Tumblr: The Easiest Way to Go Viral

Ma'ayan Plaut is the social media coordinator at Oberlin College. She maintains Oberlin's web presences in many places and encourages writing on the Oberlin blogs and for the Oberlin Stories Project.

Tumblr is a pretty hard topic to discuss, because while it is a very simple platform in concept, it has more uses than I'd like to admit to. In short, it's microblogging on a slightly more advanced and segmented level than Twitter, with few limits to what you can do.

I first ran across Tumblr last year, but didn't begin to explore it until I realized my new job included a task that involved "updating and maintaining Oberlin's Tumblr." (Not to be confused with the Oberlin blogs.)

It took me about five seconds to create my personal Tumblr—a place for me to showcase my freelance photography work, ongoing photography projects and photographs that I had recently taken. It took me about five hours to get up a mass of content up (even on a ridiculously slow Internet connection) and about five days to get a handful of followers. In the past year, my followers have grown to 135.

Oberlin's Tumblr is a place to share content of other Oberlin organizations that use their Tumblrs as a primary or secondary website, re-blog content that speaks of Oberlin and share original content that is also reposted on many of our other social media platforms.

Why Tumblr?

• It's the easiest way to blog. You choose the type of content you wish to post— text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio or video—and with a title and an upload of a file or an input of some text, you can post.
• It's foolproof to personalize even if you don't know HTML/CSS. There are hundreds of free themes and new ones are created all the time. Even the simplest themes allow for basic personalization of fonts, colors and links. If you're code-savvy (or have savvy folks around), you can always make it look exactly the way you want.
• You can submit via email. If you're interested in using Tumblr for a group blog, or wish to update from a mobile device (independent of Tumblr apps), you can format an email to mirror Tumblr's required fields. If you are also interested in having a group blog or a contribution-based blog, that email address allows you to easily share the account.
• It's easy to cross-post. Like many social media platforms, Tumblr allows you to send posts to Twitter and Facebook instantaneously.
• Content can go viral very quickly. If your content is good and thought-provoking (or witty and cute, who really knows why things go viral?), reposting is inevitable. Unlike the friend-based networks of Facebook,and to some extent Twitter, Tumblr users are connected by their similar interests rather than their proximity or offline friendships. Back in 2006, Ben Jones, vice president of communications at Oberlin (and my boss), wrote a final blog post to the incoming MIT class of 2010. Someone ran across it recently, posted it on Tumblr, and over two days, it got about 2,100 notes (a combination of reblogs and likes). As of this post, the link has more than 3,500 notes. WOW!
• Tumblr is one of the easiest ways to set up a website without needing your own server space. Tumblr is a quick and dirty fix for something that needs to get online quickly and have a permanent home. You can customize the domain with just a few clicks.
• Analytics! They are easy. Just paste a Google analytics code or any other tracking code into the HMTL.

Downsides to Tumblr:

• While its servers are getting more reliable, the TumblBeasts will occasionally roam. A few months ago, Tumblr was down constantly. Now, I've only had server errors a handful of times in the past three months.
• You can only interact (like or repost) with the blog if your viewer also has a Tumblr. But, Tumblr's user base is growing, with close to 20 million blogs at this juncture.
• It is hard to filter out posts that come across your dashboard. If you want to follow students or alumni, any and everything they post will flood your dashboard—from quotes to writing to animated gifs to the ubiquitous "reblog if you think so-and-so is sexy" (think of it as Y2K chain mail). Sifting through can be very time-consuming. Using tracked tags is the most efficient, but so many things can slip under the radar, even with the tags.

Many of the student bloggers who applied this past year to write for the Oberlin blogs submitted a Tumblr blog as their primary blog and I only expect the numbers to increase this year, as Tumblr continues to gain users, especially young ones. Tumblr encourages sharing things you care about, which might beg the idea that users are just reposting content they didn't create rather than nourishing creative and original thought, but just the act of identifying and researching the topics they care about (and getting that out there, however informally), is enticing an entirely new generation of students to approach the Internet in a completely new manner.

Do you use Tumblr, either personally or professionally? What have your experiences been?

