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Interview
Social Networking: The New Face of Recruiting
A Q&A with Brad Ward, electronic communication coordinator for Butler University, on new methods for reaching prospective students
3/6/2008
Briggs: You mention some pretty impressive recruiting numbers in blogging about your success with Zinch, like an "open rate" of 35 percent. What does that mean?
Ward: [Using Zinch] we filtered a certain group of kids that we wanted to send a message to. That means 35 percent of the kids we sent the message to opened it on Zinch.
Briggs: And that's a pretty high number for e-mail?
Ward: Yes. We usually average about 11 [percent] to 13 percent [at that time of year] for larger e-mail blasts--just a blast-out-of-nowhere message to these kids. We're seeing about three times the open rate on Zinch.
Briggs: To what do you attribute that?
Ward: I think the kids on Zinch are obviously interested in colleges, so they want to hear what we have to say. And it's also just a whole "me" generation thing with these kids. For us to be going out there and finding them--I think they find something special about that. "Wow, this school is coming to talk to me; I'm not [having to go] to talk to them."
Briggs: Have you seen anything else out there like Zinch?
Ward: I haven't, no. It seems unique.
Briggs: You've also used other electronic tools for recruiting in interesting ways. What is the student blogger program you have there at Butler?
Ward: We have eight students that just blog about what they're doing every week. It gives people an idea of what it would be like to go here. There's two staff bloggers, and our mascot has a blog--we have an actual bulldog on campus, and one of the workers is his caretaker, so he writes a blog as if the mascot [were] speaking. It's pretty funny.
We put a Facebook advertisement out at the beginning of the year and said we were looking for students who want to blog. We had about 50 kids respond. So we put an application together and just kind of narrowed it down to get a good mix of the student population here on campus.
It's been going really well. It's the most popular area of the entire admission site. The student bloggers and the forums have more page views than any other part of the [Butler] site. We just launched it at the beginning of this year, and it's been going really well.
Briggs: Are there other online tools that you've had recruiting success with as well?
Ward: There are a lot of choices out there. We're experimenting with YouTube right now, with our Butler bloggers. We've purchased a little video camera ... with a USB port. Our bloggers just come to my office, take it for a few days, then put their videos on YouTube and bring it back. We're seeing some good results so far. We've only been doing that for about a month, but a couple of our videos have seen about a hundred hits already.
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