Experimenting with Social Media at Noel Levitz’ NCSRMR 2010

Tony Zanders

At Inigral, we’re so excited about what the teams at Foursquare and Plancast are doing that we’ve thought long and hard about how Higher Ed can gain practical application out of these two game changers. So for this year’s National Conference on Student Recruitment, Marketing and Retention by Noel Levitz, we decided to conduct an experiment using Check-ins and Plans.

To our knowledge, this is unprecedented in Higher Ed. And we think it would be fantastic for Higher Ed to get the credit for starting a trend in social media and technology. We want every attendee of the conference to be able to share which conference sessions they plan on attending with their colleagues, all before they arrive at the conference. We feel that this is important because according to Inc. Magazine, about 70% of conference attendees decide what sessions they will be attending before arrival. So why not allow them to be able to see who else is attending as well?

We also want to allow attendees to broadcast to their colleagues where they are during the conference. Whether stopping by a vendor booth to learn more about a product, or listening to Mark Greenfield talk about Twitter at his “Twitter for Rookies” session, we thought this would be a nice social layer to one of the most social times that occur all year within higher ed, conference season. Marketing genius Scott Stratten said it best:

Plancast Integration

For the experiment, we researched all of the sessions in the conference to find the ones related to social media in Higher Education (11 out of 120). We then created events on Plancast for each session, in order to allow attendees to share which sessions they plan on attending. We felt this was necessary since historically, no one knew who was going to attend what session prior to arriving in the room of the session. Thanks for making this possible, Plancast :-) To learn more about Plancast, check out this wonderful information site about Plancast made by the IT department at Purdue University.

Foursquare Integration

Next, we thought that it would be a great idea to allow conference-goers to broadcast to their social networks where they were once they arrived in Atlanta. By taking all of the sessions, vendor booths, and local venues around Downtown Atlanta, we produced the ultimate location map for the 2010 Noel Levitz Conference. Thanks to Foursquare, you can know where your colleagues are during the conference just in case you’re bored to death during a session, or want to connect and socialize after hours.

Inigral’s Online Noel Levitz Hub

To pull this all together, we created a site that everyone can visit to browse the sessions focused on social media by day and time, vendors that will be displaying on the conference’s expo floor, along with Downtown Atlanta’s menu of restaurants, bars, and cafes.

Below is a diagram outlining the options we’ve provided to you, powered by Plancast, foursquare, and the Inigral blog.

You can view our social media hub here, and it is an experiment that we are open for feedback on. We hope that it makes information you need to get the most out of this year’s conference easily accessible. We also hope it can serve as a resource for people who aren’t able attend this year’s conference, but want to be in on the action. Enjoy!