Organizing Social Media in .Edu

Michael Stoner is president of mStoner. He co-presented the key findings of the 2011 social media survey at the CASE Social Media and Community conference in April 2011.

Organizing social media in .edu sounds like an oxymoron if there ever was one.

Many institutions have some degree of difficulty managing marketing and brand activities.  Social media is much newer and some leaders doubt its value—and perhaps don’t see a reason to manage it.

Participation in social media is baked into the culture on many campuses, with faculty, staff and students participating in social media via blogs, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and many other tools. This cacophony of voices shares many disparate views, using social media for personal and professional purposes, mixing it up, incorporating it in learning and teaching activities, and conducting research via social media.

It’s more important than ever that institutions find ways to manage some of this activity.

Successful Institutions Manage Social Media

The 2010 Survey of Social Media in Advancement found that institutions that considered themselves to be successful in social media generally spent more time managing their social media presence.  Our 2011 findings are similar.

A major area of focus for our 2011 white paper will be exploring how institutions organize their social media activities. We’ll focus specifically on social media for marketing, advancement, recruiting and other external relations purposes. 

To guide my thinking, I’ve relied on work done by the inestimable analyst, Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang), a partner in the Altimeter Group (with Charlene Li, the author of Open Leadership). Jeremiah has identified five different models for managing social media. Three in particular apply in education: the distributed (organic) model, the centralized model and the coordinated model.

Distributed (Organic)

This model of social media management is typical of organizations where social media activity develops in many areas at once and empowered staff members throughout the organization would find other types of social media appealing, too, and be free to explore them. In this kind of organization, there isn’t much “management” of social media—it simply happens, bubbling up from everywhere.

In .edu innovations begin at the edges and may flourish there long before they are taken up by the institution as a whole.  This is the way social media developed on most campuses: individuals or offices began to blog, then launched Facebook pages or groups or began tweeting. There was no thought to coordinating or asking from input from anyone with overall institutional responsibilities for marketing or communications.

Many institutions continue to function this way today. Other institutions haven’t been able to come to terms with the importance of social media and therefore don’t see a need to manage it, or have difficulty managing anything across units.

Centralized

In contrast to the organic model, the centralized model reflects organizations where social media is controlled by a central office, often a marketing department.

The major advantage of this model is that by adopting it, an institution can achieve an incredible amount of consistency in tone and voice across social media. 

But you can see the problems inherent in adopting this model in education.

First, there aren’t many institutions where it would work.Too many people would question the control that the central team would have over social media and many of them would simply continue to do exactly what they’re already doing. It would be very difficult to police or shut down rogue social media accounts—the result would be too much ill will.

A major drawback with this model is that it won’t scale: large institutions like Ohio State or the University of Michigan will never be able to staff a centralized office to manage social media and even colleges would find it difficult.

Finally, while the centralized model may seem appealing to some, it could easily result in social media that appears way too controlled and inauthentic: too much like advertising or broadcasting rather than engagement.

Coordinated

In this model, one office develops policies, guidelines and other procedures and is responsible for communicating them across the institution. The central unit may continue to play a role as a coach, helping to establish and communicate best practices.

You can see the appeal of this model immediately. Because various units control their own social media, there’s likely to be less push-back against guidelines but there can be quality control over messages, usage, frequency and tone. This model is the only one that is likely to provide any ability to scale—it can work equally well at a small college or a large university.

What’s Your Model?

What model does your institution use? How’s it working? What are its advantages and drawbacks? We want to know: we’ll include information from institutions that have a story to share in our 2011 white paper. Please leave a comment below.

An expanded version of this blog post is cross-posted at mStonerBlog.com. 

First Strategic, Then Strategy

Susan Evans is the director of creative services for the senior strategic communication team at the College of William & Mary.

Much has been written and said about social media strategy in recent months. Actually, there is a lot of hand-wringing going on. Some resist the discussion, claiming that the very nature of social media makes strategy unnecessary, or at least less relevant. Others get wrapped up in the details of writing a strategy that will address every possible circumstance while the communication opportunities slip away.

