The document discusses using social media to engage audiences for schools and other organizations. It begins with an agenda for a presentation or workshop on the topic. It then discusses defining social media and traditional vs. social media branding communications. The bulk of the document provides guidance on developing a social media plan, including identifying goals and target audiences, engagement strategies, and specific channels to use. It also provides examples of how different schools and organizations are using social media successfully.
Change the dash to the bullet (make it consistent)
Michael has talked about the impact, both intentional and unintentional, that social media can have on our personal brand and your school’s brand. Now I want to talk about how you can develop a social media strategy to meet your school’s goals and objectives.
If anything you have probably realized that social media is a very different world from creating a Web site or other marketing materials. If you have designed web sites, you have probably heard this. “Content Is King” You may have even told your web team the same thing. The popular wisdom is “You won’t have a successful Web site unless you have substantial , desirable content that is updated regularly” Well, I’m here to tell you something completely different. “Conversation is King. Content is just something to talk about.” [Doctorow is an editor at Boing-Boing and teaches at USC about social media.]
As you probably realize from what Michael has said earlier, just jumping into social media isn’t going to work. I want to show you an example how how two similar universities have completely different social media strategies with very different results.
Let’s look at an example with two big universities here in the Boston area
Each of the two universities has several active twitter streams, but I want to take a look at two of the most popular: Suffolk’s OFFICIAL stream at suffolk_u, run by their communications department And BU’s Dean of Students Kenn Elmore Already you can see that they are somewhat different just by the avatar images
Suffolk_U Sent out 177 tweets in month of September (~5 per day) Got 14 replies/mentions in last 7 days .08 DeanElmore Send out 31 tweets in month of September (~1 per day) Got 45 replies/mentions in the last 7 days 1.45 If you take the ratio of tweets received to tweets sent, a measurement of how ENGAGED the person is with the twitter community you will see that Dean Elmore is 18 times more ENGAGED with its twitter audience than Suffolk University http://almightylink.ksablan.com/2008/11/tribune-23-times-more-engaged-than-times-on-twitter/
Let’s take a closer look at some tweets from Suffolk - Announcements - Headlines - Occasional shout-outs to the student body
Dean of Students Kenn Elmore Listening to what is going on on campus Asks questions Opinions on current events, especially those of interest to his constituency Links to outside sides Has a sense of humor Cory Booker is mayor of newark NJ Elmore knows something about politics and African American activists
We can see that these two similar media outlets have taken very different strategies in making use of this social media resource.
It’s about engagement It’s recognizing that your audience is willing and able to engage in a conversation with you not only as a person, but as a school and as an organization
So, if engagement is the goal, How do we make sense of the cacophony of social media technology? Where do we start?
Before I talk to you about a process for creating a social media strategy. Let me make one point. If you don’t do anything else after this workshop. Even if you decide that social media is NOT appropriate for your school. At least do this! AND MAKE IT A HABIT! LISTEN! There are people out there right now talking about your school, about your organization, about your students and faculty and programs. If you aren’t listening you won’t know
The important thing to realize is that people are going to talk about your school, your students, your faculty, your brand whether you are listening or not. There are people saying good things about your school.
And there are people out there who have mistaken impressions about your organization. One of the great things about social media is that you can listen in on all of these comments and conversations. And you need to do this to get an accurate picture of the perception of your brand
A few of the reasons you should be listening
At a minimum you should be listening for mentions of your school or your brand.
There are lots of tools, free and paid out there. I’m not going to go into detail with them now. They are listed in the handout. But, the important thing is that listening becomes part of your regular habit Something that you look at daily, weekly and monthly.
Alright, now you have set up your social media monitoring program. How do you engage effectively with social media. How do you take advantage of this powerful channel.
Get get to engagement you have to answer three important questions You should not jump ahead to the technology decision. You should be determining who, what and how before you move into choosing a technology technology
Let’s start at the beginning with Who do you want to engage?
Here are some examples of the types of people you might want to reach. How do we segment this?
You have to know your audience to be able to understand the ways in which they might use or not use your social media efforts. This is making use of tools you probably already know about, both quantitative and qualitative. This is hard work. This takes time and resources. The best tool for embodying your knowledge about your audiences are user personas – models of archetypal users with demographics, psychographics and user goals.
