And I say Dr. Horrible in the best possible way.

Here’s an admissions video from Yale.

It’s a well-produced, 16-minute (!!) musical production full of students, dorms, faculty and even a network news anchor. The coolest part – it was entirely written, recorded, filmed and edited by students. Seriously, watch the whole thing, it’s pretty amazing. The middle part is awesome, showing off campus groups and life.

I didn’t know much about Yale, but after watching this I think I pretty much get what its about and what it can offer students. What a great video.

If you can, watch it full-screen and/or HD.

His post this week about young people really jumped out at me, because if you change the word music with college marketing or enrollment marketing, it still fits and they are critical points that I think we as web people get, and need to really make sure other people in our institutions get.

Here’s the whole post, which you should read, but here are two relevant bits that I think are very important.

Point being kids today are born into technology, they’ve got a natural facility. We oldsters, as adept as we may become, will always be a step behind. With children it’s instinct. The children are literally the future.

Oh, don’t blast me for using the cliche. Too many people use children as an excuse for their lame behavior today. My point, Herbie’s point, is that the kids will have the solutions. We can start the ball moving on music education, but the kids own the court.

and this. Emphasis is mine.

But more important is to note that solutions will come from this younger generation. Whilst oldsters go to lunch, play golf at the club, kids are coming up with solutions. Oldsters want a band that will be ubiquitous, that will rain down coin. It’s necessary to support the purveyors’ lifestyles. But kids are excited about music and the process first. The end result comes second. Or the end result doesn’t have to be today, it can be tomorrow, or the day after that. Kids are still dreamers, they haven’t had the optimism beaten out of them.

Today’s kids are the anti-baby boomers. Rather than striving for individual achievement, what’s most important is cohesion, being a member of the group. And it’s groups that will birth the future. You can’t have a successful act without an audience. And kids know how to grow said audience, and aren’t worried if at first it’s just thousands, and not millions. And kids today know how to use the new technology, how to stimulate and stay connected with these groups, that’s the social networking revolution. Instead of putting up barriers, preventing the free flow of both information and copyrighted material, they see easy conduits. They don’t believe information must be free, but they do believe everybody must have access to it.

So new methods of payment must be constructed. And the oldsters are penalized by their thinking, that starts with too many zeros. Kids today are interested in traction. And will jump to where the traction is on a whim, instantly, if their friends are there, if it’s appealing.

In other words, it’s about the audience, not marketing. Once a kid feels he’s being sold to… You’d better have an incredible product, like an iPhone. Otherwise, not only are they skeptical, they bad mouth you.

Today, I’m doing something similar, but a little bit different. I’m eating some dog food, just in a new and different flavor.

I’m going to a college fair (at the high school I went to) with one of our admissions counselors.

Why? To learn. I want to learn more about the admissions process and really grasp the communication flow that we as an institution have with students. I get how they do it on the web, but the web isn’t the only piece of the admissions marketing puzzle.

I’m excited and nervous. If you are an admissions expert who has done this a million times, please give me some tips or things to pay attention to.

The accommodations for this conference are not in a swanky resort or hotel – we’re staying in one of the dorms here at Smith College. It’s a beautiful campus, but this dormitory is so…dormy. I haven’t stayed in a dorm since I finished school in 1998.

It got me thinking – have you experienced your school like a prospective student will? You may have eaten at the dining halls, but have you ever spent the night in one of your dorms? Have you taken a shower in one of the shared bathrooms? Have you trudged early in the morning from the dorm to breakfast?

I think having a sleepover in a dorm would be beneficial for not only admissions folks, but public relations folks too. We market the college experience, but how many of us have really lived it – and lived it recently? IT folks – I think something like this would also be beneficial for you too. Bring a laptop and get connected. Try the wireless or in my case, fight with Cisco Clean Access for awhile like I did when I arrived.

I love the term “eating your own dog food.” Wikipedia has a great description of the term, saying: “To say that a company “eats its own dog food” means that it uses the products that it makes.”

QR codes are two-dimensional bar codes that can contain any alphanumeric text and that often feature URLs that direct users to sites where they can learn about an object or place (a practice known as “mobile tagging”). Decoding software on tools such as camera phones interprets the codes, which are increasingly found in places such as product labels, billboards, and buildings, inviting passers-by to pull out their mobile phones and uncover the encoded information.

These codes, popular in Japan, allow users to use a device, most often their cell phone camera, at a QR Code and be given information, such as a URL to visit or some other information.

While the article deals with the pedagogical uses or these codes, I think there are many possible uses on the marketing side as well.

I think it will eventually be a great resource for prospective students. For example, lets say that tomorrow we send them a postcard telling them the due date for applications is coming up. On that postcard, you include text and a URL for your online application urging them to apply. It requires the user to enter in the address manually.

In the future, perhaps we will send students a postcard urging them to apply with a QR or other 2d barcode image on it. They point their phone or mobile device at it (or hold it up to the camera in their netbook) and they are instantly taken to your application. In fact, I’ve mocked up a sample to show you what that could look like. 2 caveats: I’m not a graphic designer in any sense and the picture is from Selwyn College in Cambridge.

Click for a larger version.

If you’re tracking your conversions closely, you should know these URLs can contain all sorts of analytics data, so you would be able to get very reliable information about response rates, perhaps better then using other redirect techniques.

While the technology is ready for use today, you may not be at a point where it would make sense to introduce these types of codes. When I think about where mobile technology will be in two years, I think there will be demand for it. Today’s 14-year-olds will be starting their college searches before you know it.

Resources:
Online, free QR Code Generator
2D Sense, iPhone app that will read QR Codes
NeoReader

Beware some salty language if you’re at work.

p.s. did you notice his zenned out slides? That’s right. No slides. It’s all about the content.

The videos aren’t specific to institution and feature our VP for enrollment and marketing.

From the technical side, we shot them using our Sony HD camera outside our main administration building on our rustic bridge. The videos were edited in iMovie. I blogged last month about how great iMovie is. For now, we’re just putting these in YouTube though we will eventually upload them to Vimeo in HD.