Does Facebook make the school yearbook irrelevant?
My colleague Jessica Bock has an interesting story for the Post-Dispatch today about how high school yearbooks are coping in the age of Facebook, MySpace and Flickr.
It seems that, like everything else, it’s all about how the yearbooks are marketed and what tie-ins you can create with online sites and other interactivity.
…Advisers and yearbook editors are finding new ways to market to students by embracing their obsession with social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. The sites have influenced everything this year from yearbook themes to the ads enticing students to buy.
“We knew we needed to do more to draw people in,” said Jessica Rentel, a senior and yearbook editor at Francis Howell North, one of the top Missouri award winners in state and national contests. She said she and her friends are online constantly throughout the day, spending much of that time on Facebook, and are using that experience for the yearbook.
The staff has incorporated the Web, video and blogging into the 2007-2008 keepsake. For example, widgets on pages in the hardcover book will direct students to more photos on a website or video of an event on an accompanying DVD. The result? “Click. Read. Play.” — the yearbook that will be printed this summer.
Mercifully, my daughter isn’t an upperclassman yet (until after Tuesday!) and doesn’t have an interest in buying one yet. It was only a few weeks ago that I looked at my high school yearbook, checking out a classmate who had reached out on LinkedIn.
The story noted sales rates at area high schools ranging from 63 percent to 20 percent. The highest one in the story focused on marketing to the students with slogans such as, “Facebook and MySpace are great, but will they be around in 10 years?”
Indeed. Who knows?
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One Comment on Does Facebook make the school yearbook irrelevant?
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yearbook themes on
Sat, 7th Jun 2008 1:20 am
[...] and Flickr. It seems that, like everything else, it??s all about how the yearbooks are marketed anhttp://www.igreenbaum.com/2008/05/does-facebook-make-the-school-yearbook-irrelevant/Never change. Stay cool. Yearbooks can no longer do both. St. Louis Post-DispatchDownstairs in two [...]
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