Balancing KSC’s Reputation on the Web
From Caleb Clark, Online Communications: A “Keene State College” search for video on the web today returns a much more balanced portrait of KSC than the same search did three months ago. In October 2008, a search on Google and YouTube for the words “Keene State College” returned videos of concerts, parties, and the unfortunately popular Red Sox “riot.” Over the last three months, the Online Communications department, with help from the KSC community, has used existing and new videos to balance KSC’s reputation among videos on the Web.
Prospective students search for videos on Google and YouTube to check out schools. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education notes that the party videos students share with each other can create a perception of a school that does not reflect the school as a whole. The students can’t be faulted; they are using YouTube for one of its strongest features, the ability to share videos easily with friends. But because students are often so experienced and motivated at creating effective online media, they can unwittingly co-opt their institution’s brand.
To solve this problem, Online Communications researched what other institutions are doing. YouTube “channels,” coherent home pages for videos, were ubiquitous and had sometimes been up for years. Stanford University, World Learning, National Geographic and the Union Leader all have channels, for example. YouTube is the biggest online video host, so it influences Google searches, and is a one-stop shop for controlling search results for video on the Web. In addition ,the UMASS Journalism department was found to be successfully using YouTube and other free services to host student reports, on their student-run Amherst Wire, and Hampshire College was found to have a dedicated multimedia page.
While the Online Communications department is not in a position to produce a significant number of new videos, a deep search of the web uncovered Keene State videos posted by students, faculty, and staff, including a campus tour made by a student, a slick set of public service announcements made by students about our recycling efforts, operatic recitals recorded by parents, conference presentations, and video KSC commissioned to document the Academic Excellence Conference. The problem was that these videos did not have well-written titles, tags, and descriptions. These videos were uploaded and tagged over the last two months.
Currently we manage over half of the videos that are returned after a search of “Keene State College” on YouTube and Google Video. Our long-range goal is to someday displace the Red Sox video from the top spot. You can help by visiting the Keene State College YouTube Channel and rating, subscribing, and befriending the channel. The channel’s link is: http://www.youtube.com/user/KeeneStateCollege
We are constantly looking for more videos. Any videos posted to YouTube can also be easily embedded into our keene.edu web pages. For help, e-mail: online@keene.edu.