My advice is first strategic, then strategy. In my view, early use of social media within an institutional communication plan can be strategic. I also think it’s reasonable to begin without a formal social media strategy, allowing it to evolve over time. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

To be frank, in 2006 I didn’t know enough about social media to craft a strategy. I started using social media for my job at William & Mary when I launched a blog to chronicle an 18-month campus web redesign. I wanted to run a redesign project that included transparent communication about our progress and figured a blog was an effective way to inform and educate stakeholders. I trusted my gut.

Just knowing your content really well and sharing it immediately is enough at first. When I later used social media for communicating about William & Mary’s search for a new mascot, I trusted my gut again, focusing on 1) information I had to share, 2) getting the word out in interesting ways, and 3) fun. Even without a mature strategy, I was strategic, using a blog as the source for official updates, a Facebook group to offer previews and insider info, a Twitter feed for unexpected and fun bits about the mascot suggestions we were getting and YouTube videos as a distraction when the mascot committee was deliberating and fairly silent. With 20/20 hindsight, I now know that my strategy was the integration of multiple social media platforms to run an Internet campaign that engaged alumni and students in our mascot search. It worked.

As time went on, the power of social media was revealed to me, again and again. When I became an admin for what was then the William & Mary fan page on Facebook, I was very, very careful. At the time, we had 10,000 or so fans and I would characterize my strategic approach as a “deep breath” just prior to every post. We used the feedback from fans to gauge the popularity of certain types of content. That’s when we learned that campus photos and the weather in Williamsburg are always crowd pleasers and that William & Mary alums will be all over you if you make a grammatical error. Next, we populated a Flickr site with our best photography and used photo contests to encourage others to play. Allowing our maturing social media strategy to percolate, we added Twitter figuring you couldn’t get into too much trouble with only 140 characters. It’s still working; we have nearly 23,000 following us on Facebook and nearly 5,000 on Twitter.

Social media @williamandmary is now fully integrated with wm.edu and includes a YouTube EDU channel, Foursquare and a social media aggregator. Just when we’re ready to write a strategy based on what we’ve done strategically for the past five years, we realize we shouldn’t. Instead, we’re planning to stop and evaluate and maybe, start from scratch. Knowing what we know now, what should our social media strategy look like? I’ll keep you posted.

5 Interesting Social Media Uses in Higher Ed

Andrew Shaindlin is an independent advancement consultant with more than 22 years of experience in advancement.

There are as many ways to deploy social technology as there are opportunities to do so.

Today I'm highlighting five approaches to social media that I thought noteworthy. I also mention what I think is the key benefit of each approach.

 

1. West Virginia University: Gigantic social media icons

I don't know if bigger icons are more effective, but they make an unforgettable impression on the first-time visitor.

Key Benefit: Impossible to miss the institution's presence on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Foursquare. Plus, thoughtful social media Do's and Dont's – if anyone reads them.

 

2. Johns Hopkins University: Hopkins Interactive

This service helps prospective and admitted students to connect with the school "by offering them open, uncensored information about student life on campus and in Baltimore."

Key Benefit: Exemplifies a communication culture of openness.

 

3. University of Oregon: Social Media "Best Practice" page for campus communicators

This page is a clean, simple to use guideline and link resource for campus wide consistency. Policing social media usage is hard, but clarifying common guidelines and policies will go a long way toward helping a decentralized institution be more consistent and compelling.

Key Benefit: Centralizes and focuses social media best practice across a decentralized institution. Compare this with the thorough, but hard-to-read document from the University of Texas.

 

4. University of Delaware: Social Media Portal

A simple, very clean page that hosts direct links to the University's various official presences.

Key Benefit: One-stop shopping for official social content from the institution. It's a good visual reminder that a manageable number of official commitments allows the staff to focus on content, instead of worrying about covering every possible social website.

 

5. Webster University: Commencement social media summary

This recap of graduation activities includes a Twitter hashtag (#webstergrad), video from Ustream, alumni comments and more.

Key Benefit: Event-based organizational scheme curates and aggregates content for easy scanning by alumni, students, faculty, staff and families of graduates. The Storify.com platform provides opportunities for the creative communications professional (thanks to Patrick Powers for the pointer to this).

