1 COMEnSTUDY@MY.UNI.EDU: University Recommendation Modes Sharifah Fatimah Syed Ahmad, Jamie Murphy, University of Western Australia Yong Zulina Zubairi, University of Malaya, Malaysia David Horrigan, Glion Institute of Higher Education, Switzerland Abstract This study examines how Malaysian students recommend their universities via nine digital and two traditional word of mouth modes to family, friends and others. Face-to-face led recommendations for all groups. Clustering the students on recommending styles to friends and others showed three distinct clusters – heavy, medium and light recommenders. For recommending to family, however, the clusters were heavy, digital and traditional recommenders. Analysis of the clusters revealed significant demographic differences and rich future research streams. Introduction As universities compete globally and nationally for students, (Marginson, 2006), prospective students rely on recommendations from friends (Patton, 2000) and the Internet (Fox and Madden, 2005; Gray, Fam and Llanes, 2003). Students’ online search includes search engines, university websites and emailing universities (Gomes and Murphy, 2003). With experience, online consumers often depart from visiting official websites and view User Generated Content (UGC) – what others say about a product (Wang, Yu and Fesenmaier, 2002). UGC gives Internet users the power to create, edit, share and view online information (Tredinnick, 2006). As Internet mastery improves, the importance of UGC increases. In Europe, 60% of online users have embraced UGC activities such as social networking and posting reviews on information and interest-based sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube and TripAdvisor (Anonymous, 2007). Social Network Sites (SNS) are online communities such as Facebook, Friendster and MySpace. Youth embrace SNS (Boyd and Ellison, 2007) and are heavy users of digital communication (see Table 1) such as Instant Messaging (IM) and Short Message Service (SMS) (Kim et al., 2007). Some universities use these technologies – SMS, IM and SNS – to communicate with current and prospective students (Carnevale, 2006). Table 1: Digital communication terms Term Definition Instant Messaging (IM) Synchronous Internet chats (Hanson and Kalyanam, 2007, p. 598), such as Yahoo Messenger. Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) Rich media, such as audio and video, through mobile phones or the Internet (Turban et al., 2006, p. 381). Short Message Service (SMS) Short text messages via mobile phones (Turban et al., 2006, p. 380). Social Network Sites (SNS) Communication among community members, normally friends, who have SNS profiles - individual information and photos (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). Members could also be fans/friends of businesses or artists. Examples are Facebook and MySpace. Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VOIP) Internet substitute for telephones via computers or phones (Hanson and Kalyanam, 2007, p. 75), such as Skype Using digital communication to give and receive Word of Mouth (WOM) is growing (Sun et al., 2006). Researchers have examined online recommendations (Dwyer, 2007; Lampel and Bhalla, 2007; Senecal and Nantel, 2004; Wang and Fesenmaier, 2003), yet few WOM studies