Posts Tagged ‘social media’
thoughts on engaging alumni in social media
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on August 26th, 2009
I wrote this post for our Other Side Group company blog yesterday, so I thought I’d share it here as well!
Mashable wrote a piece last week that is getting a lot of attention in the higher ed space. The writer focused on ten ways universities are engaging alumni in social media, a topic that we’ve discussed here before. The post discussed both the successes and failures universities are experiencing in attempting to connect with alumni on social media.
It also discussed two separate tracks: those that are engaging with alums on social media for the purposes of fundraising, and those who are focused more on connecting alums with the school and with each other after graduation, maintaining a better and more up-to-date database of where alumni are and what they are doing.
We worked with universities to help them get more out of their alumni networks, and so have a couple thoughts on the article I’d like to share.
First, building your own social network is really hard, takes a lot of resources, and is rarely successful.
I don’t want to be a downer here, so let’s think about it this way: For every hugely successful social network that has been built in the last ten years, commercially speaking, there are probably at least 20 or more that failed. It’s really hard to build the right system, harder to keep it up-to-date and constantly evolving, and even harder to get people to use it. Even for companies that are dedicated to only that product. You shouldn’t feel like you HAVE to build your own network, there are other, better options to consider.
Universities should think about ways to leverage existing social networks to their benefit. For example, huge populations of current seniors and recent grads are on Facebook. Meet them on their turf, don’t make them come to you. You’ll spend a fraction of the resources you’d need to build an internal network, you won’t take on nearly the upkeep cost, and you’ll have a ready-built audience. That doesn’t mean your Facebook efforts can’t direct people back to you site, or provide content exclusively to your alums, you CAN do that, but doing it through and already-successful platform will bring you much greater success.
And you don’t have to just focus on Facebook either. The Mashable article notes universities that are using Flickr, Google Maps, LinkedIn, etc. The point here is to go where your audience is.
Second, make sure you have a specific goal in mind when you begin working on these social media projects.
I can’t stress this enough, especially when you’re devoting a lot of time and resources to building a network and creating an infrastructure. If your goal in connecting with alumni is raise money, then you need to focus on the ways you are going to encourage them to do that. So for example, the Mashable article calls out the success of a University of Texas Austin program that encourages alums to post pictures of themselves giving the hand signal of the school, and fill out a profile when they do.
That’s a creative plan, and one that has been fairly successful for them so far in terms of the number of people who have participated. But their goal going into it was to get people more connected with the school and see what alums are up to. It’s NOT meant to make money. Yes you’ll now have their contact information, but this social media effort is not going to have any direct relationship with donations. If your school is asking you to support and increase donations using social media, you are going to have to think differently about how you engage with the audience.
Take Emory for example, and their giving campaign efforts that they managed and updated through Facebook, Twitter and other media, or Colgate, where donors could make a donation and then share that information with their networks through Facebook. All these are examples of how schools are beginning (and I say beginning because in each of the examples I just gave, a lot more could have been done) to think about how social media can have a major impact on fundraising efforts.
The point is, read the Mashable article. But don’t get so excited about what one school or another is doing that you just try to apply it to yours. Each group of alumni is unique, each school has different goals, and each social media program should tie back to your institution’s communications and fundraising goals. There is so much untapped opportunity in connecting with alumni on social media, you just have to find the program that is best for you.
10 ways universities can (and should) use twitter
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on August 17th, 2009
My last post on twitter and higher ed got a lot of attention…it seems higher ed communicators are trying to figure out how twitter works, while at the same time wrestling with what kinds of information and content would be helpful and appropriate for their twitter audience.
I do think that in many cases twitter can be an incredibly powerful tool for universities, as long as it is used with a specific goal and purpose in mind. With that in mind, here are 10 ways I recommend universities can (and should) use twitter.
1. Connect with alumni
Find and follow alumni and track alums discussing the school online. Include a link to your twitter account in all alumni e-mail communication, put a link to it on your alumni site and your career center site, and encourage alums to follow school news and alumni events through twitter. You can even set up a separate twitter account specifically for alums so that they are getting targeted information, like daily tips for job seekers. If you have a large alumni event, be sure to post event updates prior via twitter, and pictures and other follow-up on twitter afterward. Interact directly with alums, invite them personally to events, and share in the follow-up conversation after alums get together.
2. Share achievements of students/faculty
Bring more to your twitter feed than your standard news feed. Call out interesting projects you know about on campus, recognize students for awards or achievements, announce a faculty member’s new research etc. Be sure to call out the person’s twitter name if they are on twitter, and link to any online examples of work if they have it. This will make your twitter account more interactive.
