76% of Students Use Facebook

Facebook was the clear winner of the social media websites surveyed although at 79% it still seemed this number is a little low.  With Facebook even this week expecting its 500 millionth user and the entire phenomenon starting in colleges and universities, you would think this number would be closer to 95% of the audience.    The slight difference here is that we are talking about college bound high school students in this survey.  Either way if over three quarters of your audience is on a channel, you simply can’t ignore it.  nuCloud gives you the ability to embed your virtual tour right on your Facebook page.  Don’t just take my word for it;  check out this example of one of our customers actually doing it.

58% of Students Identified Virtual Tours as Extremely Valuable or Adds a lot of Value

Speaking of embedding those virtual tours we have to be extremely excited to hear that almost 60% of incoming students find our product valuable!  It has never been more important than it is today to have a compelling and easy to use virtual tour on your website.  I think the big key in that last sentence is “easy to use.”  If you try to use a lot of the tours out there on college websites many are hard to figure out and even more painful to let them load.  Many prospective students have a well known dislike of being patient for things.

77% of Students Identified Campus Visit Request Forms as Extremely Valuable or Adds a lot Of Value

I very strongly believe that a campus visit is one of the strongest elements in the decision process of where a student chooses to go to school.  Any admission office will tell you that if they can get a student to visit their school they can get that individual to apply.  With this being such an important part of the recruitment funnel you have to think about as many ways as possible to open up it up more.  I strongly believe that an online virtual tour is definitely one of these methods.  If a student visits 30 school websites and knows they are only going to visit maybe five of them then seeing a virtual tour of the campus might be one of those important decision makers to keep a school on the list.

52% Have Viewed Videos About Colleges But Only 10% on YouTube

Finally this last data point shows how valuable students think videos are, but interestingly enough the world’s biggest video website isn’t where they watch this content about schools.  According to Alexa YouTube is the 3^rd largest website in the world.  If you drill down into the data a little deeper then you will see 42% of the students are watching video on your website.  If you don’t have video on your website then you probably want to get some up there.  nuCloud does give you the ability to embed video in your map stops on your website as you can see in this example.  This probably isn’t exactly what students have in mind, but we are already in the process of developing a tool to let you embed video on your website.

Conclusion

These four data points are just a few of the many in this report.  Once again I highly recommend you learn what college bound students expect from your online efforts and read the report.  Just as we have to understand the data and what students desire so we can build products and services accordingly. It is important for colleges and universities to address these same desires.  You can download the full report here »

Download our Interactive Campus Map Kit and learn exactly how nuCloud can help your recruitment efforts.  We are here to help.

Related posts:

1. Types of Videos for a College Website
2. The Difference Between a Virtual Tour and an Interactive Map
3. Virtual Tours: A Campus Visit without the Travel

Co-Founder Kyle James will be giving two presentations this year.  The first is an updated version of his red stapler winning 2008 presentation on web analytics.  The presentation is once again titled, Hello Is Anyone Out There?  Using Web Analytics to Understand Your Audience.  This presentation will be given Monday October 11^th from 1:45-2:45PM.

Presentation Summary: So you have just installed a JavaScript code on every one of your pages to track visitors on your site. Maybe you used Google Analytics or some other service and you’re collecting all this great information. Well what do these terms mean and what metrics should you care about? After a quick explanation of terms, this presentation will dig into how to filter Google Analytics for more exact and effective data. From here we will explore reports that are actually valuable to Higher Education and actionable steps that can be taken from this data. Finally we will talk about best practice techniques and explore analytics beyond your website, monitoring your institutions identity across the web.

