UMBC faced a challenge and decided to leverage its student body to come up with the solution. Because it is a relatively young university, and was a generation ago a commuter campus, UMBC is still perceived my many prospective students to offer little student life. The solution involved a combination of new social media and traditional strategies.
Mark Neustadt developed a campaign concept centered on student-generated content. Tracey Halvorsen and Amy Goldberg spearheaded development of a social media aggregator web site. The Door No. 2 team worked with a core group of UMBC students to populate the site and develop photos and text for an accompanying brochure.
The social media site which is at the heart of the campaign allows UMBC students to stream photos, videos, playlists, blogs and tweets from venues they are already using to communicate and share, like Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and LastFM. Participation in the site is exclusively for UMBC students. A radio and outdoor media campaign is used to direct prospective students to the site.
When developing the site, the UMBC students were told that they would be acting as ambassadors for their institution. Tracey Halvorsen prepped the students identified to seed the site pre-launch. "We invite you to become participants in your own reality show, where not only can you enjoy seeing what your friends are up to at any given moment, but you can also share with the world what it's like to be a student at UMBC. You will directly affect the student body of next year's class, and you want those kids to be the right kind of kids for UMBC."
Not only does the campaign leverage social media in ways that push the envelope, it adds a powerful dynamic tool to the UMBC admissions arsenal with very little labor on the part of the admissions staff. "Truth is, no matter how important the academics are, prospective students care enormously about whether they will fit in to the community at a particular school. This is information they want to receive directly from other students without adult mediation. The College.Be. web-site enables us to use social media to tell that story with a new level of authenticity,” Mark Neustadt explains.
Look for the print and radio elements to hit the streets in the coming days, and visit the site now at http://be.umbc.edu.