3. Promote campus events
Hosting a great guest speaker or a regional conference? One of your faculty presenting at a major event? Promote through twitter. Include links, tell readers how to get involved, and engage the community outside the walls of the campus by inviting the general public via twitter. You’ll build the reputation of your school in the local community and beyond by engaging more personally with these audiences and bringing them onto campus for an event they find educationally or professionally valuable.
4. Disseminate university news
Ok, don’t go crazy here. Think about what your twitter audience (alums, current students, community members, etc.) actually care about. Don’t use your twitter account for JUST news either. You can put out announcements of major news items, but your feed should be a diverse set of information, not a regurgitation of your News page.
5. Interact during campus events
Don’t just use twitter to publicize the fact that you’re having an event, use it to make the event itself more interactive. Invite students, faculty or staff to “live tweet” the event, posting quotes, observations, photos and video of the event as it happens. This will give those who could not attend a live feed of what is happening, give those who are attending a way to interact and discuss the event, and everyone else an opportunity to learn from speakers, feel involved and even see a record or what happened if they missed the event.
6. Connect with potential students and their parents
Use twitter to provide a channel through which prospective students and their parents can communicate directly and personally with the school. Offer access to admissions personnel once a week for live question and answer sessions, or post daily tips on selecting a school, writing admissions essays, doing campus visits, getting through the financial aid process, etc. You may find you’ll reach an even broader audience that just your applications, and that’s great. These efforts build awareness and connection with your school with audiences who become influencers when their friends and family begin looking at schools.
7. Connect department, students and faculty
You can use twitter to reach outside audiences. But you should also consider the power of using twitter internally. Twitter has been used in a number of cases to spur greater live classroom discussion, link related classes in different departments, allow professors to share ideas with their students, and build campus-wide communication.
8. Share live coverage of sporting events
For many schools, sports programs are a key link to alumni and community audiences. Get these groups more engaged through twitter. Live tweet sporting events, providing not only score updates but commentary and interaction with fans. Use a unique hashtag for your events so that attendees can also post pictures and commentary, and interact live with the fans during the game. Often out of town alums can’t get access to your school’s events, so providing a free way for them to follow the games online is a great way to build an engaging community.
9. Share career advice
Of course one of the best ways to keep alumni involved is to make their professional experience and integrated with their educational experience as possible. Alums who continue to view their alma maters as first-tier resources for job advice, job postings, networking connections etc. are far more likely to stay engaged with the school after graduation. And you can use twitter to build this engagement. Simplify access to career services through twitter. They should be available to answer questions, but should also be sharing constant advice, posting the latest job openings, and connecting proactively with alumni and local businesses. Offer weekly live sessions with a prominent alum or a local business person who can offer compelling advice to students. Track conversations about job searches and trends in hiring. Make the connection as valuable as possible, and alums will definitely keep coming back.
10. Get personal!
This is a broad statement, but is one that should be applied across any and all of the previous nine suggestions. Above anything else, your twitter feed should ring out as a unique PERSONAL voice for whatever department, school or office it is managed from. There is nothing worse than an auto-updating, auto-messaging, auto-feeding string of campus news announcements through the PR office. If you can’t get creative and personal, then don’t bother with twitter at all because you won’t get anything out of it. It’s the personal, one-on-one conversations that matter most in this medium, so don’t be afraid to lend some feeling and personality to your posts!
if teens don’t tweet… then why are universities on twitter?
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on August 6th, 2009
We’ve all heard the news… twitter is “in”. And universities and colleges are no exception to the mass of brands, users and organizations jumping on the 140-character bandwagon. In the last 6 months, there has been a massive uptake in university twitter use, w
ith admissions and marketing people leading the charge.
But a recent Nielson report on twitter reveals that the twitter population skews heavily in the direction of over-25-year-olds, with teens making up less than 16% of the twitterverse. While many argue this will change, and soon, and I do believe that it will, eventually, this fact still brings up a very important question.
Why are universities on twitter?
I ask this because as administrators, admissions personnel, marketing and PR people and alumni relations managers flock to twitter, they are ignoring other much larger populations of online interaction. The answer lies, in part, because these people understand twitter better than they understand other networks. Why? Because they all fall in the right demographic for twitter! We all would prefer to use tools and techniques we can relate to, understand and can use effectively. Broadly speaking, the university personnel to whom we refer fall directly in the target demographic for twitter use.
