My colleagues Bill and Peter have posted here about how admissions offices at schools like MIT and Yale are using social media to reach out to prospective students. But wait a minute — who’s reaching out to whom?

University admissions staffs are getting more creative with social media as a marketing tool. As Bill wrote here, MIT is hiring current students to blog about their experiences on the admissions website. And Peter blogged about the 17-minute video musical that Yale students, working with the admissions office, produced to tell prospects why they should chose Yale.

Tufts University, my own alma mater, is also getting in on the action, but in reverse. It invited applicants to create a one-minute YouTube video as an optional “essay,” along with their standard application. The New York Times reported in February that about 1,000 out of 15,000 applicants had posted videos.

Some are earnest monologues shot in messy bedrooms; others are photo montages, original songs, and animations. One prospective student made a remote-controlled helicopter in the shape of the Tufts elephant mascot. Another posted a crafty stop-motion animation that took a week to make and has gotten over 16,000 views on YouTube.

And that’s what Tufts hadn’t anticipated: that the videos would be watched, not just by other Tufts applicants but by thousands of people in some cases. The most-watched entry I found, with over 107,000 views and counting, features Amelia Downs performing dance interpretations of mathematical graphs, including a pie chart, scatter plot, and sine and cosine graphs. It’s not the slickest of the videos, but it’s nerdy, creative, and fresh. There’s something about it that reminds me of the kinds of goofy things I did with my nerdier friends in high school.
 

Okay, so some of the videos are more cheesy than fun — such as those in which the applicants sing songs about Tufts while wearing Tufts clothes and showing Jumbo the Elephant stuffed animals. They’ve even inspired at least one parody video, this one by a current Tufts student who laments that she hasn’t had time to explain “all the awesome things I’ve done in high school or all the meals I make for the homeless…or all the orphans I’ve been deworming in third-world countries.”

Personally, back in high school I couldn’t have imagined anything more unappealing than posting a video of myself on the Internet for all my peers to see. (Amelia’s graph dances strike me as hysterical today, but is she getting made fun of in a school hallway somewhere?)

But high-school awkwardness aside, what a cool way for prospective students to give a little flavor to their application. And how swell that Tufts admissions is turning what’s traditionally a formal, sometimes awkward process into more of a casual conversation. What they’ve learned from the popularity of these videos on YouTube is that the conversation isn’t just between the school and individual applicants — it’s between the applicants, too, and beyond them. That’s the thing about social media, no matter who’s making the content: it’s “many to many” communication. That’s why they call it social. And why it can be so much fun.

How is your educational or cultural institution using social media, or encouraging your audiences to use it? And what surprises are you finding?