even access to virtual librarians, the online avatars of real-world librarians in the virtual-reality game Second Life, Vorman reports.

“We’re seeing a lot of conversion of what may have been stack areas, warehouse areas,” says Loriene Roy, president of the American Library Association, in Jesdanun’s USA Today article. “Libraries are creating social spaces.”

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Like Bees to Honey, Social Scientists Drawn to Facebook

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 19:20:00 GMT

Facebook is where you go to get the scoop on friends. Who’s still together and who’s broken up? Who went to last weekend’s tailgate party? Who do you know in London who wants to add you to their network? And who just got a job?

But did you know, that as a mecca of online social networking, Facebook’s also the place social scientists go to get the 411 on you—your likes, dislikes, values and the ways in which you choose and attract your friends.

Sociology, psychology and political science professors are now turning to social networking sites to test their field’s traditional theories about relationships, identity, self-esteem, popularity, collective action, race and political engagement, reports Stephanie Rosenbloom for the New York Times (“On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data,” Dec. 17, 2007).

What Your Facebook Use Tells Researchers

Educators at Harvard University, the University of California, Los Angeles, Northwestern University, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Texas are among those eager to learn more about how internet technologies are changing social behaviors.

In a recent study, Harvard—the first school to use Facebook—is working with researchers at UCLA to monitor the Facebook profiles of an entire class of 1,700 juniors at an unnamed east coast college.

The purpose?

“One of the holy grails of social science is the degree to which taste determines friendship, or to which friendship determines taste,” research member Jason Kaufman, an associate professor of sociology at Harvard, tells the New York Times. “Do birds of a feather flock together, or do you become more like your friends?”

But the Facebook phenomenon goes beyond what characteristics you look for in a friend. Other studies have focused on uncovering the science behind your love life, how the connections you make affect your self-esteem and how others view your popularity.

Befriending for Science: Friend or Foe?

While professors are going gaga for the type of information they are gleaning from your Facebook usage, should they be allowed to do it?

Some users are told of the studies being conducted around their Facebook accounts, while others, like those at Harvard’s unnamed school, are unaware they are the guinea pigs of a social study.

New York Times reporter Rosenbloom writes “a spokeswoman for Facebook says the site currently has no policy prohibiting scholars from studying profiles of users who have not activated certain privacy settings.”

For now, academia may trump privacy and your desire to keep researchers from monitoring your wall posts and movie preferences or to read too much into who you send the most cyber kisses to.

But you can at least make sure to set your security settings to private sending a virtual flag, like the signs you used to hang on your bedroom door to keep your siblings out, saying “No Scientists Allowed.”

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Kickin’ It with Craigslist: Facebook Offers New Marketplace Classifieds

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 29 May 2007 18:15:00 GMT

You might say that Craigslist is a bit like an old friend—we have been through a lot together. It is a great place for college students to hang out and find and sell all kinds of stuff. I even have received tons of part-time gigs off my local Craigslist and made some good money as well.

So, when I heard the news that Facebook was coming out with a new classified ads offering called “Marketplace Classifieds,” I was sad. In light of the once popular Friendster recently having fallen from grace (no longer as popular as it once was), I thought perhaps Craigslist may follow suit.

My thinking was that with Facebook’s 22 million users, its new Marketplace Classifieds would put a huge dent in Craigslist, and that maybe it would fade away into oblivion. Thankfully, that is not likely to be the case.

Here Comes Facebook

According to the May 13, 2007 ZDNet blog by Donna Bogatin, titled “Craigslist vs. Facebook? Why Craigslist wins, big time,” found at http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=1338, Facebook may THINK that its new service may be a threat to Craigslist, but after careful consideration, I no longer think so. The blog entry states that, “In teasing a classifieds ‘Facebook Marketplace’ offering via a CEO Mark Zuckerberg briefing for the New York Times Friday, the Facebook message apparently was ‘Craigslist, here we come!’ ”

The blog goes on to report about the interview, saying “‘Facebook, the social networking Web site, is adding free classified ad listings, putting it into competition with dozens of established companies like Craigslist and many newspapers.’” This officially happened Friday, May 11, 2007.

Facebook Adds Twist to Classifieds

Just like with Craigslist, users can choose a city to browse for stuff, sell their things, and look for jobs, apartments or housing around their campus. Granted Facebook just got started, so it will not have anywhere near the volume of classifieds that Craigslist has, but with 22 million Facebook users, that all may change relatively quickly.

Besides Craigslist being super easy to navigate and almost intuitively simple for posting ads and doing virtually everything, Facebook may face a challenge in proving itself in the online ad community. Also, when considering that Craigslist has turned down all buyout offers and largely refuses to play the corporate game, Facebook may find that it really does not threaten Craigslist after all.

The biggest difference I have found? With Facebook’s Marketplace Classifieds not only can you search and post ads to the entire community (as with Craigslist), but you also can restrict access and postings to your network of friends, contacts or designated Facebook groups. Why would you NOT want to expose your listings to the entire community? Really, I am not sure, since the more people that see your ad, the more likely it is that you will sell it. Only time will tell how well the Facebook formula works.

New College Classified Site

Another really cool college-related classified ads site I just discovered that “lets you target specific schools” is www.collegemedium.com. I have not thoroughly checked it out, but from what I can see, it looks promising. It has that new Web 2.0 look and not the clunky “old school” look and feel of Craigslist, which many purists prefer.