This is not to say that using twitter can’t be useful to colleges and universities. But I do think we need to do a better job of understanding the audience on twitter and catering communication effectively. For example, planning an alumni engagement strategy on twitter is a great direction to move in. Your target group is older, more likely to engage on twitter, and less likely to be consistently getting information about the school from other places.
Attempting to use twitter to grow enrollment? Probably not the best plan. Using twitter to reach currently enrolled students? Don’t count on major uptake in that area. Does that mean you’ll have to go back to using the old tools? Definitely not! Teens and early 20s adults are online constantly, usually in places like Facebook and MySpace, and are connecting with the community in ways that can be incredibly valuable for universities and colleges. We just have to build more strategy around how we communicate in different channels and understand where our target groups are interacting, not just which tool seems the best to us!
For more information, check out Mashable’s take on teens and twitter, they have some useful general info on what user groups are growing and interacting there today.
bringing the university to the student through social media
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on July 14th, 2009
University and college marketing and communications departments are still belaboring the debate as to when and how to get involved in social media. What about legal ramifications? Our content will be available for others to use, how will we maintain control? We already have a Web site… why do we need more? We give all our students e-mail addresses and get in touch with them through that. They are tech-savvy. That means they use e-mail. Social networks are for sharing pictures and for fun. They are not the place for a university to engage in the serious business of course selection, event notification, emergency messages or alumni interaction.
Right?
Wrong.
It used to be true that schools controlled how students interacted with the institution because they controlled all the channels. As a recent report from Educause points out, most universities and colleges controlled internet connections, phone lines, e-mail accounts and in many cases the actual devices used to connect.
That is no longer the case. Students bring their own laptops, have their own cell phones, already have their own e-mail address and have access to wireless internet. That means their modes of interaction are for the most part already established by the time they reach university. They will grant the university limited access to already-establish channels of communication, and usually on a need-to-know basis. It is no longer viable for a university to expect the student to come to them.
The university must go to the student.
What does this mean? It means you have to engage students in communication forums they are already familiar with. And it means you have to understand each channel so that you convey the right information through the right channel.
For example: don’t call their landline in their dorm. They haven’t even set that up. Text message them to their cell phone. And don’t text them that you are offering Yoga 101 next fall. Text them that class is canceled tonight due to a snow storm. The Yoga class message should go out through Facebook, with a link to see a schedule and sign up that allows them to do so without even leaving the Facebook interface.
Getting involved in social media isn’t just about setting up a page and some pictures, it’s about providing value and enhanced communications to students, strengthening their relationship with the institution and fostering a relationship that can be continued well after graduation. You have to think creatively about the kinds of information and assistance you can bring to the student rather than asking them to come to you. And you have to understand how different channels of communication work so that you can choose the right message for the right platform.
Digital Media Marketing Summit
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on February 18th, 2009
I’ll be speaking tomorrow at a virtual summit on Digital Media Marketing. The topic is “Leveraging Digital Media in a Down Economy”, and I’ll be covering some advice on how and why digital media can be a cost effective marketing tool, as well as some tips and tools to get started. Join the talk by following the link below; I’d love to focus on some questions and case studies from the audience!
http://www.brighttalk.com/webcasts/2549/attend
10 ways social media will change in 2009
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on January 29th, 2009
Great post today on Read Write Web talking about what we can expect from social media in the coming year. One of the things they discuss is something we talk about a lot with clients. That is the idea that social media is moving away from advertising and marketing, and evolving toward the expectation of truly personal interaction.
Social networks as a whole, like Facebook and Twitter, have grown too large to manage as one community. Instead, populations gravitate and congregate around meaningful conversations and issues pertinent to their lives, whether that is business interests, family, shopping, sports, technology etc. Many people also bridge personal lives with business purposes on social networks, and expect the same degree of personal interaction with corporate entities as with friends on these platforms.
So what does this mean for us? It means we focus on creating relevance, value and rapport with community members. It means we need to focus on the people, not the platform, create ways for people to interact across, within and without any number of social networking communities, and we need to redefine goals to realize that quantity does not equal quality. More eyes does not necessarily mean success, it just means you need to realize you niche and create more value in smaller circles.
Check out the article for an expanded look at predictions for 2009 and let me know your thoughts on where this is headed.
