No one should be suprised by this latest development, as highlighted by a recent Washington Post article. You can read an excerpt of the article below, or read the whole article by clicking here.

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One of the first things that pops up if you check YouTube to find out about a public school in Western Maryland is a video that starts: FROSTBURG STATE UNIVERSITY. ITS GREAT!!! An edgy new-wavy punkish 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. All playing out on a site that gets hundreds of millions of viewers a day, many of them smack dab in the school’s target market.

Now Frostburg, like a growing number of schools, is trying to elbow its own messages onto such sites as YouTube to promote themselves, create a virtual community and drown out embarrassing clips.

“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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But like a parent trying to seem cool, sometimes the efforts are painful to watch. “The last thing someone on YouTube wants to see is a provost explaining the academic offerings at an institution,” Hawkins said.

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Read the whole article at the Washington Post website.