Clay gave an interesting talk about the dynamics of crowds and social media. He cited examples from banking, Wikipedia, and the recent revolutions in media. His premise is that there are now tools to enable conversations that allow for a different type of collaborative action, or liberated action that have changed and will continue to change the world and the relationship between companies and customers also institutions and constituents.  These changes play out amongst networks and the scope of change increases as the network increases. He cited a really cool example of Grobanites and how a Josh Groban charity grew into a life of its own.

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.