PS&L Blog

It’s time to admit that I was not an early advocate of social media in higher education. From where I sat (at the time), social sites were for high school and college kids who wanted to keep in touch with friends, share photos, and flirt with each other online. This was no place for a college admissions team.  At the time, I still think I was right.

That time was at least ten years ago, and a great deal has changed for those of us who live in the digital world.  Social sites have become mainstream; its not just for teenagers and college students anymore.  Every business has a Facebook account, and middle-aged adults Twitter on every serious subject imaginable.

So how come so many colleges are either not in the social networking business or are not utilizing it well?  As consultants in higher education, we can do a little more than speculate, we actually know why.

Fear.

• There are still those that believe that socializing on a network will lead to bad behavior on and off-line.  There has been bad behavior amongst humans forever; social networks will get their share of it, too, but no more than their share.

• We hear often of the fear that social networking will take up too much of someone’s time.  This argument was made 20 years about the internet and email.  Look how that turned out.

• There is always a fear that we might try something and it won’t be successful.  What if we created a Twitter account for admitted students and they didn’t use it?  I would argue that if you don’t set one up, and manage it, you are not connecting and communicating with prospective students in an arena that many are very comfortable with; if you don’t, I can guarantee your competition is.

• Fear of the unknown.  What will we use it for?  Why do we need goals?  (See my previous blog entry).  Higher education is filled with smart people, but fear of change is widespread – and that fear often can paralyze smart people with good ideas.

Overcoming Fear

Bring your working group together and start by articulating and writing down your fears.  Then systematically walk through each fear and slay each fear with your strategy and action plan.  Set your goals, develop a strategy, put a plan of action together, and execute it.  You’ll need to be willing and open to adapting the plan as you go along (part of slaying the fear of failure.)  The worst thing we can do is stick with something that doesn’t work, or is no longer working for us, and hope that the results will change.