This is a powerful reminder that it can only take one bad egg to very negatively damage your brand. Yes this is even true for higher education institutions that have been around for decades or sometimes centuries. I think there is no more apparent example in recent history as the black eye put on PSU by a certain not-to-be named previous football coach.
Even with very public examples like this we forget how pervasive social media has become across so many channels and how it impacts the decisions of our various audiences. If we wanted to get into admission specific examples there are sites like StudentAdvisor, Zinch, College Prowler, and yes even sites like Rate My Professors that can have a very real impact on the decisions that prospective students make in choosing your school.
So I’ll keep it short today and leave you with this question. Are you doing everything possible to monitor what people are saying about your institution and more importantly are you actually listening and responding accordingly to the feedback? We are in a new age where the buyer is in control of the sales process, but I’ll save that for another article.
If you are looking for help also be sure to check out, Brand.com which is a professional consortium, which can help you develop a coherent strategy to control your reputation online.
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About the author
Kyle is the CEO & Co-Founder at nuCloud and formerly the webmaster at Wofford College. He also spent almost 4 years at HubSpot doing a range of jobs including inbound marketing consulting, sales, management, and product management. Kyle is an active contributor in the social media spectrum. Although his background is technical, he claims to know a thing or two about marketing, but mostly that revolves around SEO, analytics, blogging, and social media. He has spoken at multiple national conferences and done countless webinars on topics ranging from e-mail marketing to social media and Web analytics. He’s definitely a fairly nice guy.
This post was written by Kyle James – who has written 279 posts on .eduGuru
