Can a College be a Brand?
Social media is become the pretty much be-all end-all of, well, everything.
Companies want it, Brands needs it, and Individuals are starting to think that it’s the only way that you’re going to get a job. This may or may not all be true, but recently I’ve been hearing a lot of conversation about Colleges and social media.
I go to Emerson College in Boston, MA. Emerson’s slogan “Bringing Innovation to Communication and the Arts” is descriptive, appropriate, but is it true?
Emerson’s main website is, well, lacking. No RSS feed, no links to blogs, Twitter profiles, or Facebook fan pages. And the content generally stays static for a least a few weeks.
When you search “Emerson College” on Facebook you get this:
There’s very little participation throughout all of Emerson’s Facebook presences, unless of course it’s the annual group “Emerson Class of ____” filled with new students and transfers asking any and everything that they could possible want to know about Emerson.
Some positives, however, are the recent development and implementation of “Emerson Today Digest”. I was pleasently surprised this morning when I opened my email and found a new format and presentation to the “This Week at Emerson” email. Typically the email has been nothing but text, in bullet format, and leaves much to the imagination.
To the Emerson Community, did you know that the Iwasaki Library has a blog? And a pretty good one at that too. Their posts include interactive tweet contests, suggested reading, “New to the Iwasaki” and artist biographies whenever they change the displays.
WERS, Emerson’s student run radio station, has a pretty great twitter account as well. And finally in its hay day the Emerson Mafia was a premiere source for networking opportunities for the students, both past and current. Check out their Facebook and Twitter as well.
Emerson is a pretty great school. Their Marketing Department gives students some great opportunities, and it’s one of the best theater programs that I’ve heard about in Boston, but is it a brand? Does Emerson really bring “Innovation to Communication and the Arts”?
My vote: Not really, no. It’s making a small attempt, but not being very successful at it. What’s your vote?
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