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“Trust, but verify” is a Russian proverb that Ronald Reagan adopted and turned into a signature phrase, which he often used when talking about U.S.-Russian relations.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that adage these days. And not just in a political context. Personally, I’m reflecting on the fact that while I trust that I know effective ways to reach out to teens, I’m well aware that it’s essential to continue to verify that what I know is (still) true.
I’m particularly aware of this right now because mStoner and NRCCUA are gearing up to conduct our third “Mythbusting” study. In the past two years, we surveyed teenage prospective students about their attitudes and practices around college admission and their use of .edu websites. Then we asked the same questions of college enrollment officers, marketers, and web professionals to discover what they knew, or thought they knew, about what teens did and wanted during their college search. This year, we’ll take a similar approach to the range of college marketing practices and techniques.
As I reviewed the white papers on this research — “Mythbusting Admissions” and “Mythbusting Websites” — I was impressed that, overall, we can trust professionals at colleges and universities to know a good deal about this audience. They demonstrated that they were aware of what teens did — and what they wanted — during a college search that included a variety of offline and online digital channels and websites.
For just one example, professionals clearly understood how much of a role mobile devices play in teens college search and choice: they use their phones to research colleges, to explore college social channels (and social channels about colleges), and to look at college websites.
At the same time, there are gaps in knowledge. We learned that higher ed marketers could benefit from more nuanced understanding of teen behavior.
For instance, when it comes to the use of their mobile devices, teens value their phones as an always-available conduit to their friends. Based on its own research, Google concludes that today’s teens primarily consume social media rather than use it for personal sharing. Our research confirms findings in TeensTALK® 2016 that indicate that this is definitely true when it comes to college search.
Teens explore official and unofficial social channels and use them to gauge what a college is like. But what they do with their friends (texting, sharing Snaps, or commenting on Instagram posts) isn’t something they necessarily want to do with family members, colleges, or brands. They’re not likely to interact on college-sponsored channels: don’t expect questions or likes. But if they do engage there, it’s fine to interact with them.
Similarly, they aren’t particularly interested in installing and using college apps on their phones (maybe because they’ve learned that a lot of college apps pretty much suck — a topic for another column).
From the standpoint of college marketers, “trust, but verify” means that we should be seeking opportunities to expand our knowledge of what teens think about our communications, what they value about them, and how we can improve their effectiveness.
Here, nuanced understanding can help make specific channels more effective.
We all know that teens love consuming videos on their phones or other devices. But knowing that teens value videos on college websites, but probably won’t use them as the first source of information about an institution or even an academic major, can influence design of your website.
You don’t want to get rid of videos: instead, provide videos that teens can use to verify what they’ll experience in classes or labs related to a specific major. That helps to inform their sense of what a major is all about — once they’ve decided they’re interested in it based on what they learn from the text and images you’ve provided, which are easily scanned for information.
The challenge for campus professionals is not to get get so bogged down in the day-to-day management of channels — especially social channels — that you neglect to pay attention to nuances like these that help to tweak your communications channels to make them as effective as possible.
