I’m not here to point fingers or make anyone look bad. I just want to share some simple steps to prepare for a social media campaign’s launch, and how to draw a circle of value linking back to the most crucial business metric: the bottom line.

Metrics can be a bothersome, confusing layer to a campaign, whether it’s social media or any other digital campaign. Metrics are difficult to prove. And social strategists often have the most difficulty, out of anyone in the organization, trying to prove the value of a major effort put forth in the digital space. The majority of CMOs are traditional marketers, and unless one dollar invested isn’t greater or equal to that dollar put forward, business value comes into question. In 2012, CMOs will intensify their scrutiny of social media investments and evaluate their overall worth. Social strategists and brand marketers must be prepared.

Consider this survey by IBM, published by eMarketer:

Traditional vs. New Media Approach

No matter what platform or social media channel that is used, measurement standards should be platform agnostic, and capture the essence of the end business result. Your brand must be creating, rather than be tool dependent. Traditional ROI calculations within social are a wash; they are being supplemented by softer “conversation buzz” and “influencer metrics.”

Translating Traditional ROI Metrics

Brand marketers typically calculate return based on investment and what it brings to the bottom line. However, social media campaigns require assessing different metrics, such as five laid out by Altimeter’s Brian Solis:

• Return on engagement: The duration of time spent either in conversation or interacting with social objects, and in turn, what transpired that’s worthy of measurement.
• Return on participation: The metric tied to measuring and valuing the time spent participating in social media through conversations or the creation of social objects.
• Return on involvement: Similar to participation, these are touch points for documenting states of interaction and tie in metrics and potential return of each.
• Return on attention: In the attention economy, we assess the means to seize attention, hold it, and measure the response.
• Return on trust: A variant on measuring customer loyalty and the likelihood for referrals, a trust barometer establishes the state of trust earned in social media engagement and the prospect of generating advocacy and how it impacts future business.

These five participation metrics can allow you to discover and then plant the seed to value in your programs. In fact, it’s proven needed in 2011 based on a recent survey done by eMarketer. It evaluated the metrics used by CMOs worldwide to measure the value of social media marketing activities.

In 2011, site traffic, the number of positive mentions, page views, and contributors were the top metrics that CMOs looked toward for value from social media. One significant metric that saw the largest jump was conversion and after that revenue. Each jumped 33 and 20 percentage points respectively from 2010 to 2011, a clear sign that the bottom line and results are a growing need from the C-suite when looking at social media ROI.

5 Phases of Social Media Measurement

Working your way down the funnel, metrics become “harder,” going from the wider top of the funnel where social metrics are often soft and tagged as views, followers, fans, subscribers, and overall brand mentions within the digital space. Once a user enters the funnel and begins talking about you, the next level down would be her influence, how users speak about your brand, what is their perception, what is their social equity, and do they have a high number of followers, fans, a highly read blog, etc?

Next, you want to focus on the actual engagement: Was it a click, a tweet, a retweet, a share, an @ reply, direct messages (DMs), wall posts, comments, and so on? “Engagers” are the next level before an actual conversion occurs that would affect the bottom line. Be prepared: the time delay that goes from being an “engager” to a “converter” can vary. It could happen within a day; it could happen in six months. This part of the funnel is obviously the most attractive to CMOs, but as a social strategist, you must translate this to the higher level in the correct manner. At some point, you may or may not see a conversion, but realize you have built your brand equity even stronger with the addition of this “engager.”

Finally, for those who do convert, depending on what level they’re at, whether it’s a sign-up, a registration, a purchase, a download, whatever that conversion may be – that is connecting the bottom line. And that is what your CMO wants to see.

Once a person converts, social media continues to be active in the “retention” process, keeping your customer always learning and coming back for more. With this, you create brand advocates, who will most likely share their experiences with their communities, on and offline. The long-term effect here is what makes social media more valuable than any other form of marketing. It connects with every part of your organization’s business.

In the U.S. alone, more than two-thirds of all adults who are active online are using social media. Consider that fact, and then the fact that, amazingly enough, there are still 57 percent of businesses out there, for one reason or another, that don’t understand the impact that social media can have on their business.

