Marketing in the university setting: ONU

In Chapter 14 of Katie Delahaye Paine’s “Measure What Matters,” she discusses the measurement of public relations tactics within the higher education environment. She believes that universities are marketing to prospective students, alumni and faculty more aggressively than ever before because of all the new ways to reach people through technology.

I can attest to this, as I was a prospective Polar Bear just months ago. While Ohio Northern actually didn’t send me as much mail as some of the other schools that were on my list, they still contacted me multiple times in multiple ways. They sent me traditional mail, emails, and they did a lot of marketing when I visited the campus as well.

After I had made my decision to come to ONU, I got more emails and paper mail about different things concerning move-in day and summer orientation. On top of that, I was followed on Twitter by an account called “@ONU_18,” which was made for the class of 2018. This allowed me and other Polar Bears who had already committed to meet each other over social media and get excited about the fall.

I’m not sure who was running the @ONU_18 account, but I am guessing that it was not a freshman- it was probably an upperclassman who is on a student council that works with public relations. Regardless, this Twitter account and the interaction that I gained from it made me more excited to come to Ada in the fall and definitely served as an effective PR tool for the university.

As I have mentioned in earlier blog posts, ONU is not the best at utilizing their social media networks. I think that they could get so much more interaction out of their prospective students, current students and alumni if they would utilize them; if not all social networks, maybe just Facebook and Twitter.

They could cater their interaction with the younger Polar Bears more towards Twitter, since the younger generation uses Twitter much more than Facebook, and the alumni towards Facebook.

I think that ONU does a good job of interacting with future students and alumni through the mail; if they could figure out how to add social media into their marketing equation, they could make an even bigger impact.