Hi Friends,

I am Tracy Shank, your newest RoomSync team member and resource for roommate matching software knowledge. My official title is Director of Marketology, and I am working on some pretty exciting things right now. Here’s what’s coming up.

1. RoomSync is about to hit 10,000 fans on Facebook, so if you haven’t liked us yet, please help out now!

This occasion is cause for celebration, so we want to get there as soon as possible. In our office celebration means free ShirtSync, CakeSync or Dry-Erase-Boards-We-Can-Use-In-The-ShowerSync. Yes, we may be a bit peculiar here, and sure that last one could use a name tweak, but our celebrations are about achievement and team spirit, so like us and tell your friends, too!

2. RoomSync employees now take part in a weekly ThinkSync brainstorming session.

If you have an idea of new features or changes you’d like to see, let us know and we will talk about it at length – maybe in pirate voices – but with our one un-patched eye still on our mission of empowering roommate choice.

3. RoomSync is attending more conferences this year than ever before.

We want to be the roommate matching software at your university or apartment complex, so keep an eye out for us. Not only will we have some awesome research to support the efficacy of our products, but we also have a few tricks up our sleeve to catch your attention and make sure you want to tell everyone about our product.

4. Finally, for this list anyway, we are redecorating our office.

We are getting back to our roots and reconnecting with our college-aged young users by putting a bit more school spirit on our walls. If you’ve got a pendant, send it in and we will honor our current and future customers by looking at it every day and rubbing it for good luck during football season.

I am happy to be joining the team and am looking forward to connecting with our customers a bit more over the year. So, please reach out if there is anything I can help you with or follow us on twitter for our frequent updates around roommate assignments and your organization.

Thanks,

Tracy

Greetings!

The RoomSync Nerdz have been working hard and building new features to enhance the user experience. Now students are notified inside Facebook in the 'Apps' section as soon as they are requested or accepted by a roommate in RoomSync. Previously, users were only alerted via email. This immediate notification allows users to get information about RoomSync in a way they are familiar with and also helps them respond to requests and confirmations more quickly, which ideally will help increase match rate.

According to a recent TechCrunch article, "good (mobile app) push notifications drive 67% of app usage the first month after download, 74% of usage two months after download, and 81% of usage three months after download." RoomSync Mobile has notifications similar to the Facebook app, which the RoomSync team believes "are those that are highly relevant to the user and focused on meeting [student] needs. "

This blog post is based on my presentation at the Georgetown Innovation Summit which begins at 2:53:00. 

To most people, hacking represents something negative. But I prefer to think of it as designing a workaround to achieve a desired result. By paying attention to these hacks, Higher Ed can gain all sorts of inisights to improve the overall student experience.

How Facebook learns from user hacking

In 2004, Facebook was growing, fast. Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the team needed to decide what feature to build next. They had to consider not only the time it would take to build the feature, but also the additional support costs.

One of the features being considered was the ability to upload photos besides your profile photo. Yes, there was actually a time when you could not upload your photo album to Facebook and tag all of your friends. It seems obvious to us now, however at the time it was not quite as clear that this was a feature that users wanted.

When the Facebook team looked at how people were using the site, they noticed users were changing their profile photo multiple times each day. Users wanted to show off their new photos and they came up with this 'hack' as a way to achieve their goal. 

In 2003 B.F. (before Facebook), students would receive the name, email and phone number of their assigned roommate and give them a call. It never occurred to them to look that person up online because there was nowhere to look.

By 2005 A.F., more than 85% of college students were on Facebook; each wanting to know everything they could about their new roommate to be sure that the next year of their life would not be spent in agony (desired result). The hack that students across the country constructed was to research their roommate on Facebook and if they did not like what they saw, call into the housing office and ask for a new roommate.

I have spoken with hundreds of people who work in on-campus housing and 99.9% of them experience some level of Facebook related roommate calls. The only department that did not experience them simply decided to withhold the names of assigned roommates until the students meet on the first day of classes.

So there is the hack. Now, how do you fix the process by incorporating the hack? Our clients achieve this through RoomSync because we empower students to search for roommates on Facebook. They are given access to all potential roommates before the assignments are made. The result? Users who want to be in control of the matching process are happy and housing departments do not receive any calls about Facebook.

How are students hacking your processes? Are they hacking their room like this Berkeley freshman? Try re-examining and thinking of ways to incorporate these hacks to improve the overall student experience. Do you have examples of hacks in Higher Ed? Leave a comment below!

I love my job for a lot of reasons. For one, our clients are some of the most knowledgeable and passionate people that I have met. They are thought leaders not only in housing but also in higher education.

One example is Amy Jorgensen, Marketing Coordinator at the University of Florida's Department of Housing & Residence Education. Amy does an incredible job with the department’s marketing, branding and social media efforts. You can connect with her on Twitter here. The UF Housing & Residence Education Facebook page experienced phenomenal growth over the past year. Likes increased by over 4,500 and there were nearly 390,000 Facebook page views in just the month of September in 2011. To put that in perspective, that’s almost double the page views their primary website page receives all year!

She recently presented her social media strategies and tactics at the ACUHO-I Business Operations conference in Orlando, FL entitled “Rock out your page – Make the most of your Facebook presence”. 

The presentation was named a "Best Of" at the conference and is full of useful social media statistics and powerful strategies to create an engaging Facebook fan page presence. My favorite statistic, courtesy of Dr. Rey Junco, is that students check Facebook an average of 5.75 times per day.

Check out all the statistics and insights from Amy at the ACUHO-I Online Library, which is full of some other fantastic presentations as well.