 

Have you seen other creative, original or experimental uses of social media in educational advancement? Leave a comment.

Note: This article is cross-posted to Alumni Futures.

 

Transitioning from Student Blogger to Blogging Mentee

Ma'ayan Plaut is the social media coordinator at Oberlin College. She maintains Oberlin's web presences in many places and encourages writing on the Oberlin blogs and for the Oberlin Stories Project.

By the age of 16, I had started the first of many blogs. Several personal blogs came and stayed, and when I was a junior in college, I was invited to blog for Oberlin. My current boss, Ben Jones, vice president for communications, had run across the photo-a-day blog that I started on my first day of college and was interested in mirroring that visual daily post on his newly created Oberlin blogs.

As a student, I decided to blog for Oberlin for several reasons:

• Blogging was already a part of my life. I documented and then I shared with family and friends. This time, I would be doing it for pay.
• Anything I experienced, I could blog about. Getting paid to share my life seemed too easy.
• My photo blog existed for two personal reasons: I couldn't contact my family every day but still wanted to keep them in the loop, and I not-so-secretly wanted my younger brother to attend Oberlin. (Spoiler: it worked. He's finishing his first year at Oberlin as you read this.) Writing under another title meant that I could more publicly appreciate my family and urge my brother to come to Oberlin.
• It was nice to know that strangers would see my work and potentially think more about Oberlin because of it.
• I also thought that it was pretty cool that my future boss had contacted me personally to offer me a job.

After working as a student blogger for two years, I applied for the one-year web fellowship in the Office of Communications at Oberlin College. Over the next two months, the fellowship will be transitioned into the permanent position of social media coordinator, which, among other responsibilities, put me in charge of the Oberlin blogs. I went from a student blogger to being the person submitting hours, commenting on every new blog post and acting as my bloggers' agent. Currently, we have 15 student bloggers, three recent alum bloggers, and eight staff bloggers (including faculty, admissions officers, and communications staff).

I still write for the blogs, from a slightly different perspective. I think of myself as a cheerleader and not just a writer. One of the most memorable lines from CASE's Social Media & Community conference was from Liz Allen, who said, “Pizza is not pay!” (Basically, if you want your students to feel valued, and produce quality work, you must actually pay them.) I laughed inwardly upon hearing this, since I had attended no fewer than four blogger pizza parties as a student. I found that those pizza parties did not serve as pay for blogging, but it was a great way to make the whole crew of bloggers feel connected to one another.

While you should appropriately compensate your student bloggers, don't underestimate the power of getting students together, especially around food, to create a working environment that is both welcoming and real. Personally, I like to cook, so I will make snacks/dinner/desserts, but pizza draws a similar crowd.

• Sometimes, in the internet sphere, it's hard to know who you're working with. Our students submit their blogger applications entirely online, and we may actually hire them without meeting them in person. I know each of my blogger's names, faces, and other pertinent details, so if we do see each other in person, we can converse like real people, and not as boss-employee.
• Your students are cool kids. If you are blogging, they'll give you ideas on what to write about. There's a good chance they're well-connected in the college community, and perspective is always helpful.
• Since (hopefully) the bloggers are reading and supporting each other's writing, getting them together face-to-face is a great way to facilitate new friendships. In our gatherings this past year, my bloggers have become a tightly-knit group of coworkers, as much of the basic small-talk was already covered in their blogs. Some of them are even teaming up to co-write larger posts with multiple perspectives of the same topics.

Working with my bloggers is the most gratifying part of my job. I am constantly inspired by their writing, I look forward to speaking with them about their future posts, and commenting on their blogs is one of the highlights of my days.

What Can Social Media Analytics Do for Higher Education?

Karine Joly is executive director of Higher Ed Experts, a professional development company, and editor of collegewebeditor.com.

Measuring the return on investment of social media initiatives isn’t easy—definitely far more difficult than using Facebook, Twitter and the like.

However, while 68 percent of the respondents to the second CASE survey on social media practices in higher education think measuring the ROI of their social media initiatives is tough, it’s not impossible.

