Melibee Global: Your resource for International Education and Study Abroad News, Information, Resources and Advising » marketing study abroad http://melibeeglobal.com Covering the world of International Education and Study Abroad Tue, 22 May 2012 21:53:24 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= Marketing Study Abroad: 8tracks.com http://melibeeglobal.com/2011/05/marketing-study-abroad-8tracks-com/ http://melibeeglobal.com/2011/05/marketing-study-abroad-8tracks-com/#comments Sun, 22 May 2011 15:25:19 +0000 Missy Gluckmann http://melibeeglobal.com/?p=2976 What is Marketing? According to the American Marketing Association it is: “The activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

Whether we are study abroad offices, faculty, 3rd party providers or consultants, we have an interest in marketing the study abroad experience.  Clearly, we think it has value.

I recently presented about some of the missteps in short term study abroad programming - and one of the top 5 was the lack of creativity in marketing.  Simply put: We forget to think like the students.  Yes, they’re on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube/Vimeo. But where ELSE are they?

They’re at 8tracks.com. And now, so am I!

Check out my first study abroad/international music mix:





8tracks.com is a music website that allows you to create your own music mixes.  You create a profile, add your photo and link to your website and then you can create music mixes from your own (legally purchased) music collection.  You pick your tracks, upload them to the site, describe them with a tag like “world music”,” chill”, “instrumental”, “study”, etc and then you make your mix “live.”  I created my first mix this weekend – selecting music from different cultures (American, Germany, Algeria, England, Egypt, Jamaica, Ireland and Native American.) I described the mix by artist but also mentioned that it is great mix for those interested in study abroad.  People will select my mix through a category search, but they can also search study abroad and find my mix.  Regardless of how they find my mix, they find Melibee Global.

I searched study abroad on 8tracks.com and two mixes quickly appeared. Both were loaded, not surprisingly, by students. One had studied abroad and shared her ipod mix, the other is preparing to study abroad this fall in Rome and describes her mix as music she knows she will be listening to when she steps off the plane in Italy.

You can also embed your mix into your website (as I did above), which allows students to listen to enticing music while perusing over the facts and figures of your study abroad program.

8tracks.com is a relatively new site. Twitter and Facebook were too, once.  Last fall, 8tracks.com has over 130K unique visitors per day.  Yes, you heard me correctly  – per DAY. And the number is growing, daily.

We know that music is very tied to memories.  We hear a song, we think of a place, person or experience.  Songs “get stuck” in our heads for hours.  Music is a very powerful marketing tool and we should be thinking about how often our students are walking across campus listening to ipods.  If we’re thinking like our students and marketing our programs well, they’ll be listening to our program specific mixes.  If you have a program in Spain – create a mix of songs by the Gipsy Kings and Alejandro Sanz. If you want to have students connect with your program in Kenya – create a mix that includes Kenge Kenge and Suzanna Owiyo.  And if you’re promoting your program in Brazil, you must include music by the legendary Caetano Veloso .

Just hearing Caetano Veloso makes me want to jump on a plane and return to Brazil. I was particularly inspired to visit Brazil after hearing him perform in the U.S. with some Brazilian friends. At that performance, I could feel Brazil all around me. When I listen to my own mix on 8tracks.com, I am inspired to pack my bags again, especially while grooving to DiDi by Cheb Khaled!

On that note, I’ll leave you with the brilliant Mr. Veloso, one of my all time favorites:

Click here to view the embedded video.

 

]]> http://melibeeglobal.com/2011/05/marketing-study-abroad-8tracks-com/feed/ 2 Deciding Factors in Study Abroad – Women vs Men http://melibeeglobal.com/2009/11/deciding-factors-in-study-abroad-women-vs-men/ http://melibeeglobal.com/2009/11/deciding-factors-in-study-abroad-women-vs-men/#comments Fri, 13 Nov 2009 06:21:32 +0000 Missy Gluckmann http://melibeeglobal.com/?p=147 The article below was printed in the Chronicle of Higher Education on November 6th, 2009.  I found this new research regarding why women tend to study abroad more than men to be particularly interesting, yet I am not completely convinced by these findings.

Women have dominated educational travel abroad for decades -  in the earliest tradition as a way to teach girls to be “young ladies” who were well versed in foreign languages and the arts. The vast majority of study abroad programs still reside in Western European countries and require language and culture study.

