August 2, 2013

Looking Back at Hobsons University 2013

Aug. 2, 2013 at 09:00 AM | By Rachel DiCaro Metscher | Comment Count

Hobsons University 2013 kicked off on Tuesday, July 22 with an energetic keynote from Arel Moodie. Arel Moodie is one of the leading voices on helping young students prepare, get accepted into, and complete college. Arel works with students from all backgrounds to ensure they are ready and excited for the journey ahead. He shared many key learning points, but a few that stuck with me were:

You don’t have to be better, just different.
Don’t stop learning. Remove “ I already know that” from your vocabulary.
Be more student focused to enhance the academic ROI.

There were many sessions at Hobsons University. I had the opportunity to attend a few and wanted to share some nuggets from each:

Columbia College of Chicago shared their experience and best practices for effective search engine marketing to prospective students.

• @ColumbiaChi shares why page load time and optimization is key to your demand gen and #SEM #hobsonsu13
• Big mistake: asking students to give 16 fields of info about them when they learned about us 2 sec. ago. Columbia College Chicago #hobsonsu13
• Big take away: Write for humans. No one will read your awesome copy if it doesn’t speak to them.

University of Tennessee at Martin shared how campuses can better engage with parents. Parents want to learn more about their student’s performance but, before engaging with parents, there are many things to consider. UTM shared how they helped their school’s parents successfully engage with the university to help their students.

Brandy, UTM director of Academic Records & Registrar, talks about changing the perception of the registrar office #hobsonsu13 pic.twitter.com/l4GBPcgBfT
Students who have regular interactions with parents are more resilient and can handle challenging situations. This is key to retention.
FERPA forms are a crucial component to parent communications. Inform parents of the importance of having their students complete these forms. Without them, students will not have the ability to access their educational records.

On Wednesday, Hobsons U involved a full day of sessions concluding with the Excellence Awards Reception, 80’s style. Wednesday’s sessions were jam packed with awesome tips and tricks of the industry for higher education professionals.

The University of Wisconsin-Stout and the University of Wisconsin-Superior shared their best practices for using Google Analytics and your CRM for education. While there were many great nuggets of information, I was delighted to hear about their use of student bloggers whom blog about their college experience; a fantastic and excellent use of telling your university’s story through the eyes of students. The second piece of information that Tonya, director of Admissions at UW-Stout, and Melissa, marketing coordinator at UW-Stout, shared outlined just how blogging helped their search engine optimization.

Stay tuned for their presentation on Slideshare - How CRM and Google can power your schools marketing initiatives.

Find out what all the buzz was about on Twitter at Hobsons University 2013 - The Most Interesting Twitter Chatter of Hobsons University 2013