Facebook and Your School

It is important to control the website for your school (that’s the obvious statement of the day) and control the look and feel of it but be able to have something that is permanent and that shouldn’t be sacrificed for the tool of the day. Facebook is obviously more than that. And it really is a relevant question. The kids are on it and parents are on it and there needs to be a ongoing discussion of the school and the ability for people to connect with the school and to network about the school on Facebook.

Facebook could change ownership or alter their terms of service and if you relinquish that control, then you give up all the good things that could potentially come from search, such as highly targeted referrals and navigation referrals and the multitude of possibilities for parents and students that can find you using deep detailed searches, that just can’t be tapped as much on Facebook as they can on Google.

It made me think a lot about Google and the two presentations that I gave at the UC. My feeling is that schools can really take hold of the conversation about what happens at their institution and harness that to promote the school. I don’t advocate for a blatant marketing effort, but more that schools can create open forums that they control on their domains and through totally overt and open tactics can harness this conversation for search engine marketing. And can create useful quality content to support the searches of user’s queries.

For example let’s say the school sets up open rules for a forum or blog and then establishes a small group to work within that channel to talk and engage with parents and potential parents interested in a school.  The structure and tagging of that forum can be used for marketing without co-opting the transparent nature of the discussion.  There is a way to set up a website and or forum with certain keywords embedded that don’t interfere with the message of the site.

Discussion is marketing and if it takes place on the school site then that school can be involved in it and through an open interaction can be a part of it and to a certain extent control it.

Let’s say there is a tradition at a school that has a summer camp program and somebody wants to change that tradition. Let’s say it’s a party before the end of camp. The school wants to stop it because it is a little extravagant, but the parents and the kids love it. The school announces on their website or blog that they want parents to discuss this in an open forum.  Parents support the event and decide to raise funds and make it successful. The fact that this discussion of the summer camp takes place on the school’s website and uses terms such as summer camp – helps to optimize the structure of the school’s website so that when potential parents and students visit they have awareness of the summer camp and it creates buzz and energy around the camp. More people will find the school on search engines related to searches for camps.

So his speech has left me thinking of new ways to harness (crowds) school constituent effort for school marketing and seo! So my advice to schools would be to leverage the crowd and invite them to have that discussion on schools grounds or terms – even if it is virtual it can be used to the schools benefit.