• TargetX campus visit experts and clients featured in the Washington Monthly http://bit.ly/bZj0UE #
• TargetX’s campus visit experts in the Washington Monthly… http://fb.me/EJHT4BVa #

Diverse student populations, small class sizes, a wide range of student activities, state-of-the-art facilities and convenient locations. These are characteristics that institutions use to describe themselves. What they don’t realize is that every college is saying the same thing. So where’s the differentiation?

Bloomberg Businessweek posted an article discussing Youngme Moon’s book, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd. Moon, a Harvard Business School professor, wrote her book with a focus on what is called “reverse positioning.” An idea that promotes the following: Simplify when everyone else is tacking on options. Give back to customers when competitors are taking back. Resist the urge to succumb to feature-itis.

Examples of companies that broke free from the herd include JetBlue and Google. These organizations stripped down their offerings to focus on what they did best (low fares and essential amenities only, and superior search technology). Her strategies on breaking herd mentality also crossover into the industry we live in — student recruiting. The takeaway for higher education from these corporate examples is twofold.

1) Don’t be afraid to be different. It’s surprising that schools have an aversion to replacing marketing speak with an authentic description of who they are. Students want to understand your institution and why your school is unique.

2) When you have something unique to offer - focus your attention on letting your audience know about it. Focus on what differentiates you and do so successfully. Just because your competitor is going one direction, doesn’t mean you need to follow.

Break free from the herd and pave your own path.

Read the Bloomberg Businessweek article “To Hell with the Herd.”

August and September are hectic times for our consulting campus visit team members. Trent Gilbert, Emily Welsh and I are crisscrossing the country conducting ambassador/tour guide training and checking the status of campus visit improvements at many clients.

But it’s also one of the most rewarding times. Besides having the opportunity to inspire student guides to be master storytellers, render authenticity and have fun, we get to see the progress consulting campus visit clients are making based upon our recommendations.

Recently Baldwin-Wallace College in NE Ohio implemented a walking-riding tour. BWC has a unique physicality because it’s the merger of two campuses (Baldwin and Wallace Colleges) and a third campus that comprises their conservatory. While all are walkable and relatively connected, it’s a bit of a death march in both the heat of summer as well as during those not-so-balmy Cleveland winters.

This summer, they implemented this van and start tours with a riding portion. Along with seeing all of the college, the riding portion includes the Cleveland Metroparks, shopping/eating favorites in the adjacent Village of Berea (both favorites of BWC students), as well as BWC’s new Center for Innovation and Growth. Then the majority of the campus is revealed via a traditional walking tour.

Patti Skrha, Director of Undergraduate Admission, told us that it’s receiving great reviews by prospective families who report that they really appreciate seeing all parts of the BWC experience without being walked to exhaustion and that campus is attractive from all approaches.

While we’re the first to stress authenticity and rendering a student experience, at times that seems counterintuitive to a walking-riding hybrid tour, especially if yours is a walking campus. But if Presidents and Boards are going to continually expand the borders of a campus and increase acreage and square footage, comfort of guests and maximizing their time on campus might require a walking-riding hybrid.

BWC, Alfred and WVU all have well designed and purposeful walking-riding hybrid tours. Does your campus have one? Need one? Or have you experienced one at another campus? Please click “comments” and tell us about it.

We’ll be sharing more successes from the road in the coming days and weeks.

We’ve recently released eXpressEmail 8.4 — the latest version of our original email broadcast system.

Have you seen what’s new?

Today I’m stepping aside and inviting you to watch a short video from Dara Corrato, our Director of Client Support.

Dara will be your guide around eXpress 8.4 and its newest features — which include the ability to:

• Search and sort campaign intelligence
• Save your frequently-used queries and data import mappings
• Create html messages using our in-line editor

Just click below to visit our Video Library and then click “Learn about Enhancements to eXpressEmail (3:51)”:

You’re less than five minutes away from saving time and working smarter in eXpressEmail.

Adrienne

P.S.  If you’ve got questions or would like to talk more about eXpress 8.4, don’t hesitate to contact TargetX Client Support at support@targetx.com or 877.715.7474 (press 3).

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Want to learn more about how to change things in your office?

Visit www.targetx.com/odc to read about our new book “Overthrowing Dead Culture:  The Vision to Change the World of College Recruiting.”

And be sure to register for our next webcast to learn more as well:
www.targetx.com/webcasts

When 120 enrollment officers came together last fall for their annual “iThink” discussion, one of the things they thought was this:

Work more closely with Career Services. After all, communicating the success of your graduates may be the best way to articulate the return-on-investment of your school.