And once social media does become its own functional department in an organization, it’s an element that cannot only function on its own, but support and operate within other core business units that are already established within any given organization. Whomever is tasked with leading social media efforts within an organization should work within the basic business framework already established:

• Marketing/PR
• Retention
• Customer service
• Acquisition

Marketing/PR

The lifeblood of any company relies on two areas: marketing and PR. And their activities combined on a monthly basis keep any organization moving forward. Their mission is normally tied to content creation, delivery, and promotion. Social media is key here, as it’s normally utilized as another marketing channel to accompany any campaign that marketing and PR promote. Social media could be used on a simple level by just pushing out messaging across social channels, such as Facebook and Twitter. Organizations that consider larger promotions might choose to do something around a custom Facebook tab with some sort of social engagement built in to the experience. This allows a brand to promote their content, invite viral sharing, and push content to current and new prospects within and outside the social media space.

Retention

It’s always important to remember that your own customers are your best salespeople. And when considering retention, you not only want to keep your current customers wanting more, but also give them opportunities to share your content on and offline. Social media is the perfect ecosystem for educating users. And depending on your brand, this can happen in a variety of ways, using social channels such as a blog, Facebook, Twitter, or a YouTube channel.
Delivering content in a retention model should focus on engaging current users and exciting them about the brand. This offers them the opportunity to talk about your brand, and promote it within their social circles. One way you could package this type of content delivery could be through video. A number of brands have created Livestream channels that allow them to continuously educate, promote, and flash their brand to their user base by utilizing live video. Another tactic might be creating a secondary blog, outside of your corporate blog, that focuses on some aspect of your brand. Numerous organizations use the fast-growing social blogging platform, Tumblr. If you give the blog a personality and a different voice, you can use that to broadcast content to your users and gain brand loyalty points.

Customer Service

In today’s landscape, customer service is more important than ever. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and various other social neighborhoods can level the playing field, enabling businesses of all sizes to interact directly with customers like never before. The voice of the consumer has never been more powerful, or influential. It has the potential to spread virally in an instant. Over 58 percent of consumers who have tweeted about a bad experience have never received a response from the offending company. This is a stat that organizations can avoid by supporting their social media efforts with customer support/member services.

The solution seems simple, but management of a channel once something like this is launched can be a time-consuming process. But once you do finalize management efforts within, the idea of social support starts with how you respond. It’s important to ensure you’re prepared to respond quickly and cordially. In some cases, you may need to “kill them with kindness” in an effort to offer an experience that exceeds their expectations. If a customer has a serious issue with no quick resolution, offer a specialized email address or phone contact in order to take the conversation offline. Solving these issues in real time through a company’s social channel shows dedication and transparency to an organization’s customers. Just consider this: the next time a customer tweets “Is there anyone out there?” you can proudly respond with “Yes, how can we help you?”

Acquisition

This should be the last reason to use social media within your organization. If you believe that you can use social media as a high-level conversion channel, you need to head back to the war room and rethink your strategy. Using social media as a pure acquisition channel is where you find its least value.
Social media typically captures people’s attention outside of the buying cycle, so it’s used more often for brand trust, recall, and engagement. Also, social media takes place on platforms that are not your own and within places where you have little control. It’s far less a science within social media as compared to search, display, or other forms of direct marketing, where otherwise you have complete control over context and execution.

When it comes down to tracking and measuring the impact of social media on sales, it’s still difficult to nail down 100 percent, as social media has a contributing role to play in consumer likelihood of purchasing from you, so there’s less opportunity to determine acquisition metrics as well.
Although social media is strongest in areas of brand awareness, nurturing loyalty, increasing customer retention, and general brand recall, rather than powering acquisitions; there are still some tactics you can employ to better a result.

Social media can be integrated into acquisition programs where it’s a stage-by-stage approach, to funnel people through a point of conversion. These conversions will find more success when focusing more on a product, rather than the brand as a whole. Some ways to do this might be through some tactics like opening up a shop tab on Facebook or distributing through other social channels where you can push individual products and your brand at the same time. Other tactics might include integrating a conversion form on your Facebook page, or integrating social media into direct email campaigns.

Internet users flock to social media networks to stay in touch with friends and family by sharing messages, photos and more. But when it comes to sharing personal information on these public sites, users expect to be able to share privately with their friends and circles.

A study from online sharing platform Posterous conducted by Harris Interactive found the majority of US social network users felt family and personal photos were for private sharing. Expectations for privately sharing status updates and photos of friends were slightly more lenient.

