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A study on the usage of social media by the top MBA programs in the United States shows that while all are using Facebook for recruiting and marketing their programs, most of them don’t do any ROI assessment of the social media tools they employ to bring in prospective students. Nor do most tap the potentially best resource: Just a few schools are using downloadable mobile apps, even though these are rated among the most effective tools studied.

Last year, we wrote about how undergraduate colleges are using social media. The same group from University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research, led by Dr. Nora Barnes, has recently taken a look at graduate MBA programs.

In phone interviews, Barnes and her researchers spoke to 70 of the top B-school directors or deans in charge of their programs. Missing were some of the top 10 schools, but the sample was still statistically valid over the more than 400 MBA programs across the U.S. Here are some of the interesting results:

• All 70 schools are using Facebook, and most are also using Twitter and LinkedIn to market their programs. Three-quarters also maintain a blog. More than half of the schools use five or more social media tools. The Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona is a real social media butterfly: They are using 14 different social media tools!
• While only 16% of schools are using downloadable mobile apps, these are rated among the most effective tools studied. You can see the results in the chart above of the schools’ judgment on effectiveness of each social network. Interestingly, LinkedIn – which might be thought to have the closest ties to career aspirations of any of the social media tools – isn’t near the top.
• The majority (65%) of schools don’t track the number of perspective applicants who have found out about their programs through social media connections.
• And perhaps most surprisingly, 94% report recruitment is the No. 1 goal of their social media efforts, yet the top measures of effectiveness do not include tracking prospective applicants. Instead, they are looking at the numbers of fans or followers, or other metrics such as page views or the number of comments.

Clearly, social media is in a state of transition for business schools. Many said they would increase their involvement or expand to additional social networks in the coming year, with a third planning to buy additional software and nearly as many investing in new training or new hires. Still, as the study states: “Being able to measure whether these prospects actually apply to the program is something schools may be looking to do, but have not yet mastered. Without this piece of information it is difficult to really assess the effectiveness of the social media plan and to know where future investments should be made.”

Go Daddy wants to be known for more than domain names and racy Superbowl ads. The company has built large businesses around Web hosting and other services for companies of all sizes. But can it really have it both ways?

At a recent meeting in ReadWriteWeb’s San Francisco headquarters, new Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman delighted in reeling off the company’s impressive numbers: almost $1.4 billion in sales, 53 million domains registered, 5 million websites hosted, and so on. Go Daddy is as big as the next eight competitors combined, Adleman said, and gets more than half of all new domain registrations.

But the company, which was bought by private equity firms for $2.25 billion last year has even bigger aspirations. “We don’t want to move away from that,” Adelman said, but “we think we can do more than serve that segment.”

Servers or Celebrities?

“People think we’re a bunch of guys down in Arizona” with domain names and Super Bowls ads, he said, but there are “sections of the site to address the needs of different communities… We have offerings for the tech community, for the developer community.”

Overcoming those perceptions among seasoned techies won’t be easy, though. Questions like “you’re still using Go Daddy?” are often posed to tech start ups. And really, it’s Go Daddy’s own fault.

No matter what its actual technology credentials, the company spent millions of dollars promoting Go Daddy Girls, not cloud infrastructure (4GH Cloud Hosting) or online storage. Even companies that use those services might think twice about explaining why to the CEO. And that’s especially true the larger, and more sophisticated the company. Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman visits RWW HQ.

Adelman acknowledges “some amount of polarization” around the Go Daddy brand, but believes that the company’s scale more than makes up for any negative perceptions. Go Daddy is big enough to enjoy massive economies of scale, and to create a full suite of add-on products for all kinds of customers. Domian names, website hosting and site-building tools, SSL certificates, marketing tools like search engine optimization, search engine marketing, email marketing and social media. “It’s like selling hot dogs at the ballpark,” Adelman said. Sixty six percent of Go Daddy customers have a product in addition to a domain name, he said.

An App Threat?

Why the tech push now? Although Adelman says it kept growing through the recession, the reason for the push could be the gradual move to mobile apps instead of websites, a transition that threatens Go Daddy’s core business. But Adleman says he’s not worried. “The Web will die a slower death than predicted,” he said, adding that given the hype cycle and the rise of HTML5, it might not be long before you start hearing that “the App World is dead.”