The Education Finance Advisors at NextStudent can help you figure in all your college expenses so that you get the student loan that best suits your needs. Don’t get caught short. Go to www.nextstudent.com for all your student loan needs.

Check back here next Friday for my next blog on Campus Life.

Student Loan Girl

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Social Networking: Hip, Cool and Fun … But Be Smart

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 18:19:00 GMT

There now is little doubt about social networking becoming an integral part of our culture. It almost is a foregone conclusion. I know you and your friends for years have been into MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, and many other such networks. But mom and dad—“the parent generation”—are just starting to get a clue.

I realize that last week I touched on social networks and how to get a job through them. This week I want to issue a caution for all of you out there who have become totally absorbed, dare I say obsessed, with meeting people and “doing your thing” online.

Do Not Let This Be You

Just ask Cameron Walker or Kurt Vachon. A few years back they had a short stint of fame I am sure they would rather forget, and quickly. Remember, they were the guys from Fisher College in Boston who tried to get a security guard fired by setting up a petition and posting it on Facebook.com? Both ended up getting expelled from school. Here is the story if you missed it: http://www.physorg.com/news8698.html.

Another interesting tidbit I found on Wikipedia gives details on how Facebook “is increasingly being used by school administrations and law enforcement agencies as a source of evidence against student users.” Here is the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook's_use_in_investigations.

You seriously need to look into this and pay attention. I do not say this to scare you or even to get you to close your Facebook account. No, what I am attempting to impart to you is a bit of wisdom. Be smart in what you say and how you say it. Honestly, is it a good move to air your dirty laundry, or give far too many incriminating details that could come back to haunt you later?

Most recently the CIA set up a Facebook page (see my blog from Jan. 26, 2007) and joins many other employers in the social network community. Do you really think that these employers want to hire someone who “parties all the time” or engages in behavior perceived as blatantly irresponsible?

Simple Solution With Minimum Hassle

Here is a great idea: If you absolutely must brag to your friends about a recent event that was so earth-shattering it was practically religious in nature, why not try more conventional methods. Like contacting your core group of friends directly through e-mail, instant messaging, or, in the case of MySpace, send an announcement. This may well keep you out of trouble and below the radar. And no, just for the record, I am not condoning methods that enable you to conceal immature behaviors or break the rules of your school behind the backs of college administrators.

Bloggers: Take Note

For all you bloggers out there, both those who post and those who comment, be careful too. This past Sunday, Jan. 28, 2007, a blogger by the name of Shoemoney (Jeremy Shoemaker) got a rude awakening, and it was not from anything he did. Shoemoney was served a subpoena to testify in a slander lawsuit stemming from a comment someone made on his blog. Unreal! Here is the story: http://www.revenews.com/carstencumbrowski/2007/01/legal_issues_with_blog_comment.html.

So, if you have a blog, conservative or outlandish, just be sensitive of the content you post. If someone posts a comment that is way over the top, is slanderous or just plain mean or evil, you may want to consider removing it, for your sake.

Check back here next Friday for my next blog on Campus Life.

Student Loan Girl

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CIA Socializes: Getting a Job through FaceBook, MySpace, Whatever

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 20:18:00 GMT

Could it be that social networks are becoming an embedded piece of our culture, no longer just limited to college geeks, party mongers, and those who are hip and in the know? That would appear to be the case.

Just last month the CIA, that is, the Central Intelligence Agency, got friendly with FaceBook. It has been using the popular social networking site to recruit potential employees into its organization. And get this, it even uses a promotional YouTube video to get you interested. Here’s the page: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2223915657.

Do What Gets You Hired

Responding to newspaper ads and competing with hundreds of other applicants for a single position does not give you great odds for getting hired. Resume experts and career coaches point to statistics that say most people, in excess of more than 70 percent, get jobs through people they know or from hearing about jobs “on the street.” That is good news for those of you who are into FaceBook, MySpace and other social networking sites. Chances are your network already is established, even if it is filled with college buddies or those with whom you associate for entertainment or dating value.

So, it would not be that much of a stretch to use your network, or more likely expand what you already have for the purpose of searching for your ideal job.

Be Careful What You Post

But before you get started, heed this: Clean up your profile and make sure that you do not reveal any information that could harm you or defeat your job search before you start. Though there is a definite difference between a “public” and a “private” persona, employers may not get this.

Several weeks back, there was a lot of talk flying around about how employers do not have the right to (or should not) check out MySpace and other social networking sites when screening potential employees. The fact remains that employers do this, regardless of what we would prefer. So, here’s my unsolicited advice: Do not brag on and on about the latest frat party where you won numerous dubious awards for certain behaviors that likely will not endear you to your future employer.

Other Avenues

Besides searching employers’ profiles, developing your network, and asking your existing network if anyone knows someone in the industry or of a job for which you may be interested, you could try some of these techniques.

· Check out career networking sites like www.LinkedIn.com.

· Use the Jobs section on MySpace. You can search for positions as well as post your resume. Go here: http://jobs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=careers.

· Start a blog. You either could write one about your career interests or give a firsthand account of your job search. Both ways may serve to market you as a potential job candidate. Use: www.blogger.com, www.blog-city.com or www.wordpress.com (they all are free).

Check back here next Friday for my next blog on Campus Life.

Student Loan Girl

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