Expectations vary slightly across social networking sites, however; users were typically less demanding of privacy on Facebook compared to other sites, such as Google+. One reason for the slight difference could be the familiarity of Facebook compared to a newer site like Google+ that users are still learning how to operate. In addition, Google+ in particular was billed as the answer to selective sharing, with its Circles highlighted much more strongly than Facebook’s analogous features.

Additional findings from an October 2011 USA Today and Gallup Poll support the theory that site familiarity and usage might relate to a user’s comfort for their privacy. For instance, 39% of US Facebook users who used the social networking site less than once a week were very concerned about their privacy, compared to only 26% of users who logged in daily.

One possibility is that greater privacy concerns lead to less frequent use of these social networking sites—or that greater usage leads to greater familiarity and comfort.

But one should not mistake comfort with online privacy on sites such as Facebook for an understanding of privacy controls. In regard to how well US social network users believe they understand Facebook’s privacy settings, Posterous found less than a third (32%) felt they had a complete understanding of such controls.

Clearly, there is room to grow here, but data from National Security Cyber Alliance (NSCA) and McAfee found 21% of US internet users were either unsure of when they last changed their social network privacy and security settings or admitted to having never done so. In comparison, 44% said they had updated their settings within the last month or last week.

NCSA and McAfee also found 46% of respondents said they had altered their social media network usage in response to security concerns, whereas 50% said they had not. It is worth watching these percentages closely in the coming months as the online privacy debate continues to heat up, likely forcing social networks to become more transparent about their privacy settings.

In the U.S. alone, more than two-thirds of all adults who are active online are using social media. Consider that fact, and then the fact that, amazingly enough, there are still 57 percent of businesses out there, for one reason or another, that don’t understand the impact that social media can have on their business.

And once social media does become its own functional department in an organization, it’s an element that cannot only function on its own, but support and operate within other core business units that are already established within any given organization. Whomever is tasked with leading social media efforts within an organization should work within the basic business framework already established:

• Marketing/PR
• Retention
• Customer service
• Acquisition

Marketing/PR

The lifeblood of any company relies on two areas: marketing and PR. And their activities combined on a monthly basis keep any organization moving forward. Their mission is normally tied to content creation, delivery, and promotion. Social media is key here, as it’s normally utilized as another marketing channel to accompany any campaign that marketing and PR promote. Social media could be used on a simple level by just pushing out messaging across social channels, such as Facebook and Twitter. Organizations that consider larger promotions might choose to do something around a custom Facebook tab with some sort of social engagement built in to the experience. This allows a brand to promote their content, invite viral sharing, and push content to current and new prospects within and outside the social media space.

Retention

It’s always important to remember that your own customers are your best salespeople. And when considering retention, you not only want to keep your current customers wanting more, but also give them opportunities to share your content on and offline. Social media is the perfect ecosystem for educating users. And depending on your brand, this can happen in a variety of ways, using social channels such as a blog, Facebook, Twitter, or a YouTube channel.

Delivering content in a retention model should focus on engaging current users and exciting them about the brand. This offers them the opportunity to talk about your brand, and promote it within their social circles. One way you could package this type of content delivery could be through video. A number of brands have created Livestream channels that allow them to continuously educate, promote, and flash their brand to their user base by utilizing live video. Another tactic might be creating a secondary blog, outside of your corporate blog, that focuses on some aspect of your brand. Numerous organizations use the fast-growing social blogging platform, Tumblr. If you give the blog a personality and a different voice, you can use that to broadcast content to your users and gain brand loyalty points.

Customer Service

In today’s landscape, customer service is more important than ever. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and various other social neighborhoods can level the playing field, enabling businesses of all sizes to interact directly with customers like never before. The voice of the consumer has never been more powerful, or influential. It has the potential to spread virally in an instant. Over 58 percent of consumers who have tweeted about a bad experience have never received a response from the offending company. This is a stat that organizations can avoid by supporting their social media efforts with customer support/member services.

The solution seems simple, but management of a channel once something like this is launched can be a time-consuming process. But once you do finalize management efforts within, the idea of social support starts with how you respond. It’s important to ensure you’re prepared to respond quickly and cordially. In some cases, you may need to “kill them with kindness” in an effort to offer an experience that exceeds their expectations. If a customer has a serious issue with no quick resolution, offer a specialized email address or phone contact in order to take the conversation offline. Solving these issues in real time through a company’s social channel shows dedication and transparency to an organization’s customers. Just consider this: the next time a customer tweets “Is there anyone out there?” you can proudly respond with “Yes, how can we help you?”