This article does not clarify whether men are less likely to go abroad due to more stringent academic requirements in fields of study that are more traditionally populated by men (i.e. engineering/sciences/math that require sequential coursework with less flexibility for study). It also does not reference the quality or method of academic advising that led students to decide to participate in study abroad.

I find the commentary about women following faculty advising to be particularly interesting.  Does this mean that women latch on to a positive faculty influence more readily than men do and therefore elevate the possibility of receiving direct advice about the value of study abroad? Does this hold true for other academic experiences such as internships or co-op experiences?

I want to know more about the data collection and what other factors were considered before feeling confident in this research.  The research references data from 19 colleges  – 4 year and 2 years institutions.  But what is the split – were there 17 four year schools and  2 community colleges? Were the four year colleges private or public institutions? What is the break down of the majors of the 2800 students?  Were they primarily humanities/social science students?  What percentage were in the hard sciences?

What are your initial thoughts on this research?  Are women and men significantly different in factors that lead to decisions about study abroad? What questions or affirmations does this research raise for you?  I’m curious to hear your feedback and equally curious to see if there will be expanded research on this subject.  The topic is a vital question for international educators and certainly one that will be of great interest to those in the field that are responsible for marketing programs to their own students and those on other campuses.

November 6, 2009 – From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Men and Women Differ in How They

Decide to Study Abroad, Study Finds

By Peter Schmidt

Vancouver, British Columbia

Women appear to be much more likely than men to choose to study abroad because of significant gender-based differences in how students are influenced by their backgrounds, academic environments, and social interactions, according to research results being presented here this week as part of the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education.

The findings suggest that advocates of study-abroad programs “need to craft targeted marketing strategies that recognize and account for key differences between women and men,” says a paper summarizing the results of a study by three researchers at the University of Iowa.

“While intent to study abroad among women seems to be affected by influential authority figures and educational contexts,” the paper says, “intent to study abroad among men seems to be primarily shaped by emerging personal values, experiences, and peer influence.”

The key question the study sought to tackle was why women are almost twice as likely as men to embark on foreign study. Although the gender gap is sometimes assumed to simply reflect the preponderance of women in the fine arts, foreign languages, and other humanities majors heavily represented in foreign-study programs, the reality is that it exists even in male-dominated majors such as engineering and the hard sciences.

Mark Salisbury, a research assistant at Iowa’s Center for Research on Undergraduate Education, and Michael B. Paulsen and Ernest T. Pascarella, both professors of higher education there, based their analysis on data about some 2,800 students at 19 four-year and two-year colleges and universities participating in the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education. The students were surveyed by the Wabash-study researchers shortly after entering college as freshmen in the fall of 2006 and were asked about their intent to study abroad when surveyed again in the spring of 2007.

In crunching the survey data to determine what had influenced students’ decisions to study abroad, the researchers found marked differences in how the different genders responded to different forces in their lives.

Having highly educated parents appeared to make women more likely to intend to study abroad, but it did not have any effect on men’s intentions, reflecting the broader observation among researchers that women are more likely to make college-going decisions based on their parents’ preferences.

Similarly, taking classes that focus on human diversity and differences appeared to leave women more likely to intend to study abroad but did not have an impact on men, suggesting that, just as women are more influenced by their parents than are men, they may be more influenced by faculty members or, at least, the courses that faculty members teach.

The Iowa researchers are found that:

  • The more men interacted with their peers, the less likely they were to intend to study abroad. Peer interactions did not have such an impact on women.
  • Women, but not men, who attended regional institutions or community colleges were less likely than those attending liberal-arts colleges to intend to study abroad. The researchers speculated that perhaps “something about the educational culture at regional institutions and community colleges is negatively affecting women’s intent to study abroad,” or that perhaps “women attending these institutions are impacted by additional obligations such as family or parenting responsibilities that preclude the possibility of studying abroad.”
  • Being undecided on a major appeared to leave men substantially more likely to choose to study abroad but not to have any significant impact on women.
  • In some cases, culture and gender appeared to interact. Asian-American men, but not Asian-American women, were significantly less likely than white students to intend to study abroad. And although Hispanic men and white men were equally likely to intend to study abroad, Hispanic women were significantly more likely to intend to study abroad than were white women.
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