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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: What kinds of things are your student bloggers creating for YouTube?
Ward: The most popular video is when one of the female bloggers took the camera into her sorority house and did a seven-minute tour. I think kids find that interesting because you're obviously not going to get that on a tour. We have very nice sorority and fraternity houses so it was a good video.
Another popular video [shows] Coach Boone, who is the coach featured in [the movie] "Remember the Titans," on campus speaking. That student-life aspect is popular. "What am I going to see here?" "What am I going to do?" And basketball games and things like that are always popular.
Briggs: So it's students talking to students in a medium that they understand.
Ward: Exactly.
Briggs: In terms of recruiting tools, what else besides Zinch and YouTube have you tried?
Ward: Are you familiar with the fan pages now on Facebook? We have one of those set up for the bloggers, so that kids on Facebook can ask the bloggers a question there. We haven't really started promoting that yet. It's just there in case a kid runs across it. Right now, we're [mainly] using that to direct traffic over to our main blogs, which are on our admission site.
[Speaking of Facebook], when I got here in June of last year I did a search for Butler Class of 2011. There was a group that a student had started [in Facebook] with about 200 kids in it. By the end of the summer, there were 750 kids--and our incoming class was only 950.
Briggs: So most of your incoming students were talking to each other on Facebook?
Ward: Yes. But what we were noticing is that everyone was asking questions, but since they were all incoming freshmen, nobody really knew the answers. The story I always tell everybody is this one: Someone asked if there was wireless in the dorms. Someone else said, "I think on my tour they said no."
Briggs: And that wasn't true?
Ward: No. We have wireless in all our dorms.... There are lots of other examples.
So I've started tracking the 2012 group already. It went over 100 students this weekend. I'm trying to use my blogger students to watch that a little bit and just make sure there's correct information there. I don't think the kids would view administrators or employees going in there very well. A lot of the kids that are posting on there aren't quite sure if they're coming to Butler yet.... They're looking at schools, and they're using this to gather some more information, so we don't really want to go in there and try to look official. Our student bloggers just kind of keep an eye on it.
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