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How to Make Student Engagement Contagious

In 1969, famed psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a social experiment looking at the contagiousness of engagement. Wired magazine's Jonah Lehrer accurately summarizes the experiment:

In this study, Milgram had "confederates" stop on a busy city street and look upwards at the sky. He demonstrated that when one person was looking up, 40 percent of passerby also looked up, just in case something interesting was happening. (There was nothing to look at, just sky and buildings.) When two people were looking up, 60 percent of passerby looked up. When there were three people, the percentage jumped to 65 percent, and, when there were four people, nearly 80 percent of strangers stopped and stared upwards.

Here's a video of the experiment in action:

In the unrelated setting of the 2009 Sasquatch Music Festival, a replication of Milgram's experiment occurred as seen in the video below:

The first dancer was alone for a long while, but loved every moment. Some would consider him to be a bit socially off. Then #2 shows up, and from his facial expression, seems to look back at his friends as if he were doing it as a dare or joke. Then, #3 shows up and this is where it gets serious. From that moment on, the level of engagement exponentially grows. This is no longer one person dancing, or a dare, or a joke; this is a contagious social movement.

Connecting the ideas together gets me thinking about the role of student leaders on campus. The current paradigm for student leaders is to host engaging activities (e.g. dance party, cookouts, musicians, etc) and then try to get people to participate. Most schools have a very difficult time achieving success with this model. Also in this model, student leaders tend to look like the sole person dancing by themselves looking a bit off from the rest of the social scene as was the case with the Sasquatch dancer. Yes you are called a leader for being #1, but the real engagement doesn't happen until #3 shows up.

In terms of student engagement, maybe student leaders should stop trying to be #1 by hosting the events and instead find the random #1s on your campus and support them by being #3.

Stop creating events that you think are good and look for students on your campus that are doing cool stuff and support them. Stop being the leader and start being the supporter.

Say Hello to the First Official Red Rover Newsletter

We've joked about making the tag line for Red Rover be, "Students Actually Use It!" The proof of course is in the pudding which we've already talked about.

We see the students as our "customer" first and the admin/staff as our "customer" second. Most higher ed software solutions seem to think the opposite. Just look at the complex user interfaces with "comprehensive solutions" and you'll know the student wasn't their primary focus. We think a bottom up approach is more effective.

One of the strengths of Red Rover is going to be in the connectedness of it's members to each other. Our goal is to help facilitate a strong Red Rover community that is in line with our bottom up approach.

We already have a Student Affairs Collaborative Blog, a Student Leader Collaborative Blog, a Collaborative Project Wiki Space, and a New Features Usersuggest Forum.

We have more ideas in the pipeline and today we just released our first official Red Rover Newsletter to help us better connect to our users and help them connect with each other. There is a separate monthly newsletter for the Admins, Student Leaders, and Regular Students. The goal is to give them tips on how to be more effective within their respective roles through the use of Red Rover.

If you're interested in signing up for the different newsletters, you can do so below:

THE ADMIN NEWSLETTER:
Email:

THE STUDENT LEADER NEWSLETTER:
Email:

THE REGULAR STUDENT NEWSLETTER:
Email:

Don't Market. Build Well. And Then Community Content.

Found this over at Logic + Emotion - for us and every other entrepreneur out there, it's essential.

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There's a little caveat in this theory when it comes to innovation within your target segment.

When, for example, your target market needs education to understand why your product is useful. Let's just say your product relies on Facebook App viral dynamics, uses tags and meta data, and will be the center of a filtered RSS feed ecosystem in education, well then you have to do a fair amount of education. It's not really marketing per se, it's just scaffolding. Building a foundation of understanding so that folks can appreciate.

Conference on the First Year Experience and the Genius of our Community

We often feel really dumb in our work when we repeat the same silly mistakes. This time we wasted four days of work thinking we could come up with the answer on our own instead of asking for advice from the rich pool of knowledge around us.

Last week we reached out to our community of academic professionals for help on what our booth banners for the upcoming FYE conference should say. We posted our current design on the Red Rover marketing wiki page and invited everyone to leave opinions. Their feedback was invaluable as they are in the same job roles as the conference attendees.

Musicians often get to say how they have the coolest and most supportive fans. We'll I'd like to say the same thing about our community of support. Your knowledge is deep, your passion is alive, and without you we would still be swimming in the shallow end. Some of you we just meet, some were there in the beginning and some of you even before that. You are the coolest fans and we appreciate every bit of your advice. Just be patient with us as we'll surely waste another four days before remembering that you probably already know the answer :)

The three main themes from the feedback were:

- Have a catchier center tag line
- Emphasize free
- Ditch the word 'generation' as it's too limiting

With the feedback fresh in our minds and a printing deadline for the conference, we reworked the banners and here's the 'final' (I use that word loosely) version of the banners.

 

We are actually at the conference right now and testing the banners in real time. So far the response has been fairly positive. I suspect much more so than had we went with our original design.

We are annoyed with our use of every buzz word possible because everyone is using them and our message gets lost. Also, the center banner with the black text on red is too hard to read without the correct lighting.

So we want to start the brainstorming session for the next round now and figure out how to be the anti buzz word, the anti 40K solution, the anti in house portal that no one uses, etc. Thoughts?