It’s not even THAT difficult.

You just need to learn how to use social media analytics—and then get on the program (and if you want to find out where you stand when it comes to web and social media analytics, make sure you take my survey about The State of Online Analytics in Higher Education by Thursday, May 12).

Stephane Hamel, a certified web analyst and a recognized expert in anaytics, teaches the art and science of online analytics at the University of British Columbia and the University of Laval. As one of the rare university instructors in this specific area in North America, he has a very different perspective on social media ROI than most in higher education.

That’s why I was curious to hear Stephane's take on some of the questions that were raised after the CASE survey results were released last month. I think you'll find his answers interesting.

1. Many in higher education think it’s impossible—or very difficult—to measure social media outcomes and ROI. Is it?

Yes, indeed, it’s not easy. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it! Measuring outcomes starts by defining our goals—are we into social media to boost our ego and get the most Twitter followers and Facebook likes or are we into it to rally new students, create a sense of community or simply better serve them by communicating where they are? I like to think of social media strategies in four quadrants ranging from negative/positive sentiment on one end, and level of activity on the other. Should we engage (positive/high activity), observe (positive/low activity), watch & respond (negative/low activity) or enter into a dialog (negative/high activity)? This, in turn, will drive what we should measure.

2. Some institutions have started to rely on Klout scores to measure their social media activities, what do you think about this practice?

Klout and other tools are a starting point but they measure the microcosm of social media. They certainly don’t measure the real business outcomes such as enrolling new students and making sure they are satisfied—just like any other business in fact!

3. Can you share one thing institutions can do to better measure the results of their social media activities?

Very simple: define your social media objectives. Do they align with your core strategies and values? It’s amazing the number of organizations that are jumping on the social media band wagon because they’ve been told they need to be there, but have absolutely no clue as to why, exactly, they are doing it. It is fine to experiment and make the jump, but it’s much better to define clear objectives. And no, having thousands of followers or doing it only for “brand awareness” aren’t good objectives in themselves. Social media marketing needs to lead to something else!

Have YOU defined clear social media objectives at your institution? What are they?

In Defense of the Non-Ninja

Matthew Herek currently serves as the assistant director of young alumni in the office of alumni relations and development at Northwestern University.

On a normal day, I wake up and check Twitter on an Ipad, usually while still in bed.  I double check Facebook on a Droid, usually while walking my dog.  Eventually I’ll use the same phone to check-in to the train station on Foursquare before going to work, where I spend at least part of the day monitoring alumni activity on those same platforms using Tweetdeck.  I would define myself as a social media ninja.

Described another way—I’m very comfortable in the social media universe.  If you’re reading this, I suspect you are as well, or at least you have the time to learn about it.  Yet, as social media gets more integrated into what we do, we need to learn how to tell the story of social media to the non-ninjas in our lives.   These are the people who don’t know the difference between a paycheck and a check-in, a ceiling fan and a fanpage, and think Tweets are a bulk Easter candy.

Social media is becoming so important to the work we do that we have to be able to talk about it in the workplace without it devolving into an Abbot and Costello routine. (He’s our fan? I thought he was our follower?)

Here are some thoughts about communicating effectively with the non-ninja:

1. Lack of Facebook knowledge does not equal the lack of a high school diploma. When talking to your boss, your boss's boss, or your mother about social media, don’t treat them like Forest Gump with a login.  Remember how you felt before you learned to ride a two wheel bike?  Watching all the other kids zoom past you?  Until you learned you probably felt frustrated.  Don’t stoke that frustration in others. 
2. Why say “geosocial” when “check-in” will do?  I had no idea how to describe Foursquare or Scvngr until I was at the CASE Social Media conference, at which point I learned the word "geosocial."  That was 3 weeks ago.  It might be a little too soon to assume everyone in my life intuitively knows what it means.  Don’t use fancy lingo that only you understand just to make yourself look smart in front of decision-makers. 
3. Social media is changing the "how", not necessarily the "why."  The goals of alumni relations and advancement are certainly evolving.  However, in the end, we are still seeking a high level of engagement and participation. Social media is becoming a powerful tool in meeting these goals.  Remember though, your vast experience with and understanding of Facebook does not necessarily trump someone else’s years of experience in donor relations, marketing, event planning or gift solicitation. It is up to you to show how these tools can help enhance their efforts to meet measurable goals.

