Recruiting Intelligence

In honor of the U.S. Federal Tax Filing Deadline this week, we dedicate this Intead Insight to another federal agency with filing requirements – the US Immigration and Customs Service and the SEVIS system that many of you know all too well (and wish you didn't).

We all know that the visa process plays a significant role in the university enrollment process. We highly recommend you listen to our podcast with former State Department Officer Tony Edson for valuable insights into the State Department's Visa Services.

Here at Intead we don't spend a lot of time tooting our own horn. We're so busy implementing client projects while analyzing trends in international higher education recruiting and marketing, digital marketing and social media, there's little time for patting ourselves on the back. Let alone shouting our succeses from the rafters.  

Your work, like ours, is important stuff. And all that stuff is valued by the folks we reach, our target audiences: the students, researchers, and other industry professionals who benefit from what our organizations do. These are our customers.

So when good customer feedback happens, we have the opportunity to use it as objective justification for the value of our work. Testimonials represent authentic, reliable and sharable content to let our customers hear the message: "Hey, these guys met my needs; exceeded my expectations."

Building bridges between cultures and achieving cultural connectedness has been simplified through technology. What once required face-to-face meetings and books on the subject can now be achieved through the power of video and social media.

Many of us work to engage international students and connect with them in a way that feels familiar, comfortable and culturally relevent, but none of us are doing it in quite the creative and talented way as Jessica Beinecke. As the creator of Crazy Fresh Chinese and BaiJie Lalala, Ms. Beinecke is a well known celebrity among Chinese teenagers and young adults for the way in which she explains American popular culture in a relatable, entertaining way. And we are proud to announce that Ms. Beinecke will be joining us as a keynote speaker at the 2014 Intead Global Marketing Conference.  

Watch this VIDEO to learn more about Ms. Beinecke: 

Video is a powerful force. In our marketing work we encounter the force of video every day. FACT: The second largest search engine in the world after Google: YouTube.

A personal experience, much to my chagrin: my son wants to learn how to tie a necktie. Does he ask me? No! He simply consults YouTube.  

One more example, my son's high school teacher has a meeting outside of school and he will miss a lesson. This teacher does not believe in the quality of the substitute for his high level math class. He selects a set of videos on YouTube with lectures on high level math and provides questions to answer. Online video content supplants human teaching in this case.

That gets us to our Intead Insight review of: "Research on the Use of Khan Academy in Schools." The research was conducted by SRI and the Gates Foundation to understand the outcomes of using Khan Academy videos as teaching tools. 

We'd like to proudly introduce a new content source for you-- Intead Index-- a set of indices that provides you with all of the information you need to make informed decisions. We will publish the lists regularly on the blog over the next few months. We will be publishing a compilation of these lists on a yearly basis. While we'd like to think that our research is comprehensive, we know that there might be service providers we inadvertently overlooked. That's where you, our loyal readers, come into the picture.  We welcome your comments and additions to the lists. Feel free to use the provided link to share your feedback. 

The rising cost of higher education coupled with mounting student debt is the biggest threat to higher education. Though we hope that you chuckled over our April Fool's Day joke (see: Intead Applauds Opportunity U's New Tuition Pricing Model), we approach this challenge in all seriousness. Our young people are being crushed under a mountain of debt. This affects all of us, not just those students with loan payment plans. The economic and social impacts are a national challenge. We need a new approach to the higher education tuition pricing model.

"Will I get a job in India after I graduate from your institution?"

This is probably one of the most challenging questions for an US admissions officer from a prospective Indian student. In contrast to the question about scholarships which is bound to ocurr as well, the admissions officer has no control and very limited knowledge about the value of the degree in the Indian market.

The reality is that U.S. universities have done a very poor job tracking, let alone supporting, their international students' career opportunities in student home countries. Let's see if we can help.

Don't be the last to learn about Opportunity University's innovative tuition pricing model. This changes everything in higher education.

The vast majority of companies still treat social media as a fad and social phenomena. Their use of social media tools for marketing is rudimentary and the equivalent of marketing by billboard. Not to say that billboards are ineffective. It's just that digital marketing and social media offer a different marketing opportunity and by and large, folks simply don't know how to use it effectively.

And so, because social media marketing is free, more and more companies are putting up their billboards (first it was websites back in the 1990s and now it is social media accounts). So here's the thing: digital marketing is a waste of time given the number of billboards now posted, UNLESS you have the infrastructure to create and disseminate compelling content and track the online activity.

And so, the answer is "yes" that will require more investment in digital tools, staff or vendors. Effective marketing is not free afterall. Even when using social media. Sorry to be the ones breaking the news.

Today we want to highlight data from a report from Sprout, a company providing social media management tools.