Acquisition

This should be the last reason to use social media within your organization. If you believe that you can use social media as a high-level conversion channel, you need to head back to the war room and rethink your strategy. Using social media as a pure acquisition channel is where you find its least value.

Social media typically captures people’s attention outside of the buying cycle, so it’s used more often for brand trust, recall, and engagement. Also, social media takes place on platforms that are not your own and within places where you have little control. It’s far less a science within social media as compared to search, display, or other forms of direct marketing, where otherwise you have complete control over context and execution.

When it comes down to tracking and measuring the impact of social media on sales, it’s still difficult to nail down 100 percent, as social media has a contributing role to play in consumer likelihood of purchasing from you, so there’s less opportunity to determine acquisition metrics as well.

Although social media is strongest in areas of brand awareness, nurturing loyalty, increasing customer retention, and general brand recall, rather than powering acquisitions; there are still some tactics you can employ to better a result.

Social media can be integrated into acquisition programs where it’s a stage-by-stage approach, to funnel people through a point of conversion. These conversions will find more success when focusing more on a product, rather than the brand as a whole. Some ways to do this might be through some tactics like opening up a shop tab on Facebook or distributing through other social channels where you can push individual products and your brand at the same time. Other tactics might include integrating a conversion form on your Facebook page, or integrating social media into direct email campaigns.

However, the public or employees often don’t really see or understand what’s going on behind the scenes at a company. Keep in mind: Not only your employees, but your customers are your greatest sales people. Ensuring that they understand what you are doing holistically with your corporate social responsibility efforts is key to growing as a brand.

As you’ve learned from countless articles you’ve read, transparency and full disclosure are key to creating a stronger, more efficient social business. And thanks to social media culture, companies recognize the need for a stronger, more public social responsibility strategy. The social media spotlight garners accolades and new business for companies that give back. All the more reason to create a strong corporate social responsibility strategy. Here are five steps to help develop a corporate social responsibility strategy using social media:

1. Lead from the top.

You must have a long-term vision and commitment from the executive level when building your CSR program. Having C-level buy-in can also greatly enhance overall brand positioning and provide your supporters the opportunity to engage and promote your brand’s activity with no doubt lingering.

Blake Mycoskie, CEO of Toms Shoes, is a great example of a strong leader. He readily uses Twitter to spread the word of the brand and his story. It already had a unique approach to CSR molded into its business model: Through its One for One Movement, Toms Shoes donates one pair of shoes to a child in need every time a customer buys a pair.

2. Always be listening and learning.

Your brand must constantly monitor and listen to the needs of the communities where you do business and then determine the most suitable approach to address their social issues. Whether it’s providing assistance to homeless, by being present at food banks, building homes, or helping educators by donating materials, time, or even money – all of this helps to humanize the brand while strengthening the community at the same time.

By searching Twitter using hashtags such as #CSR, #sustainability, or doing some Google searches around CSR, you will discover some great examples on how you can incorporate a well-thoughtout CSR strategy for your brand and socialize it.

3. Innovate.

Companies must leverage social media to encourage users to also take part, while promoting your own brand’s initiatives. Yahoo runs a campaign called “How Good Grows”, a crowdsourcing initiative as part of its CSR efforts; users and employees share random acts of kindness and filter it out through their respective Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter profiles, allowing others to engage (share, comment, or like) with the posted act.

After the first year of “How Good Grows,” Yahoo went one step further and featured the top 10 inspiring acts, conducting separate interviews with each person, and using it more as a larger public relations play. The effort helps spread positive feedback about the brand and keeps the story growing, offering a larger viral play in the end.

4. Communicate.

Once you have built your CSR strategy, make sure you talk about what you are doing with your CSR initiatives. When people hear about acts of compassion, they are more likely to take interest and then take part in your experience. By using not just your social media channels, such as your blog, Twitter, or Facebook page, but also your inbound channels hold just as much value – such as employee meetings, board meetings and press briefs. By maximizing the coverage of your efforts – it brings attention to what your brand is doing full circle.

5. Invest.

Don’t waste your CSR efforts. Companies focus so much attention on the sales channel, which in today’s economy seems almost unavoidable. But it’s crucial to consider either allocating internal resources to an ongoing CSR strategy effort, or if you can, hire key individuals to grow and properly develop a strategy for your company’s CSR efforts.

