ESSEC Business School: Social Media Monitoring Project

In a press release dated May 6, 2010, the President of ESSEC, Pierre Tapie, presented the objectives and strategy for development for the next five years.

"Faced with the challenges of internationalization, the growing demand for higher education in emerging countries and the new needs of students and companies, ESSEC has developed an ambitious plan to maintain its position amongst the top business schools of the future."

REELING IN THE WORLD'S STUDENTS

According to the press release, the number of students worldwide will have doubled by the year 2015, going from 100 M to 200 M students.  Fifty-five million of these will be coming from China and India, but these countries will not be able to handle this number.

 " To live up to these new stakes, ESSEC has set new ambitions:  be one of the top 20 business schools worldwide, in the top ten of Asia and one of the top five in Europe.  To gain notoriety on the international scene, ESSEC is putting into place a common brand name, called ESSEC Business School."

Because the modest-sized school (5,550 enrolled students) has a significant presence throughout the world, one of its goals is to develop interconnectedness between all participants via the internet.  In addition, the school plans to raise €150M by 2015:  €79 M from companies, €41 M from public financing and €30M from Alumni.  If the school wants to find funding, it needs to develop its visibility.

INSTITUTIONAL WEBSITES

The first indication of the school's internet presence can be found on its websites.  You can already sense a difference between ESSEC Business School, the larger entity and its Executive Education Department, which has ranked 10th in the world in 2010 for Executive Education, N° 1 in France and N° 4 in Europe for open enrollment programs, ranking done by the Financial Times.

On the ESSEC Business School website there is a news page for press releases and an RSS feed for ESSEC events.  Not a lot in terms of Social Media, or in terms of regularly updated content.

We can compare this to its Executive Education Department website, which is much more tech-savvy, which unfortunately is not much of a compliment.  On its home page, we can see links to Facebook, LinkedIn, (LinkedIn description of ESSEC  here) Viadeo and Twitter.  However, you discover they are pretty much just there to decorate the page if you delve a little further by clicking on the links.

SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING 

• There is a real lack of social network groups affiliated with ESSEC.  
• The school has maintained an old-fashioned approach of  what I will call a hierarchical system of social networking.  On pages of the website, we can see opportunities to network via physical events, for  which you'll be notified by joining the special interest group.  Alums are noted on these pages as contact people. 
• Imagine how much more dynamic this would be if these people could contact each other via a forum and their area of interest! 
• And they could reach out to members world-wide, not just those who could participate in the physical meetings.
• The school uses PR sites to notify the public of its press releases.    
• I found no evidence of any social networking activity using Addictomatic, Social Mention or Ice Rocket.  Their approach is definitely pre-web 2.O and it needs to be brought up to speed.

Social Mention gives us a 5:0 ratio in terms of positive sentiments expressed on social networks.  Clearly people are proud to be affiliated with the school, but aside from using it as a kind of calling card, what can they really do with it?

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HIERARCHICAL COMMUNICATION:  2nd example

We can see a decent amount of web activity that follows the typical top-down method of communication.  ESSEC has been in the news for researching VideoGames and their influence on Kids in Sports. 
These articles are present on the official website, but also on various blogs and other resources.  The quality of the media coverage is impressive enough, with big leaguers taking notice:  Business Week and the New York Times (see article), for example. 

Not only does big league press talk about ESSEC, but ESSEC's partners are big league, so we know they've got stuff to brag about:  joint projects with the Louvre, the prestigious Concorde Hotels chain, visiting professors from Harvard and the like.

SO WHY AREN'T THEY OUT THERE TALKING AND BLOWING THEIR HORN?

If so many ESSEC reps are busy out there doing things, why isn’t ESSEC promoting those events?  Or helping its associates to spread the word about what they are doing.  It is a cultural phenomenon, true, that the French generally don’t like to brag about individual success, considering it in bad taste.  But training can be done so that they can see the advantage in it for them, for their science, for the world, for whatever reason that may motivate them.  Everyone wins here.

I found one consultant, called The Orangeman, who was in charge of "360° marketing for ESSEC :  print, web, advertising, PR and HR."  Why no talk of SM?  


The groundswell is out there talking about them, such as bloggers and aggregate sites who spread the word about MBA programs around the world, but don't take preference with one or another.  Maybe there is a way to work on this aspect, researching these existing sites and finding ways to augment the information that is out there, providing them with additional information.  Tighter links could be developed.

 Another example of this would be F1GMAT, a one-stop resource portal that helps people with their GMAT preparation, MBA Applications and give prospective students the latest information on business school events, deadlines and other developments.  They should hook up with groups like this around the globe to promote ESSEC’s activities.  

Taking this idea one step further, ESSEC could launch an on-line newspaper in the area of their specialty or specialties, just as gamasutra, who posted ESSEC's findings on video games, follows what is happening in the gaming industry.

There is absolutely no mention of ESSEC (well almost) on Twitter, except for a visiting professor and my own announcement that I had undertaken this project.  Nothing on MySpace, which we might agree is no longer as popular as it once was.  Twitter needs to be used to send events news, awards, etc. to its followers.  I found on Digg an announcement for scholarships.  This is a great opportunity to show the school's benevolent side.  But this again, is coming from the groundswell, following a PR announcement on the side of ESSEC.  ESSEC needs to diversify how it communicates with the public.

VOTRE TUBE, NOT YOU TUBE

One area where ESSEC appears to be quite present on the Web is on You Tube, with 101 videos found by Addictomatic.  Many of these videos are student-initated, others are put on-line by the school.  The problem is, too many are in French, not English.  A possible solution to attract international audiences would be to put English subtitles on them, or perhaps to even dub into English.  ESSEC SELLS PARIS(video)

Other top French schools seem to do a better job marketing themselves:  Sciences Po, HEC and INSEAD are good examples.  This should be a major motivator in getting ESSEC to move forward in its promotional tactics.

And finally, to end with some irony, I managed to find one article saying that a representative from ESSEC will be giving a speech at a Cornell Hospitality Research Summit  that will feature hands-on strategies and tactics for using social media.

Go figure.  Perhaps change is closer than we might think.