The second presentation is titled, SEO Best Practices: The Low Hanging Fruit for Immediate Results and will be given Monday October 11^th from 3:00-3:45PM

Presentation Summary: Maybe you don’t even know what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is. Search Engines are the first place that nearly everyone goes to looking for something. Having your site displayed at the top of results for relevant searches is a powerful way to get visitors to your website. In a sense it’s a way to provide free traffic to your site. Also, because when people search they are usually looking for a specific thing and who is able to provide it to them, you are gaining a relevant visitor. Unfortunately, when people think about SEO, immediately those emails of spammers who guarantee #1 results in search engines come to mind. SEO doesn’t have to be black magic, pixie dust, or snake oil. In fact if you think of SEO in terms of the usability and accessibility that the search engines like Google have always intended it to be then it’s a very practical approach to designing your website. College websites already have the authority to rank well in search engines, but are you getting the most exposure and relevant traffic that you could be? This presentation will go through the fundamental and approved methods for on-page optimization, off-page optimization, and implementing these best practices into your marketing efforts going forward. These actionable steps will be practices that you can take home and begin implementing on your site that very week. We will look at methods to track and show improvement to your higher ups over time. Bottom line you will learn best practices about On-Page & Off-Page optimization for search engines. This will be solid advice that individuals can take home and immediately make changes to their site.

Chief Technology Officer Michael Fienen will be presenting on college homepage layout in his presentation titled, Got Centerpiece?  So Does Everyone Else.  He will be presenting on Tuesday October 12^th from 1:30-2:15PM.

Presentation Summary: Higher ed has a problem with its web sites. Many of us are past that first big hump of The Millennial Redesign. We’ve plopped down money on a shiny new CMS. Our design is hip and groovy. But an issue snuck in when we weren’t looking. Centerpieces have become a staple component of the ever important home page. The problem is that they have homogenized us. We’re all doing it, and we’re all doing it the same. This presentation will look at a number of sites and their centerpieces, look at common themes, address why our current trend is a problem, and make suggestions as to where we can go and what we can do to stand out and differentiate ourselves.

Although we specialize in interactive campus maps here at nuCloud our expertise goes beyond this specific niche. This will be the third year that one of our team members has presented at this conference. If you will be at HighEdWeb 2010 please be sure to say hello and we look forward to meeting you in person then.

Related posts:

1. World Cup 2010 – Interactive Maps to Check Out
2. Interactive Map of Higher Education Spending Cuts

Check out eduRank

We will continue to develop this application and know that we have no plan of ever charging anyone to rank their own website.  Watch the video below for a demonstration and more information.

Watch the eduRank Video Introduction

Related posts:

1. New Report: 58% of Students Value a Virtual Tour On A College Website
2. Types of Videos for a College Website

I’ve blogged in the past about types of videos for a college website and this video really shows us the value of user (student) generated content.  These two students put themselves out there and show the love of their college experience.  It is quite infectious.  There are some effective video animations that also happen in the video, but by no means is this something that students at any campus couldn’t reproduce.

Hopefully you enjoyed the video as much as we did.  Now ask yourself what sort of video are your students shooting that you can use in marketing material?  No one can tell the story of the wonderful college experience quite like the college student who is living it.

Related posts:

1. Virtual Tours: A Campus Visit without the Travel
2. New Report: 58% of Students Value a Virtual Tour On A College Website
3. Types of Videos for a College Website

From the release, IBM claims the following:

Using the new IBM Academic Skills Cloud, professors can help students:

- learn the latest technology skills, such as software development and practical use of information management, Web 2.0 and cloud computing and how they can be applied for decision-making;
- access IT curricula and courses from anywhere using their laptop or netbook;
- differentiate themselves from other graduates by gaining key IT skills to better compete for jobs.

On paper, this and everything else promised sounds really interesting and promising.

Now back to The Chronicle article.  IBM Pitches New ‘Cloud’ Software to Colleges.  But Some Say It’s Corporate PR.

Reading through this short article they claim this IBM initative is simply a PR stunt similar to what Microsoft did around their Microsoft University program.  One of the main purposes of Microsoft University is to help students get Microsoft Professional Certifications.  My criticism of the article is that I don’t necessarily see students and recent graduates getting certified in popular software systems as a bad thing.  As someone who actually is a MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) maybe I’m a little biased.  It is true that the things that I was certified on have nothing to do with nuCloud or any of the current projects that I work on, but this only helps my credibility, right?  Individuals getting certified that they are competent in a skill is an extremely efficient way to sort through resumes.  Although just because someone doesn’t have a certification in a certain area doesn’t mean they do not have the necessary skills, but having that certification shows that they also have the initiative to get the proof to say they know what they are talking about.

