Education and Social Media

Professor Ujjwal K Chowdhury, Executive Director of media studies at ISB&M, shares his thoughts on IndiaSocial on use of social media in the field of education.

Last two to three years have drastically changed the techniques and tools of education marketing and promotions in India. And the larger brands are waking up to the new digital revolution in educational services marketing all of a sudden. It is almost a rude shock to many. Most education brands, the larger ones included, have been happy with full and half page ads, with faces of bosses, appearing in national dailies, and usually in English. That has been their ‘marketing effort’. Added to that, have been the media net route to get stories published by paying for the same, and participation in educational fairs and putting up huge outdoor hoardings.

The scene is very different today.

All educational institutes are understanding now the power and the need of the New Media to reach out to its audiences. For example, the executive education focused on working professionals has almost exclusively gone into the internet and mobile mode. A few days back, XLRI  announced an executive management training program through the SMS route, as it can be discerning and focused on a specific audience. Many social networking portals are used to identify the network of similar needs professionals and such campaigns are pegged there for better results.

The portals focused on creating education domain-specific communities, have become a major tool of marketing now for this sector. Minglebox.com, Shiksha.com, Studyplaces.com, HTcampus.com, educationtimes.com, etc are raking in the moolah and creating institute specific and domain specific platforms for networking with the youth online. We at ISB&M have also used these and Google to reach out to our audiences, and have got rich dividends in this admission season. Apart from ads on these portals, they have info-links and domain specific segments, and opportunities for conversation to happen between the site, the institutes and the users at large.

Further, pagalguy.com has emerged in the last three to four years as a strong platform for online users among MBA aspirants. Though the forums need administrator’s intervention to avoid abusive language and the marketing potentials of it still can be much better leveraged, still this site is a strong platform for all B-school aspirants.

Several institutes, including a few constituents of my last organization, Symbiosis, have created alumni network portals to keep tab on job opportunities for working professionals, and also linking the alumni through an ongoing online conversation with current students for projects, internships, mentoring and counseling. Professional education increasingly will need to create such conversation routes alive for credible branding and industry positioning of its trainees.

On the other hand, negative campaigns, comments and posts by present and past students about some institutes have given rise to serious branding challenges for a few educational institutes. One known group of B-schools, name withheld, devised an e-brochure of positive testimonials of its current and past students with email ids and some cell numbers as well and uploaded the entire brochure and the individual testimonials selectively across various online platforms to generate a counter campaign while facing disgruntled elements making disparaging and blatant remarks on social media about the institute.

Often it has been seen that on-ground activities, like Unmaad of IIM Bengaluru, Xavotsov of St Xavier’s Kolkata, Media Pulse of ISBM School of Communication Pune, Y-Factor of NSHM Kolkata or Mood Indigo of IIT Mumbai and others, have been marketed to its audiences through the social media largely: by connecting link and landing pages to Facebook and Orkut communities created around that event or festival. These seamless blending of online campaign with on ground activation leads to a strong stake-holder driven buzz or viral which is good for the brand of the institute concerned.

Seeing is believing. One of the ways of promoting image is to upload videos made by students onto YouTube and other places, and create the institute’s own portal of video and photos for all times onto the virtual space. I have done it twice for two institutes so far.

The best part of social media is its conversationalist non-hierarchical communication which makes information turn into a virtual buzz or viral. The worst part of social media communication is that loads of rumour passes off as genuine information, and credibility of the source of a lot of information will always be under question.

All things said and done, with flat organizations and flat mindsets becoming the norm, online conversation will gradually become the mainstay of many an educational branding in the days to come.

One of my educationist colleagues and an expert on Social Media, Prof Shyama Dutta, notes and I find it interesting to quote her here,

We are not yet using it as effectively as possible, because social media is treated as a urban vision. In fact if one looks at the entire treatment of visualization and ideation in new media it is still very urban centric. However, the potential exists – because by default it allows all opinions in it. The strongest way forward is because social media is now extensively integrated with 3 G mobile technology – which means it transcends the urban walls. If we harness the existing technology along with social media – such as webinars and the power of user generated content then we would find a way.

Note: Views of authors are personal, and do not represent views of IndiaSocial or its partners.