Education Program Types

We are partnering with Magna Publications to provide an online seminar about "Cost-Effective Best Practices for Marketing Online Programs" on February 24, 2009. We hope that some of you will join us for this informative and interactive event.

I've provided some information below, but you can find the rest of the information at their website:

Cost-Effective Best Practices for Marketing Online Programs - Online Seminar Information and Registration

Institutions have discovered a new realm of college recruiting by hosting virtual career fairs targeted at tech-savvy teens.   Eye4You Alliance, CollegeWeekLive, and the Learning Network (operate

All institutions have a brand, whether they tend to it or not.  Different institutions have different approaches to brand building, others don’t have any at all.  Brand building at a strategic level is gaining traction in higher education though, as noted in this recent Newsweek article.  There is not a lot of data out there on universities using Second Life for brand building, but given that it offers a more engaging user experience than the web and the growth it has experienced, I would not be surprised if we see more institutions turning to Second Life as at least a small part of their branding strategy.  One indicator of this is that universities with well known brands, such as Harvard and Princeton (http://etc.princeton.edu/sl/), were quick to utilize this medium.  An instantly recognizable brand in the real world is likely going to be an instantly recognizable brand in the Second Life world.  What intrigues me though is the potential for some of the institutions that may only have a regional brand or smaller to extend their brand in a whole new way.  If this branding concept is extended into the classroom and the institution fully embraces Second Life, the Second Life community may very well embrace that institution.  It is possible that an institution could become a dominant brand in Second Life, even when they are only a regional or local player in the real world.  The fact that it is still relatively small in terms of traffic and student enrollment potential actually provides you with the opportunity to get in on the ground floor.

Traffic to any one place has been and continues to be one of the most limiting factors to marketers in Second Life. Marketers in Second Life from a variety of fields are finding it difficult in general to generate traffic at all, but even if you were able to generate a lot of traffic, you run out of “user space” because of the user maximums. Those are officially around 30-35, meaning you can only have 30-35 people in a certain area before experiencing server issues, but we’ve seen traffic as high as 80-90 with no issues. Much of that depends on the activities of the users. But even 80-90 isn’t a very large group and isn’t scalable. Anyone that is in marketing or that has experience with Internet marketing or social network marketing knows that you can’t expect to have a steady stream of 80 users. You are much more likely to have extreme peaks and valleys in traffic. So for Second Life, a peak means a bunch of people getting frustrated that they can’t get into your space to see whatever it was that attracted so many people, and the more typical valley means a lot of wasted resources and time.  Things may change in the future as they improve the technology to allow larger crowds to gather, but for now, I would recommend that your marketing strategy in Second Life be more about something other than reaching out to the masses for large one-time events. Perhaps a set of smaller meetings or self-paced activities that engage individuals longer and use an educational approach to teach them the message you are trying to deliver about your institution. As an example, a business school could create an Alumni hall featuring inspiring Alumni stories that could strike a chord with both prospective students and Alumni. One part of the University of Michigan island had a giant ball that you can get into and that rolls down a path through woods and into the valley and a cannon that you could climb in and shoot yourself across the campus. These things may seem trivial and you may find an application that works better for your particular purpose, but I see them as useful ways to engage your user, to keep your Second Life space fresh in their minds, and to give them something to talk about when they talk to other prospective students and alumni.

As with most things on the web, certain statistics matter more than others. In web marketing, we rarely even mention hits to a web page, because those numbers can be very inaccurate as an indicator of traffic behavior. Instead we tend to focus on unique visitors if that information is available. So in Second Life, you may have a tendency to focus on unique residents. And that tendency would probably be wrong. The problem with the unique resident statistics is that it is not an accurate reflection of actual activity in Second Life. This is for the simple reason that some people create an account and then are never heard from again, or they may create multiple accounts with different personal information and are never detected in the system. In fact, I was one of those first 3,000 residents that existed in early 2004, but I lost the information for that account and have since created a couple different accounts with more preferable avatar names. The more telling statistics are really the recent daily login activity and to a lesser extent the hourly usage. I found statistics all over the web for these, but many are very inconsistent with other statistics I’ve found, so I don’t think they are reliable enough to use. You can get current data at any time though on recent login activity at the Second Life website, which is what is listed above for this particular moment. Hourly usage per month, which are all of the hours logged by all of the Second Life users, was 51,000 in 2003 when they started tracking the statistic and that has grown to 34.8 million per month today. In the last 12 months (August to August), hourly usage grew 44%. Even though they are not 100% correlated, that should help give at least an indicator in the growth of logins over the past year as well. With the statistics we found, you could analyze Second Life usage for weeks, but this should get you started. You are welcome to download our statistics that we gathered yourself (downloadable from this article behind login), but if you do, we encourage you to come back and share with the community what your findings were.