PR is not dead… or dying for that matter
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on November 13th, 2008
Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang over at Forrester I have finally been inspired back to the blog to tackle one of my favorite issues… the evolving PR industry. His thoughts on business opportunities in PR are both insightful and vitally important for the survival of the agency industry. Note that I do not say the survival of PR. “Public relations” as a practice will always be an incredibly important part of any organization’s business, and I’m going to tell you why. But before I discuss what awesome change IS taking place, I think we need to tackle an important myth:
PR does not equal media relations. PR has not been defined as media relations in DECADES. PR is only defined as media relations by AGENCIES.
That’s not the definition of PR as it is taught in business school and communications schools, and it isn’t the way most internal PR departments work. It’s the way most traditional AGENCIES in PR work. And they are a different animal entirely, and also much less likely to be able to change with shifting economic and industry demands, because an agency’s entire business is designed around the media relations model. Asking a PR agency to act differently is like asking Coca-Cola to start selling cars. It’s not that easy to change a business model overnight.
Public relations in today’s world is a term that refers to managing an organization’s relationship with its various publics. This can include any number of constituencies: customers, employees, local community members, investors, environmental activists, moms, teens, politicians, you name it. Any given organization manages a large number of diverse and vital relationships with different publics. This does also include bloggers, mainstream media, industry media and analysts. But they are a small part of a much larger pie.
So I want to make a quick argument here…
If we rethink our definition of PR, we would arrive at a much better practice of communicating in all channels, including social media. We should be managers (consultants, counselors, thinking big, thinking strategy…) We should not be thinking just about the media, but about our clients’ businesses, the bottom line, the sales cycle, new markets to explore, new insights into doing business that includes new ways of communicating, building relationships and strengthening brand awareness and brand loyalty. If we’re helping to launch a product, we should be involved in development, market research, user-interface design, website content editing, beta-testing, feedback analysis, and finally launch. We should have a hand in marketing and advertising strategy as part of the entire communications package, we should have a strategic approach to PR, marketing and advertising that all works together with a cohesive message. And that message should have been developed with clear business goals and strategy in mind.
There are thousands of tactics and tools out there to tackle these efforts. But before you start telling your clients to join twitter and start a blog, tell your clients you are going to help them THINK about what strategy can be assembled to take their business to the next level. The most valuable differentiator you can offer your potential clients is your MIND. Your IDEAS. This is a knowledge-based industry first… showing your clients that you’re thinking about their business in a unique way, that you didn’t pull most of their proposal from one you did last week for someone else, and that YOU bring something to the table others don’t will go a long way in showing that your work is a notch above the rest.
Finally, it’s time to realize that there is a burgeoning group of new consultants and agencies that GET IT. In a blatant act of self-promotion I’m here to tell you that this is EXACTLY why I joined Kate in the Other Side Group venture. We like to think we take a new approach to communications consulting, and that often takes a variety of forms depending on the clients we work with. But it does NOT center on media relations. We are business consultants, and we are focused on helping our clients improve existing business and communications practices or develop unique new ways of interacting with constituents, identify new markets and opportunities and achieve the best results possible.
So if you’re thinking PR agencies are a dying breed, you’re thinking in the wrong direction. They are evolving, they have new ideas, a foundation based on strategy and a nimble and personalized approach to what for decades has been a cookie-cutter method of media blasts. Check it out. PR isn’t old, it’s new. You just have to be looking in the right places.
pr 2.0 – public relations in the new world
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on October 15th, 2008
Christine Perkett – PerkettPR
Tony Sapienza – Topaz Partners
Bobbie Carlton – Beacon Street Girls
How are companies evaluating mainstream media vs. new media?
Christine: a lot of companies are still seeing the traditional media as the holy grail, but they are starting to see online media and bloggers as important. Gives an example of media hit on CNBC which seems amazing, but traffic spike indicated that online hits have been more valuable.
Tony: Depends on the client. Some audiences are more online than others, so for example developers are pretty much only online, so a client in that field can move totally online and have much more success than traditional media. Others, for example small business, are still picking up the local paper.
Is this a tough sell?
Tony: It’s not as difficult to sell today. It’s sinking in, new marketing and social media is really starting to take off. A few years ago it was really hard to get people on board, now they’re starting to request social media from the start.
Christine: I agree with Tony that it depends on the audience. I think traditional media is still just as important, but social media is incredibly important as well. The fundamentals are still there and that’s the most important thing I would stress today.
What’s different about pitching blogs from traditional media like Time?
Bobbie: It’s not all that different, I do have to have big press people with print and traditional as well as blogs on our side.