As social media integrates itself more and more in what we do, there will be more ninjas than non-ninjas. Until that day comes, patience, understanding, and some deep breaths will help everyone maximize the use of these new technologies.

5 Things You Shouldn't Be Doing in Social Media

Patrick Powers is an interactive media manager at Webster University.

If you’ve ever signed up for a social media account, you’ve seen it. It’s the little tiny box that no one seems to notice. Before any social media site creates a new user account, it’s going to ask for agreement to its terms of service. This innocuous little box may mean nothing to most users when it could mean everything.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube all have terms of service that make it abundantly clear — violate the terms and the company can terminate an account. It’s cut and dry. There is no need for debate.

I know of only a handful of cases when a social media site simply terminated an account for violating terms of service. But the risk is real. So if you’re responsible for maintaining a professional social media presence on any social network, shouldn’t you be familiar with the specifics?

There are scores of examples of violations. Here are five of the most common:

1. Multiple Facebook profiles.

It’s difficult keeping personal and professional lives separate and Facebook is no different. How many people do you know have a personal account where they post party pictures on the weekend and a “work” account where they change tone and act professional?

Facebook couldn’t be clearer:

You will not create more than one personal profile.

In recent weeks, Facebook is offering an out for people in violation of this rule. The social network now allows users to convert personal profiles into professional pages.

2. Screenshots of someone else’s tweets.

There’s not better way to explain Twitter than to show Twitter. If you’re doing so, however, you’ll need to ask permission from the author of the tweets you hope to display. Twitter’s guidelines for use of the Twitter trademark state:

Don’t use screenshots of other people’s profiles or Tweets without their permission.

The company is cool with users taking screen shots of the Twitter home page, the Twitter "About Us" page or even the @twitter profile page. But when it comes to taking screen shots of other people's pages, you’ll need to ask permission first.

3. Facebook contests and giveaways.

The offending status updates often look like this: “The 100th person to like us wins a free T-shirt!” or “Post a photo of yourself at our location and win a free lunch!” Both violate Facebook's Promotions Guidelines, specifically those clauses that state:

You cannot: Condition entry in the promotion upon a user providing content on Facebook, such as posting on a Wall of a Page, uploading a photo, or posting a status update.

You cannot: Administer a promotion that users automatically enter by liking your Page, checking in to your Place or connecting to your Platform integration.

Page administrators can use a third-party application to condition entry into a promotion. For example, a page administrator can administer a photo contest on Facebook wherein users upload photos to a third-party application.

4. More promotion than education on YouTube EDU.

When YouTube EDU launched in March 2009, the goal was to create an educational hub built around lectures, presentations and student work. The reality is a collection of university channels weighted down by promotional videos that do little to provide high quality education. Yet the YouTube EDU application still makes the case for education over promotion:

To be considered for YouTube EDU your channel should already be established with a representative amount of educational videos. YouTube EDU is intended for educational materials as opposed to promotional.

5. Logo alteration.

Free social media icons come in all shapes and sizes, ready to fit your university website design. They look like burnt wood, hammered metal, well-kept grass and glossy buttons. And nearly all of them violate published guidelines. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn all provide free versions of their logos for public use and they all offer similar guidelines—you can use the logo as long as you don’t modify it in any way or imply any kind of sponsorship or endorsement. None offer logos that appear to be peel-off stickers.

From Facebook:

While you may scale the size to suit your needs, you may not modify the Like Button in any other way (such as by changing the design).

While you may scale the size to suit your needs, you may not modify the “f” logo in any other way (such as by changing the design or color). If you are unable to use the correct color due to technical limitations, you may revert to black and white.

From Twitter:

Don’t manipulate the logos unless necessary due to color restrictions (for example black and white)

Don’t use the Twitter bird as a spokesperson to carry your logos or messaging (for example, your logo next to or being carried by the bird).

Don’t create your own buttons or marks using our logos.