One of the key things we need to look for in our audience research, is how they are currently engaging in social media. In their book Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff have given us a structure for understanding how your target audiences are apt to use or not use social media. They call this the Social Technographics Ladder
Know your audience Then determine your objectives
Let’s assume now that you have understood your audience. Now we need to understand what your objectives are. Here are some examples. Just a subset of all of the things you might want to do online
Your objectives come from your existing plans and objectives as a business. They are not esoteric new goals brought about by the advent of social media. These objectives should be things you are already familiar with internally. Including
Here’s a classic example of why you need to be in on social media. You are probably familiar with TechCrunch. It is one of the top two or three blogs on the internet. 3.4M site visitors per month. Over one million followers on twtter. Well, one morning, the editor of TechCrunch, Michael Arrington wakes up and is having problems with his Comcast internet connection. I think we’ve all been there. But Michael Arrington decides he is going to tweet this to his followers. All of a sudden a normal service call to Comcast becomes a potential for crisis and public backlash. Luckily Comcast already had an effective strategy in place. I think many of you are familiar with ComCastCares, the twitter face of Comcast’s customer support. Their strategy is unlike the way most of us approach social media. Comcast is reactive as opposed to proactive. They listen to what people are saying about them, then jump in and engage with the customer. HOW IT ENGAGES: Comcast Cares does not broadcast information. It does not lead the discussion online. Instead, it responds to comments about Comcast online. Comcast launched this strategy in the wake of negative brand events in 2007 including: a blog titled “Comcast must die”, news story about woman smashing cable box, JD Powers customer satisfaction surveys, Net Neutrality Forum at Harvard The upside is that someone from Comcast called Michael Arrington within 20 minutes. The problem was solved and TechCrunch broadcast the solution to their constituency. Look at how they achieve this It has a real name and a real face – Frank Eliason (and even links to personal blogs and family sites) It has multiple ways to get in touch with Comcast and Frank, email, twitter, blogs http://www.penn-olson.com/2009/09/21/5-social-media-disasters/ http://twitter.com/techcrunch/statuses/788349425
You might ask whether this kind of reactive strategy is appropriate for an independent school. Here is an example, a project we put together for the Buckinham Browne & Nichols School, an independent K-12 school located in Cambridge. They have a tradition, dating back to the 1950s, that each graduating senior creates a painted ceramic tile that gets placed into a wall of the high school building. They had a major problem. These tiles were attached to the walls and they were demolishing a part of the building for renovations and upgrades. They tiles would be destroyed. POTENTIAL PR DISASTER FOR BB&N We came up with a solution for them that included photographing each of the tiles and grouping them by class year in a specially created Flickr account. Flickr allowed them to make the tiles public, share it with their online alumni community. This not only archived the destroyed tiles for generations of students and alumni but made them available for comments and discussions. Their alumni department now sets up a laptop station at many alumni events – it has become a popular node for conversation and reminisces at those events.
Know your audience Know your objectives THEN decide how to engage
Here are some examples of ways you might engage Broadcasting is the simplest of the strategies and the least engaging. It is a one way street. Energize your advocates is about giving them the tools to help spread your message. Cooper Mini has taken this strategy by targeting marketing directly at Mini owners, not prospective owners Just watching is a valid strategy. If you objective is to monitor your brand’s perception over time (brand for an organization or personal). You may want to just set up a strategy to monitor a number of different social media outlets and watch what people are saying. Walled garden social communities can be extremely helpful (Communispace, Tapestry Networks or Future Monitor) when you want feedback from a very small tight group with little time (e.g., doctor) . You might pay them for participation. Crowdsourcing is a way to generate idea. Threadless is one example of this.
