Tim Copeland's Blog on College & University Marketing and Enrollment Management

OMG! If You Are Not ‘Tweeting’, You’re a Bad Enrollment Manager!

Twitter and Facebook … the future of enrollment marketing and management for prospective students … or as some would have you believe. 

Consider the following excerpts from higher education vendor email messages I’ve received in the last two weeks.

‘Tweeting’, ‘Friending’ and other Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

In the mid-1600’s, the newly introduced Dutch tulip bulb skyrocketed to twice the price of gold. It was said that one of the rarest of the bulbs could be traded for 12 acres of land!

In his 1824 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, author Charles Mackay proposed that crowds of people often behave irrationally, and he buttressed his argument with examples of crowds pursuing ‘get rich quick schemes’ including tulip mania, the South Seas and Mississippi company bubbles. Add the recent real estate collapse and the Internet bubble of the late 1990’s, and you get the idea.

According to MacKay, why do otherwise intelligent individuals form seething masses of idiocy when they engage in collective action?