Forging ties with the job placement office was a theme that came up again and again as this group of high-powered admissions officers looked for concrete ways to confront the challenges they face.

And now one of the world’s most prestigious schools has taken that idea a bold step further.

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania has appointed a vice dean for admissions, financial aid and career management.

J.J. Cutler recently told the Chronicle of Higher Education why his new position was created: “The typical model in admissions is that you turn the class over to student services or the office of student life, and then you start recruiting for the following year. We thought it would be interesting for someone in admissions to have some continuity in the life cycle of the student experience. That way we get an early read on our students and can start to better build services for them in career management, even before they get here.”

While you may not have the luxury of creating a new position that merges admissions and career services, there are ways to more effectively use the resources, insight and success of your job placement people to communicate the value of your degree.

For the 3rd straight year, top-level enrollment officers will kick off the NACAC conference at iThink. This event is for presidents, VPs, deans and directors and will focus this year on “The Perfect Storm in College Admissions.”

Learn more about iThink.

Love him or hate him — the name Tom Peters rarely invokes feelings of neutrality.

As business’ bad boy of management consulting, he’s spent years inspiring boardroom’s top brass to quit being blasé and start being exceptional (oh, and he doesn’t always ask nicely;)

Even his Twitter bio outs him as a “professional agitator,” which is pretty authentic if you’ve ever read his books or seen him speak.  Tom is an outspoken leader who’s not afraid to draw a line in the sand and call it like he sees it — even if it turns people off in the process.

As a student of business (as well as a practicing addict;), I’ve followed Tom’s writings for years.

This weekend I spent some time catching up on his Twitter feed (yes, I still follow some people even though I’ve been Twitter-truant for months;)

This tweet from July really got me thinking about doing things differently — or, perhaps even more importantly, not doing some things at all.

I thought I would share it in the hopes it might inspire you to shake things up in your office this fall:

Pretty simple concept huh?  That our “To-Don’ts” should be at least as important as our “To-Do’s?”

Too bad it never seems to work that way in reality though.

Often we just keep adding more to our plates without questioning the seemingly “have-to” activities and making tough choices about what’s really working.

But in a situation with finite time, resources and budget money, simply piling on more is a losing proposition (not to mention an exhausting one).

So take a cue from Tom Peters and start making your own “To-Don’t” list.  Get together with your staff or start a conversation in your next meeting as well.  I bet together you can come up with at least a few things that simply aren’t worth the investment.

Then spend that extra time and money focusing on the campaigns, events and activities that are really helping you recruit best-fit students.

And that’s one big “To-Do.”

Adrienne

P.S.  What will you not do this fall? Comment below and let’s talk…

Visit Tom Peters on the web
Follow Tom Peters on Twitter

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Want to learn more about how to change things in your office?

Visit www.targetx.com/odc to read about our book “Overthrowing Dead Culture:  The Vision to Change the World of College Recruiting.”

And be sure to register for our next webcast to learn more as well.

Online recruitment tools have become a critical aspect of the enrollment efforts at colleges and universities.

What are the student’s needs? What areas should we focus on? Which tools are highly valued by college-bound students? These are all questions an admissions office asks themselves. Insights into what students are looking for are always useful to understand what you can do as a recruiter.

Noel-Levitz E-Expectations research group surveyed 1,000 prospective students on their online behaviors, needs and expectations in the college search process. There were some surprising (and not so surprising) results from this year’s survey.

One primary finding that dominated the study was the importance of an institution’s webpage. According to the Noel-Levitz results, the college website is still a student’s main destination and portal to your campus. While more complex forms of e-recruitment become available to students, finding and researching information on the website is still most important.

One hundred percent of survey respondents said they were visiting/researching college websites. Survey results indicated 33% of students visit 3-5 websites and 18% visit 10-14 websites. While many students are visiting a significant number of college websites, students have specific expectations during their time on your site.

Students expect detailed information about academic programs and cost to be easily found on the site. While they listed these items as “most valuable,” it should not discount the information relating to student life, location and activities. It only emphasizes the need for institutions to carefully organize their websites to meet prospective students’ needs.

When students feel their needs are not being met on the website, it can have costly results for an institution. According to Noel-Levitz, 1 out of 4 students will drop an institution from their list due to a bad experience on the website.

The college website is just one aspect of the E-Expectations survey. There are many more findings in the report, including social media efforts, cost calculators and the future of email and texting.

Read the full report on E-Expectations 2010: Focusing Your E-Recruitment Efforts to Meet the Expectations of College-Bound Students.