Here’s a recent quote by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos regarding developing a social media strategy. He is saying that your social media strategy has to be as natural to your organization as smiling. You need to build on your existing strengths (personalities, methods of communication that already work) And develop new strengths where you need them (technology expertise, tools)
This goes back to the BU Dean of Students twitter stream that we were looking at earlier. The BU Dean of Student’s stream is more successful than the Suffolk stream because it is: - More authentic Gives users a reason to connect and respond Has a viewpoint Comments on events/news outside of BU Note that the Dean uses multiple channels to speak to his audiences: Twitter a blog a flickr stream Many of the photos on Flickr show the Dean interacting with students. Demonstrating the relationship visually.
This goes back to the BU Dean of Students twitter stream that we were looking at earlier. The BU Dean of Student’s stream is more successful than the Suffolk stream because it is: - More authentic Gives users a reason to connect and respond Has a viewpoint Comments on events/news outside of BU Note that the Dean uses multiple channels to speak to his audiences: Twitter a blog a flickr stream Many of the photos on Flickr show the Dean interacting with students. Demonstrating the relationship visually.
Here’s an example of a university that has made even more of a commitment to making social interactions personal . Not only it MIT making the commitment to post personal blog entries from students, alumni and admissions staff BUT they are making postings that are extremely personal: about academics, relationships, food, and the experience of going to MIT AND THEY LISTEN TO THE AUDIENCE AND ANSWER SPECIFIC QUESTIONS ABOUT ADMISSIONS PROCEDURE AND DETAILS Also note that MIT has over 30 active blogger the admissions site. *** Look at the number of responses that most of these blog entries have prompted. Numbers that any corporation would die for.
You may have even seen more organic efforts. Mashups using a bunch of different channels like Blogs, YouTube, Twitter and photo galleries all in one place. Most of us would say this doesn’t play a big part in our communications or development strategy because it is a class project . It’s something that was built organically by a history professor and put together by students. BUT social media makes this effort part of a bigger conversation: with people who have an interest in politics, an interest in education and an interest in Worcester Academy
What all this means is that you can’t go into this without a good plan. You need to get tactical and very specific about how you are going to execute and how you are going to engage with your constituencies
These are taken from the top 10 Twitter accounts in terms of usage and followers. Many are corporate accounts, but I think there is plenty to learn. These are not meant to be hard and fast rules for your organization. Instead I want to show you how specific you have to be when developing a policy and strategy for social media. You need to think about general rules that you can apply over time and in many different situations.
Here’s a great example of a specific, tactical engagement strategy. He blogged about his strategy for using Twitter and it is a GREAT EXAMPLE OF HOW TACTICAL YOU NEED TO BE IN EXECUTION Jereimiah Owyang, Forrester Social Media analyst http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/11/29/how-i-use-twitter-and-you/
Targeted audience Determined objectives Decided on how to engage
Now we can begin to jump into all of the various technologies and determine which ones make the most sense (or don’t make sense) for our audience, our objectives and our engagement strategy.
The most important thing with all of these technologies is to dip your toes in. Swim around a little. Try it out. The only way you are going to understand how they work is by trying it out. You can do this on a personal level or on a business level, but remember that whatever you do will be archived and available for ever online.
Are they using it? How are they using it? Are they talking about you? Are they talking about your product or service space?
So, to conclude: There are people out there right now talking about your school, about your organization, about your students and faculty and programs. If you aren’t listening you won’t know
So to conclude You need to answer three important questions before you even get to the point of choosing your social media technology. what and how before you move into choosing a technology technology
Elitism Your school just conducted a market survey that indicates that many prospective parents in the area feel that independent schools in general and your school in particular are elitist institutions. This perception is exacerbated by the fact that your community has excellent public schools that provide a real alternative for prospective families. Many families want the best for their children, but also want to support their community. The kicker: A parent just forwarded you a posting from Twitter accusing your school of being 'snobish' and worse. How can you use social media to help change the perception among your target audience ?
Fundraising Over the past few years, participation in your annual fund has dropped among your younger alumni/ae. The buzz is that younger alums feel that they are able to contribute so little that it doesn't make a difference to the school.How can you use social media to help turn this perception around?
Your school has always had trouble recruiting students of color, despite a large minority population in the community. Based on anecdotal evidence, many prospective minority families are concerned that your school does not provide an appropriate support structure for their needs or a community of peers Your supervisor has charged you with using your school's social media presence as one way to help change perceptions around your school.