Your customers are your greatest sales people. Ensure that they understand what you are doing from a CSR perspective. “Doing good” can actually be good for business.

Filling a Void

DealsGoRound CEO Kris Petersen says that deals are going unused across all categories, from food and drink to fitness to travel. “We’re really filling a void where [the daily deal vendors] are leaving off,” Petersen says, “and not because they don’t care,” but because it’s a necessarily low priority for them.

Meanwhile, these companies are selling so many deals that the average customer is stuck with six at a time, and one or more of those goes unspent. Its value vanishes. So consumed with selling new deals and attracting new customers, coupon sites are apparently leaving hundreds of millions of dollars – and lots of new customers for their clients – on the table.

Estimating the Size of the Market

As far as the size of the table – whether DealsGoRound’s $577 million is a reasonable number – it’s worth doing another back-of-the-envelope calculation. Respondents to the Rice survey reported that 21.7% of deals went unfulfilled. The study only covered 23 U.S. markets, and it had a 27% response rate, meaning that the non-respondents could be significantly different from the respondents, which would leave skewed results. One possible bias would be that dissatisfied customers could be more likely to voluntarily respond to a survey.

Nevertheless, the Rice study points to surveys in different markets that had similar response rates and showed comparable results. Since deal tracker site Mob Manager finds that people sit on 6 unredeemed deals at a time, let’s assume it’s reasonable that 21.7% of those – about one – goes unredeemed each time. Granting that, we could apply it to estimates of the size of the daily deals market. Wall Street analysts estimated the size of the global daily deals market in 2011 to be almost $3.7 billion, and 21.7% of that would be over $800 million. Assuming that’s a rather bullish estimate – and allowing for some response bias in the Rice survey, $500 million or so in unredeemed deals sounds plausible.

The Secondary Market

DealsGoRound is among a handful of sites picking up the pieces of this secondary market, including Lifesta, CoupRecoup and Sell My Deal. There’s a site called redealize with international ambitions, but it looks like a ghost town. And there’s a site called dealigee, which is owned by a Chicago-based company. Chicago is Groupon country, and DealsGoRound hails from there as well. But Petersen has grown his startup from a Craisglist-style free-for-all into a PayPal-powered, feature-rich marketplace serving 128 cities in the U.S. and Canada. The pot in 2011 is up to is $577 million or so, so the race is on for the secondary daily deals market.

Good for Business?

We’ve written before about the open question of whether daily deals are good for small businesses, and Petersen regularly encounters the criticism that some businesses depend on deals going unredeemed to keep from breaking the bank. “Businesses would prefer for those 21.7% of people to show up,” Petersen says, because that’s their opportunity to up-sell customers and build loyalty.

“If people are [offering daily deals] in hopes that the breakage [revenue] is how they make their money,” Petersen says, “then I think they’re sorely mistaken about the value they’re getting out of this whole industry.”

Disgruntled Business Owners

The study from Rice found that 55.5% of businesses surveyed made money on their daily deals promotions, 17.9% broke even, and 26.6% of businesses lost money. Keep in mind that 21.7% of their deals go unredeemed, which means the businesses pocket the money.

Almost 80% of customers who redeemed deals were new customers, but only 36% of them spent beyond the face value of the deal, and the study says that only 20% of customers returned to purchase something at full price.

It would take a much bigger study to be precise, but the margins on these deals are thin, and significantly increasing the amount of deals that get cashed in would reduce their value for businesses even more. The Rice study found that just under half (48%) of surveyed businesses would definitely run a second daily deal promotion.

The study also found no significant performance differences between the various daily deal sites. No Groupons or LivingSocials stuck out from the pack as far as how well their marketing paid off for their client businesses.

Wasted Deals Are Wasted Deals

But with hundreds of millions in deals just vanishing, Petersen thinks the consumer is getting hurt, and that hurts businesses, too, ultimately. Getting stuck with a deal could lead consumers never to buy one again. By enabling consumers to resell unused deals, Petersen believes DealsGoRound helps keep the daily deals business cycle in motion.

To illustrate the secondary market opportunity, DealsGoRound has produced this infographic (see below) with their own data as well as data from Mob Manager, the Rice University study and Local Offer Network.

