A growing number of colleges and universities are trying to elbow their own video messages onto such sites as YouTube to promote themselves, create a virtual community, and drown out embarrassing clips, reports the Washington Post. One of the first things that pops up if you check YouTube to find out about a certain public school in Western Maryland is a video that starts: FROSTBURG STATE UNIVERSITY. ITS GREAT!!! An edgy, new-wavy Electric Six song cranks in, and the camera lurches as people down shots, chug beer, and do keg stands. One guy climbs unsteadily out a window, grins at the camera, then drops through the dark to the ground far below. Not exactly the image the school wants to broadcast–and that’s nothing compared with some of the videos at other universities, which show fights, racist costumes, weird hazing rituals, and everything else that’s ugly about college life. These videos are all playing out on a site that gets hundreds of millions of viewers a day, many of them smack dab in the schools’ target market–and they’re the kind of clips that schools are aiming to drown out with their own promotional videos. "Marketing in higher education is really at a crossroads," said Nora Ganim Barnes, director of the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. "Those that don’t engage and manage social media are going to be left behind."
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