The discussion lately on what the next big thing is in technology is ever evolving . Having just come from SXSWi (that’s South by Southwest Interactive), I have been with some very early adopters, but I still believe when you want to know what is coming next, look at what high school students are doing. OK, along with these SXSWi attendees, high school students are the early adopters.

According to Mashable.com’s research, majority of teens have been using social media way before 2007. Teenagers quickly adopted social media; the rest of the population is quickly adopting it.

So, what is next? Take a look at most high schoolers today. You’ll see their heads down looking at smartphones, tablets, and laptops. What are they doing? Consuming media. But it is not television, radio, magazines, and newspapers. Now, it’s YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Pinterest, Instagram, and the myriad of other social networks. All day long, these high schoolers consume media in all different forms. On their way to school, they are reading their friends’ Facebook status updates. During lunch, they check out Twitter for any interesting articles. When they get home, they jump on YouTube to see the latest videos. And at night, they scroll through Instagram to see what pictures their friends have taken.

So what does this mean for marketers? Let’s look back at a couple decades ago. If you wanted to inform high school students about your university, you’d pay for an advertisement on television, radio, or print. That was enough. But fewer high school students are consuming this traditional media. Therefore, fewer prospective students are seeing these marketing messages. As the old saying goes, you need to be where your customers are. Media consumption has changed, and so too should your marketing. It’s no longer enough to only use traditional media.

Not only is the media changing, but so is the way consumers interact with their media. Traditional media were one way, broadcast messages. Producers produced, and consumers consumed. Now, the line has blurred. Consumers are not only consuming media, but are producing it as well. Looking at today’s popular media, you’ll see every day students are creating videos for YouTube, status updates on Facebook, and tweets on Twitter. It’s no longer a broadcast, but a conversation.

Now, if you want your brand to be relevant, you can’t rely on broadcasting marketing messages. Instead, you need to join the conversation. So how can a university join the conversation? It’s best to illustrate this with an example. Let’s assume we are the marketers for a fictitious university, the TWG Plus University. We could run television, radio, and print ads. But as we said, that’s not enough. Looking online, we see people “sharing” us on the Internet: alumni and current students tweeting about the positive and negative of our educational experience; check-ins on Facebook and Foursquare; pictures on Instagram and Pintrest; blog articles. And then there are the potential students who come across these media, who saw their friend check-in at a TWG Plus University event; who saw their friend’s campus visit pictures on Facebook.

This conversation is going on, and as higher education professionals we need to join in. We can create a Facebook page inviting people to share pictures and stories of the university. We can thank people on Twitter who are saying how great we are, and find out how we can improve by asking those who were unhappy with their education. We can post images on Instagram, Pintrest and Flickr to show what our campus looks like. While we are not broadcasting a message anymore, we are amplifying the conversation that is there. And when we amplify the conversation, more people join in. And when more people join in, our university receives more applications, which will lead to enrollment and graduates!

 Let us show you how you can integrate social media into your university marketing plan.