Blogging effective marketing tool for Wabash College

With innovations in technology, you can do almost anything online, including reach potential college recruits.

Online blogs have become a major tool for recruiting students at Wabash College. Last year, the college tinkered with the idea of blogs written by three freshmen. The blogs would be unedited — posted just as they were written. Wabash employees could have cleaned up some of the work, but opted against it.

The idea worked better than expected. So much so that Wabash has again picked three incoming freshmen to blog about their first year of college. Daniel King, one of last year’s student bloggers, will continue blogging on his entire four-year college experience.

Associate Director of Admissions Chip Timmons said the blogging has been beneficial for incoming students.

“For a lot of students looking here, they want to hear from students,” Timmons said. “They want to know what the food tastes like, how hard the classes are. It’s honest, it’s genuine and it’s what students want to know.”

The student blogs have become so popular, the three incoming freshmen writing this year — Jake Ezell, Indianapolis; Michael Richmond, Franklin; and Adrian Perez, south Texas — has already received more hits on the homepage than anything on the Wabash site, aside from football.

Wabash Web Editor Howard Hewitt heard at a Chicago seminar that 80 percent of students have their first contact with the college they attend by Internet. While Wabash has blogs on a plethora of topics, the student-written blogs remain the most popular.

Wabash’s decision to have blogs online again this year drew 50 interested students wishing to keep a running tally of their first year at the college. From there, Wabash employees had to whittle it down to three students, looking for enough variety to cover a wide range of students. Though two of this year’s bloggers are from central Indiana, one is from a private high school and the other went to public school.

“We want different interest and different backgrounds,” said Timmons. “We wanted to make sure there was a little bit of everything from everybody.”

During the narrowing process, the college’s staff looks at who makes the best case for why they want to blog, who can write well and how eager they are to share their stories, Timmons said. And of course the question is asked to each about whether they’d want their mother to read it.

The first blogs of Perez, Richmond and Ezell can be read at on Wabash’s homepage wabash.edu.

SOURCE : www.journalreview.com