Well, they were pretty close to right. My dream to become an all-star newspaper writer, were squashed by a dose of reality, and a stack of graduate school loans that someone was going to have to pay off. As these series of events took place, I began to stroll the internet more, taking an interest in marketing, and also began blogging myself. At first, uneventful, I thought to myself often, “who cares what I say?” Well, not many at first, but I kept pressing on, a small start-up down the street from me opened it’s virtual doors and I took interest, something called The Facebook.

This copy cat of a network that dares try to be MySpace, who are these fakers I thought. Well, a month later, I found myself addicted, also blogging even more. In fact, I was so good at it, I began blog coaching, teaching at first my friends, and then fellow employees how we should approach this new medium. At the same time, I was growing my expertise in marketing in the digital space, learning the ins and outs of the online world, such as SEO, PPC, online media, website building, management, email marketing and content writing. This was all so new and exciting, if I only knew what it would soon become.

Long story short, and fast forwarding six years later, one TV station, three agencies, and a successful consulting period, I now stand here today. A digital nut, native, and someone who is about to embark upon a new adventure at Ancestry.com

Today, August 1, 2011, was my last day at Edelman. A great agency that I had some of my best experiencs at, from all the creative and intellectual people I was able to work with, great friends I was able to make and memories I’ll take away, an amazing experience. But with departure, comes an amazing opportunity, as I am heading to Ancestry.com to become the Global Director of Social Media. A role that is sure to combine all of my digital expertise into one, exciting challenge.

I thank all of those throughout my very young career who have helped me get to where I am today, and look forward moving into the future. For now, it’s off to Los Cabos in Mexico for a short break, and then a fresh start when I return.

See you in a week!

Chances are, if you’ve hired or have been hired for a job in the last few years knows, social media is now a standard necessity of the recruiting process. I look over copious amounts of data that show LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook playing a crucial role in the hiring process, and numbers are only rising.

The infographic from JobVite shows that 89% of U.S. companies are using social media for recruiting. But how successful is it? The survey shows that 64% of companies said they’ve hired through social media and 55% plan to invest even more in it this year.

One interesting point in the survey showed that while LinkedIn is used by the majority of companies for recruiting, most job seekers actually use Facebook when looking for a job, showing that people are relying on closer, more personal connections to find employment.

The methodology included interviews with 456 college social network administrators from last November to May at all sizes and kinds of institutions. 

When it comes to overall usage of social media, 100% of all colleges and universities studied are using some form of social media. Usage continues to rise for most popular tools, but adoption of others have leveled off or fallen.

Facebook, Twitter, a blog and podcasting are all up in usage from last year’s report. MySpace, not surprisingly, is the only platform that decreased in usage. Foursquare and YouTube were also included for the first time in this year’s report, and are used by 20% and 86% respectively.

The platform with the largest increase that has grown in use for admissions professionals is LinkedIn with 47%, up from 16% last year. Another growing platform, blogging, has also been embraced in the last year in the educational sector, while we see other areas outside of colleges and universities falling off (i.e, Fortune 500, Forbes Top Charities); higher education usage has grown exponentially.

Focusing on blogs, the study revealed some interesting statistics around the “conversation” aspect of blogs. Blogs that fail to facilitate engagement and conversation tend to lose their audience.

In the 2007 study, 37% of schools with blogs did not accept comments. You could imagine, this is a REAL problem if the goal is to connect with prospective students through ongoing conversation with the school. However, over the past three years, that number has dropped signifigantly, and is now at just 15% in 2010. This shows that schools are beginning to master the tool and embrace it for its true spirit of two-way conversation. And for students and their parents looking to have conversation online about particular aspects of university life, the increased interaction through comments can be extremely signifigant.

Another blog characteristic that increased over the past four years is RSS feed availability and email subscriptions. In 2007, the study showed 46% of schools have an RSS feed availability and 31% allowing email subscriptions. In the latest study, now 77% have an RSS feed available and 54% allow email sign-ups. Again, a clear indication that there is an increased sophistication in the use of blogging as a recruitment strategy.

Are They Listening?

All the evidence has been presented that shows schools are communicating in new ways. But, the next question, are they listening to what’s being said about their brand online? In 2007, 53% said they did, 54% in 2008, and 73% in 2009 reported that they monitored the internet for buzz, posts, conversations and news about their institution. However, the latest research shows a slight decrease to 68%. This is surprising based on how easy monitoring can be done and implemented. Solutions have grown over the years since 2007 and their feasability in cost as well, with both free and paid options available.