Working for TargetX, college administrators seem to think that we have a crystal ball into the future of the internet and everyone is always asking us what’s next. Be it Facebook, MySpace, twitter, or ning. it seems that our industry and society has a BSOS (Bright Shiny Object Syndrome) pandemic.

I recently heard a report on NPR’s Morning Edition about the Google/Verizon “Net Neutrality” proposal. Correspondent Alex Bloomberg’s closing line of the report rang so true, “What we know though, when it comes the internet most of our predictions about its future are wrong.”

Just six or seven years ago, while working at Mindpower, I’d go to college campuses to do discovery for branding or publications and started hearing about this thing called “Facebook”. It was the rage on the Ivy campuses and started hitting other schools like a hipster tsunami. It was a cool and selective tribe. Remember back when you had to have a .edu email address to access the magic behind the walls of Facebook? Before your Grandmother, annoying high school friend you completely forgot about, or random stranger could “friend” you?

It’s been a rush to read, research and participate in the Facebook phenomenon. So, I’m excited to see the movie The Social Network, the story of the start-up turned third largest country/community on the planet.

Even more compelling is the internet connection beyond it all.  Nearly as soon as this preview/trailers started spreading on the internet, others produced parodies for MySpace, YouTube and Twitter, complete with behind the scene story/dialogue, music, production, graphics and more. (Note - some content may offend.)

No, we can’t predict the internet’s future, but we can know that creative control and the power to share your own content, thoughts and feelings will drive what’s next.

Colleges and universities that get that you can’t talk at, but instead you have to talk with — that you have to give your communities and constituents the tools to create and share their own stories, memories and experiences — will weather the perfect storm that’s pounding higher education know.

Regardless of what your board, president or marketing department wants to say or believe, they are not in control of the message anymore. Gone are the days of the advertising and marketing “Mad Men” who simply had to produce a 30-second spot and print ad (or viewbook.)

Is your school marketing like it is 1989, or are they in the here and now and embracing this brave new world?

Please share your comments, opinions, stories and observations by posting a comment.

Today I’m coming to you “on location” from the illustrious TargetX headquarters in Atlanta!

I’m here for a mini think-tank with Brian Niles and my colleagues from TargetX’s “Experience Team”  — Jeff Kallay, Trent Gilbert, Celesta Brown and our newest addition, Emily Welsh.

We’re here in the conference room doing some brainstorming and further developing the consulting offering we launched back in February at the Xpert Summit.

I thought today would be a great opportunity to give you a sneak-peek of what we’re talking about  (even though we’re admittedly only about half-way through our day at this point;)

Here’s the skinny:  basically, TargetX Consulting is a completely new division of TargetX that focuses on using our experience and expertise to help clients recruit best-fit students.

It’s about taking the industry knowledge we’ve shared for years in the form of email broadcasts, blog posts, presentations, webcasts (and one soon-to-be-released book) and helping schools apply those best practices to their individual goals and challenges.

From things like sales, marketing and customer service training to communications planning and reinventing your campus visit (to name just a few), we think we’re in a pretty good place to help schools bring about the change we know they so desperately need.

To that end, we’ve developed a unique process that combines audits of what clients are currently doing with education for admissions and the broader campus community on what works best to recruit students today.

From there, we engage in new idea generation to deliver an authentic consulting offering unlike anything our industry has come to rely on.

I can tell you it’s something that I’m truly excited to be a part of and that I hope will help our clients navigate the “perfect storm” that’s threatening enrollment at schools across the country — so much so that it will be the main focus of this year’s iThink event at NACAC in St. Louis.

We’ll soon be revising the consulting website and marketing materials to reflect today’s conversations — so keep your eyes and ears open for more on what’s to come.

And in the meantime, just let me know if you’d like to talk more.

Who knows — perhaps our “consultants at large” may just be able to offer the insight and advocacy you need to meet your goals this year.

Adrienne

P.S.  Visit www.targetx.com/odc to read about our book “Overthrowing Dead Culture:  The Vision to Change the World of College Recruiting.”

And be sure to register for our next webcast to learn more as well:
www.targetx.com/webcasts

• Live from the TargetX webcast studio with Emily and Trent! http://fb.me/y2kQFLEq #
• Free on Friday Webcast today at 3PM Eastern! Join us for The Campus Visit: Back to Basics. Register now: http://bit.ly/clKjlL #
• Two members of the Experience Team, Trent Gilbert and Emily Welsh share their tips on campus visit, Friday, August 13: http://bit.ly/clKjlL #
• Join us August 13th for the Free on Friday Webcast “The Campus Visit: Back to Basics.” Register today: http://bit.ly/clKjlL #