The same holds true for any of these IBM cloud skills.  Obviously at nuCloud we are HUGE proponents of the cloud module as the future of not just the web but technology in general.  The more educated students can be the better,  getting on these core competences and better understanding of the way the technology works.  In many respects the cloud is a new way of thinking about resource management and programming.

So maybe this IBM Academic Cloud does have some PR reasons behind it, but the knowledge and resources they are providing should not be simply dismissed.  For better or worse major players like IBM and Microsoft lay the foundation that much of our technology is built on.  The better we can educate the future on this the more successful they will be.  Not simply so they can be “experts” on these specific platforms, but so they can learn from them to apply the core concepts in “out of the box” formats.

So what are your thoughts?  Is this just a PR stunt or is free cloud education good for universities?

Related posts:

1. Cloud Computing’s Future and What It Could Mean for Colleges and Universities
2. Forbes called Cloud Computing “The Death of Hardware”
3. A little Uncloudy explanation of the Cloud

Facebook has personal pages and groups, but for an interactive campus map the best page on which to include it is your school’s fan page.  This is accomplished through using what Facebook calls FBML (Facebook Markup Language).  We’ve gone the extra mile to create the embed script for this FBML inside of the nuCloud user interface so all you need to do is follow the three simple steps outlined below.

Steps for adding your interactive map to your Facebook fan page

1.    Setup FBML on your Facebook fan page

a)      Login to your Facebook fan page and select “edit page”
b)      Find and install the “Static FBML” application to your fan page

c)      Back in the fan page editor, find FBML and go to the “Application Settings”
d)      Remove  “Box” and add “Tab.” Click Okay

e)      Choose “Edit” under FBML
f)       Enter the title of your map tab under “Box Title”

2.    Copy the FBML embed code from nuCloud and paste it into your FBML block

a)      Open your map through nuCloud’s map editor
b)      Choose “Get Facebook Code” from the Actions panel and copy the Embed code

c)       Paste the FBML embed code into the FBML box and save changes

3.    You should now see a tab on your fan page for your interactive map.

Check Out Live Examples

That couldn’t have been much easier, could it?  Want to see exactly what this looks like in Facebook?  Here is how two of our customers are taking advantage of this feature.  Please check out the Belmont Map and USC Upstate Map.

• USC Upstate Map in Facebook
• Belmont University Map in Facebook

Related posts:

1. Open Your Campus Visit “Secret Menu”
2. More Than an Interactive Campus Tour – Stadium Tours
3. How Many Features Does Your Virtual Campus Map Need?

This map is not much different than the hundreds of maps I’ve seen that pull U.S. data and display it in a state by state comparison. But what does stand out is the interesting layout to find out more information on how to use the map.  In the top right-hand corner is a question mark, and when you scroll over it, it displays simple 1,2,3 instructions on exactly how to drill into the valuable data on the map and get comparison data from different steps.  This interesting approach is a little bit different, and most maps we see are intuitive enough to not need instructions.  Although you could understand how to gather information in this interface, this extra help allows you to drill a little deeper and pull state by state comparisons that aren’t instantly obvious.

So I mentioned that data like this shows us how important it is to spend money wisely, but it is also another opportunity to state my case on why an interactive campus map is a vital piece of your institute’s website for recruitment reasons.

From a recruitment standpoint an interactive map allows prospective students to get a taste of a campus visit without having to drive potentially hundreds or thousands of miles to explore your campus in a guided tour.  With rising energy and transportation costs it’s simply not realistic to tour as many universities as students have in previous years.  A compelling campus tour helps prospective students prioritize your school and makes for more committed visits when they do come.

As compelling as an interactive map is to an institution’s website, the development costs and, in some cases, simply having a developer capable of creating the map can put it out of reach of many institutions.  Outsourcing the whole project costs $10,000 as a base price and goes up from there.  With outsourcing, don’t even ask for the ability to change things down the road because that will cost additional development time.  I’m not saying nuCloud is the first to tackle these issues, but in very cost conscious times it is important to know all the hidden costs.

You can read more information about this data in the University of Washington PDF brief off their website.

Related posts:

1. Interactive Water Pollution Map Shows Where Polluters Actually Are
2. Virtual Tours: A Campus Visit without the Travel
3. Interactive Airport Map Displays U.S. Airports Getting Big Grant Money