About 85 prospective students attended the first ever Google+ Hangout hosted by the Office of Admissions to have their questions about the U answered.
The U was approached by Google to hold the hangout as part of its marketing push with universities across the country. The staff at the Office of Admissions had not used Google+ before and logged in to the social network for the first time last week.
Before the invitation for the moderated chat was sent out, the U’s page had about 200 followers. After this weekend announcing the chat, the number jumped to about 1,800, said Mateo Remsburg, associate director of the Office of Admissions.
“It was a rough first go of it, but overall I think it went well,” Remsburg said. “Once we got the hang of it, we got into a groove.”
The students were able to type in questions and the moderators answered them live. Questions were related to students’ concerns about Salt Lake City, the U and available opportunities on campus.
The chat covered topics such at admission standards, diversity, social opportunities and extracurricular activities.
Remsburg said one challenge of the chat was the influx of multiple questions at one time. While they tried to answer all the questions, there are a few they were not able to answer. These questions will be answered by email.
“[We] had many graduate and second bachelor’s students attend, who had questions [the reps] weren’t prepared to answer,” he said. “In the future, we would want to make sure we had reps from different offices who could answer all the questions.”
Overall the feedback was positive, he said.
“I thought that this hangout session was so helpful,” wrote Julianne Kidd on the chat page when the session concluded. “I would encourage many of the other colleges to do this and for the U of U to keep hosting them. This hangout answered many of my questions and gave me more insight about U of U. Thank you guys for all your help.”
Even though the first run had a couple glitches, Remsburg said the chat has potential to be used in the future, though they still have some issues to work out.
“One of the things we look at is the return on investment, and in this situation, it’s hard to know who you are talking to and how to capture their information so we can follow up with them in the future for recruitment purposes,” Remsburg said. “Like is there a way to gauge how many people participated, and did it really influence their decision to come to the university?”