MASFAA Newsletter Online

Net-Working: Integrating User-Generated Content into the Financial Aid Office

Definition: User-generated content (UGC, often hyphenated), also known as Consumer Generated Media (CGM) or User-created Content (UCC), refers to various kinds of media content, publicly available, that are produced by end-users. - Wikipedia

Definition: Anything anyone says about you on the Internet that you have no control over. - Christopher S. Penn

Have you ever had the experience of Googling for your institution's name - or even your name - and found some content on the Web that was less than complimentary about the service a student received?

Have you ever had the experience of writing, emailing, or even blogging about a great or terrible experience you had at the hands of someone else's customer service department?

User-generated content is exactly that: content generated by Internet users. As customers or consumers, it's the writing, speaking, video, audio, blogs – i.e., content - we create to talk about our experiences with someone or something, good or bad.

As service providers, it's the feedback we don't need to solicit, because the customer is so emotional about their experience they are compelled to make content about their experience.

How can financial aid offices make the most of user-generated content, particularly to combat stereotypes of financial aid? By applying a simple, three-step framework that any financial aid administrator can use.

1. LISTEN
The first step is to know whether you're being talked about. Here's a simple way to measure. Go to Google and type in the following, including the quotation marks:

"financial aid office""your institution name here"
(for example: "financial aid office" "Exemplary University")

Next, do the exact same search at Google's Blog Search, and see what comes up.

The first search gives you general results of web sites and pages that have mentioned those two terms. The second search specifically looks into blogs to see if anyone has blogged about your school and its financial aid office.

What will you find? Difficult to say - you may find nothing, or you may find a river of flames. You may find surprisingly complimentary discussions about you, whether or not you are involved in the discussions. Here's another experiment to try.

Go to www.Summize.com and in the search box, type "FAFSA". Summize is a search site, similar to Google, that monitors Twitter, a public, world-wide chat room. See what students around the country are thinking about the FAFSA (or any other topic) and you may gain additional insights into your own students (and their parents) about how they manage financial aid.

2. PARTICIPATE
The next step after reading and learning what people - your customers - are saying about you is to take the step into participating.

Participating is what makes technologies like blogging so different. In the past, you would publish information to your audience, but they never had the opportunity to publish their responses. Today, with most forms of user-generated content, you have the opportunity to respond publicly to praise, criticism, and other forms of feedback.

How do you participate? If you are reading an entry on someone's blog, look for a Comments link or button. If you are listening to a podcast, listen for a call-in telephone number.

What do you say?

Participating in a public forum is radically different from email or other personal conversations you may have with your customers. On the Internet, words last forever and are usually found by Google within seconds. Treat responses in user-generated content like you would treat any kind of media interaction, because the tools of user-generated content are essentially media outlets.

A blog, when you boil away all the fancy terminology, is essentially a newspaper column written by someone who doesn't work for a newspaper.

An audio podcast is a radio show you download, and YouTube is little more than a television set with a billion channels and a computer keyboard instead of a remote control.

These newer forms of media are still essentially media outlets. Treat them as such when you participate. Say exactly what you would say if you were being filmed for the evening news or recorded for the front page of the New York Times. Use the opportunity to participate as a chance to leave a positive impression about financial aid administrators and break negative stereotypes.

3. CREATE
At some point, you may find that the user-generated content you are coming across is not quite correct (for example, students giving each other financial aid advice that may be inaccurate), and you'll want to create your own media outlet. Creating your own media, generating your own user-generated content, is a big step, but one worth taking as long as you are prepared for what it involves.

You'll first need to determine what your overall media strategy is. Who is the audience and what "channels" are they watching? Some colleges have student bodies that spend most of their time on MySpace. Others have student bodies largely on Facebook, while still others are using more niche networks like Twitter, Bebo, Xanga, etc.

The single best way to determine which platform to base your efforts on is, of course, to ask your students where they spend most of their time online. When they need a source for trusted information, where do they go? Once you know where your students are going, you'll need to decide the amount of time and resources you have and are willing to devote to the production of media. Blogs, once set up, take relatively little time to maintain besides the actual time it takes you to write, but be prepared to write 250 - 300 words once a week as a suggested time commitment.

If you're interested in producing audio such as podcasts, expect to invest a few hundred dollars in equipment (modern, fast computer, software, inexpensive microphone and headphones) and time to get the pieces of a podcast set up. You'll need a web site with a blog to create the delivery system for your audio. Typically, audio podcasts take approximately 5 minutes of production time for every 1 minute of final audio, so a 10 minute show might take 50 minutes to produce. As with blogs, try to produce regularly, at least twice a month.

Video is the richest and most time consuming type of media to create. Lots of students regularly produce video and watch hours of it online. On an average day, YouTube.com has 25 - 30 million viewers visit its home page alone. Producing video requires a camera of decent quality, a modern, very fast computer, and video editing software. Typically, video podcasts take approximately 15 - 30 minutes of production time for every 1 minute of final video, making them resource-intensive to produce. However, if you create a video that is compelling and entertaining, you can reach every one of your students and many more beyond the boundaries of your campus.

Once you begin creating your own user-generated content, you'll want to foster and encourage feedback and discussion of your content. Make sure you have available either comments (on blogs and podcasts) or web-based discussion forums to accept input from your audience and answer questions. You are guaranteed to receive at least some less than favorable feedback, so be prepared and accepting of it, and always remind yourself that the delete button is never more than a few clicks away.

One of the most effective strategies for approaching the creation of media production is to hire relatively experienced media producers - and by this, we mean work-study students at your institution. Consider posting an on-campus job for federal work study funds to hire one or more media-savvy and technology-savvy students. You'll boost your own efforts and help even more students in the process.

SUMMARY

User-generated content is feedback, nothing more. The same conversations that have been happening in dormitories and cafeterias since colleges were founded. The only difference in the modern age is that now conversations are very public. They can be found by Google, indexed, and made available for you as a financial aid administrator to listen to, participate in, and even create.

Effectively, in today's always-on, always-connected world, we are all the media the moment we begin to write a blog post or record our thoughts. Every time we turn on a mobile phone that has a camera built in, we potentially become a photojournalist. By listening, participating, and creating your own media, you'll not only be more responsive to your students and customers, you'll also find your own voice in ways that can be deeply satisfying and reinvigorate the passion you have for helping others achieve their dreams.

If you embark on the journey of user generated content management, please let me know if this article is helpful, and what you find works best for you. I can be reached at FinancialAidPodcast@gmail.com or 617-249-1203, and I'll be at the NASFAA 2008 National Conference in Orlando as well.