Tony: We use mainstream media hits differently. We got a hit in the Washington Post and that day we launched a campaign in the blogs to make bloggers aware of the write up in the post. Drove more traffic and generated more views to the company Web site. So we leveraged both kinds of media for better success overall.
How do you measure it?
Bobbie: traffic.
Tony: It used to be clip books, and it was hard to connect those clips to biz success. But today we can watch traffic and buzz closely, which we can track in real time. This can be a curse because it forces us into acute accountability.
How do you look at the co-dependence between old and new media?
Christine: New media has offered a lot of opportunities and opened a world to have real relationships with reporters and bloggers, sharing knowledge and building bonds with reporters. Engaging in conversations.
Are there patterns here in the back and forth between new media and traditional media?
Tony: I don’t think there are any specific orders that these things move in. Probably more social media taking the lead and traditional media following in general these days. Stories have started in twitter and then moved into mainstream pubs with more frequency lately.
Have you dealt with crises in a social media world?
All: yes
Tony: There are crises and preparing is important, we’ve done a lot of dealing with companies that need to do reputation management online and are facing criticism. We’re looking at an entirely new way of dealing with crisis management.
What do you do when someone is saying something that is just wrong?
Bobbie: We get that, and we like to have others defend us as much as possible, but there are times we have to go out there and defend ourselves, and we have to just present the facts and leave it at that.
How do you allocate resources when you need to address 5 times more people than before?
Tony: Try to point out that reaching out to bloggers and working in social media can be a natural extension of what we already do. B-roll can be a shared video, case study can be a blog post etc. We do have a far greater audience, and you do need to keep that in mind.
Christine: You need to see it as an extension of what you’re already doing. You can’t expect people to just come to you, now you need to go where they are, interact and bring that content you’re aready developing with you. On the agency side, I think agency heads have to embrace it from the top down, explain that its an importnant use of time. Takes more time, and requires a restructure of billing because your way of thinking and way of billing around it has to change.
Bobbie: Let go, and let other people help you. I do everything from marketing to SEO to PR, so I can’t do it all. But one of the things i’ve learned is i can create partnerships with other people that will leverage our brand name. You need to prepare and have your messages prepared in advance.
monitoring your brand in social media
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on October 14th, 2008
Afternoon panel at New Marketing Summit: Listening in a Blizzard – Social Media Monitoring and the Future
How do you retrofit a company that needs to learn how to listen?
Mike: We see a lot of agencies helping companies aggregate information, put together a strategic process by which this info comes into the organization and how it gets used by different ppl, marketers, researchers, ads, business leaders etc.
Todd: We see a lot of business listening going on. If I’m looking to build brand awareness or measure my reputation I’m going to have a different focus of how I listen and who I listen to. We’re seeing a great need for this kind of personalized monitoring function.
Candace: There are going to be 30,000 blogs written while we sit here. Not all about us, but that many altogether. So there is way too much volume. We don’t feel like we need to convince companies to monitor these days, we have to change the WAY they monitor. They have some person in the next room trying to read all this stuff and that just doesn’t work
Tony: Where is your customer? Is your customer in social media, in communities, what do you need to know in order to understand that conversation. How do you figure out how you fit in to this, and then you can take a look at how to fit in to this community and how to approach.
David: Companies want to listen, they all listen in a different way but they are seeing the value. It’s what they do with this listening.
What is one thing that is characteristic of the payloads you can get from listening?
Mike: Listening is non-strategic for biz. CMOs will listen and all that. But if they can’t take that data and then quantify it and identify trends and useful stats, they’re not going to go to product developers etc to change the business or product without hard data. In 2008 social media data became important data. Consumer insights have been on the web for a long time, but ony recently have marketers really started using this data to see what they can do to make a difference in how they sell.
Todd: Recognize the influencers who are credible on a topic and people are paying attention to them. Our output is simply a list of who is behind important blogs and other social media in certain instances.
Candace: We focus on characterizing the haystack of opinion rather than individual influencers. We go beyond sentiment, we summarize what people are saying. Identify a problem or sentiment and then provide a look at why this is happening. We alllow users to determine what they want to track and how to track it.
Tony: We measure tone and impact for traditional and social media and how they interact.
The panel is now giving examples of how to use their monitoring products to measure the community, get customer feedback, monitor blogs and other social media forums and how to use this data to make business decisions that will help the company create products that cater to their target audiences.
Candace has actually seen people use these monitoring tools as a money saving option, putting marketing dollars to better use than one person spending all day monitoring manually.
what’s next in social media??
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on October 14th, 2008
